Do you know the answer to this question? "Which is the most deadly conflict the world has seen since the Second World War?" Is it Korea? Vietnam? Iraq? Any of the Arab-Israeli wars? The answer is "no" to any of these, nasty and bloody as they have been. The location of the most bloody conflict, although in plain sight and still going on, has been taking place in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Since 1998, fighting in that large equatorial country has involved eight African countries and some 25 armed groups. The cost in human lives is enormous - some 5.4 million, most of them through disease and starvation.

Like most other countries on what the Europeans liked to call "the dark continent", Congo survived for centuries in close to a natural state, with its small population eking out a fairly comfortable existence off the extremely lush land. It is a land of superlatives - occupying 2.3 million square kilometres, about as much as western Europe. It is named after one of the world's mightiest rivers, the Congo, which drains the second-largest swatch of equatorial forest in the world. Even though it is the eighth longest of the world's rivers, the Congo is second only to the Amazon in the size of its watershed and the amount of fresh water it pours into the South Atlantic.

Congo's worries really began when the Europeans came, around the middle of the 19th century. Henry Morton Stanley, a Brit who was most comfortable away from his homeland, explored central Africa on behalf of Léopold, king of Belgium, who ended up owning Congo as his own private property, calling it the Congo Free State. He named its capital, Léopoldville, after him and his only interest was exploitation. At first it was rubber to feed the new automobile industry. That made a fortune for the Belgian king, who used it to erect ornate buildings on Brussels and Ostend. Between 1885, when Léopold seized it, and 1908, between five and 15 million people succumbed to exploitation and disease. In 1908, international pressure, chiefly from Britain, caused the Belgian Parliament to wrest control of the Congo Free State from the king and began running it as a colony, now called Belgian Congo.

The brutal treatment of the population continued, and by then prospectors had discovered that the area was also rich in a variety of minerals - cobalt, copper, cadmium, diamonds, gold, silver, zinc, manganese, tin, germanium, uranium, radium, bauxite, iron ore and coal.

By the 1950s the nationalist forces which had bubbled up throughout the colonial world caught fire in the Belgian Congo. In 1960, the Mouvement National Congolais, led by Patrice Lumumba, won a parliamentary election and he was named prime minister while Joseph Kasavubu became president. They took the country into independence and very soon the province of Katanga, under the leadership of Moise Tshombe, launched a secessionist effort. You have to remember that all this was happening at the height of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union and the western bloc were in intense competition for the hearts and minds of the rest of the world. The leaders of the new independent Congo had a definite leftist outlook, and this did not go down too well with Washington. Add to this continual internal bickering among a number of factions all with their own agendas, and it's no wonder that chaos ensued.

Lumumba had appointed a fellow called Joseph-Désiré Mobutu as head of the new Congolese army, and he built it into a force loyal to him. In 1961, Katangan soldiers and Belgian paratroopers, supported by foreigners interested in the copper and diamond mines of Katanga, kidnapped Lumumba and executed him. The confusion intensified, with a succession of governments until Mobutu, with the blessing of the western powers, staged a coup and installed himself as president.

Mobutu ran the place as a one-man show for 32 years, generously helping himself to the treasury. By 1984 some estimates say he had deposited US$4 billion in a private Swiss bank account. The term "kleptocracy" was coined to describe his wanton looting of the public purse. He changed the name of the country first to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to distinguish it from the neighbouring Republic of Congo, a former French colony, then in 1971 he called it Zaire. He himself morphed into Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbenda Wa Za Banga and replaced the European names of all the important towns and cities with African ones. Mobutu continued in power until conflict forced him to flee in 1997.
By that time, a new bunch of tensions had arisen in the eastern stretches of the country, where hundreds of thousands of refugees had streamed across the border from Rwanda to escape an orgy of pillage, rape, mutilations and massacre between the two main tribal groups, the Hutus and Tutsis. Rebel forces opposed to the Mobutu government had also garnered support from neighbouring countries, and began harassing his forces. It was led by Laurent Kabila, a long-time revolutionary and follower of Lumumba. He was assassinated by a bodyguard in 2001, and his son, Joseph, succeeded him.

Much of Congo is completely lawless terrain, where the law of the jungle literally applies. Life is cheap, especially for people like the freelance prospectors who scratch from the ground minerals like coltan - a local term for niobium-tantalite, used to make capacitors for electronic equipment like CD players and cellphones. They ravage the countryside with no regard for environmental concerns and take an enormous toll on endangered species. The greatest sufferers are the pygmies and women. There are reports that pygmies are hunted, killed and eaten like game, as the rival groups consider them sub-human and believe that their flesh has magical properties. Women are routinely abused and raped, and are abandoned as collateral damage.

The United Nations has a peacekeeping force in Congo - at 17,000 the largest mission in existence - but it is not deployed in the most critical areas and suffers the usual problems of equipment and supplies. The situation has drawn the attention of people like the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon, and the foreign ministers of France and Britain, who visited the region for a closer look last week. But, as usual, no doubt because those at the centre of it are merely a bunch of hapless Africans, the rest of the world looks but does not see.

keeble.mack@sympatico.ca

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