Jeffrey Gettleman: The Horror in the Congo

Jeffrey Gettleman is the East Africa bureau chief for the NYT.

The history of Congo is the history of mass murder. What is going on today—with rebels, government soldiers, and armed groups from neighboring countries raping and slaughtering Congolese civilians—is a continuation of the ruthlessness that has been embedded in this country for more than a hundred years. It began in the 1880s, when King Leopold II of Belgium turned this abundantly fertile expanse in the center of Africa into his own personal fiefdom, murdering and enslaving the population in order to collect as much ivory and rubber as humanly possible. The whip-wielding Belgian administrators who followed were hardly any better, and an ill-prepared Congo stumbled toward independence in 1960. Then, thanks to American meddling, it produced the most corrupt continent’s most corrupt leader, Mobutu Sese Seko, who guzzled pink champagne and feasted on fresh cakes flown in from Paris while his people wasted away. When he was overthrown in 1997, Congo plunged into a bloodbath that sucked in many of its neighbors. It became—and remains—one of the worst wars in modern history, a truly continental disaster that has killed millions of people.

In Congo’s war, battles between soldiers are incredibly rare. Instead, gratuitous massacres of civilians and flamboyant cruelty are the norm. It is difficult not to be hyperbolic when describing this country—the vastness, the mineral riches, the depravity are all off the charts. I have traveled there more than a dozen times and the stories that I have collected stay with me. I have spoken to men who have been pinned down on their stomachs in cassava fields and gang-raped. I have met a little girl whose lips were sawed off by lunatic rebels; you could see her teeth when her mouth was closed. I have stepped over freshly dug graves, one crumbly mound after another, stretching deep into the jungle, marking where hundreds of people were clubbed to death in a massacre that took weeks to come to light because that particular patch of Congo, like so much of the country, is totally cut off, without phones, roads, or any vestiges of modernity. Last fall I met a very gaunt, whispery woman who said she was in a lot of pain. She had been gang-raped as well. Her name was Anna. She was eighty years old.