The Democratic Republic of Congo
is potentially one of the richest
countries on earth, but colonialism,
slavery and corruption has turned it
into one of the poorest, writes
historian Dan Snow.

The world's bloodiest conflict since World
War II is still rumbling on today.
It is a war in which more than five million
people have died, millions more have been
driven to the brink by starvation and disease
and several million women and girls have been
raped.
The Great War of Africa, a conflagration that
has sucked in soldiers and civilians from nine
nations and countless armed rebel groups, has
been fought almost entirely inside the
borders of one unfortunate country - the
Democratic Republic of Congo.
It is a place
seemingly blessed
with every type of
mineral, yet
consistently rated
lowest on the UN
Human Development
Index, where even
the more fortunate
live in grinding
poverty.
I went to the Congo
this summer to find
out what it was
about the country's
past that had
delivered it into the hands of unimaginable
violence and anarchy.
The journey that I went on, through the
Congo's abusive history, while travelling
across its war-torn present, was the most
disturbing experience of my career.
I met rape victims, rebels, bloated politicians
and haunted citizens of a country that has
ceased to function - people who struggle to
survive in a place cursed by a past that
defies description, a history that will not
release them from its death-like grip.
The Congo's apocalyptic present is a direct
product of decisions and actions taken over
the past five centuries.

In the late 15th Century an empire known as
the Kingdom of Kongo dominated the western
portion of the Congo, and bits of other
modern states such as Angola.
It was sophisticated, had its own aristocracy
and an impressive civil service.
When Portuguese traders arrived from Europe
in the 1480s, they realised they had stumbled
upon a land of vast natural wealth, rich in
resources - particularly human flesh.
The Congo was home to a seemingly
inexhaustible supply of strong, disease-
resistant slaves. The Portuguese quickly found
this supply would be easier to tap if the
interior of the continent was in a state of
anarchy.
They did their utmost to destroy any
indigenous political force capable of curtailing
their slaving or trading interests.
Money and modern weapons were sent to
rebels, Kongolese armies were defeated, kings
were murdered, elites slaughtered and secession
was encouraged.
By the 1600s, the once-mighty kingdom had
disintegrated into a leaderless, anarchy of
mini-states locked in endemic civil war. Slaves,
victims of this fighting, flowed to the coast
and were carried to the Americas.
About four million people were forcibly
embarked at the mouth of the Congo River.
English ships were at the heart of the trade.
British cities and merchants grew rich on the
back of Congolese resources they would never
see.

This first engagement with Europeans set the
tone for the rest of the Congo's history.
Development has been stifled, government has
been weak and the rule of law non-existent.
This was not through any innate fault of the
Congolese, but because it has been in the
interests of the powerful to destroy,
suppress and prevent any strong, stable,
legitimate government. That would interfere -
as the Kongolese had threatened to interfere
before - with the easy extraction of the
nation's resources. The Congo has been utterly
cursed by its natural wealth.
The Congo is a massive country, the size of
Western Europe.

Stanley's expeditions opened up the Congo for
exploitation by King Leopold
Limitless water, from the world's second-
largest river, the Congo, a benign climate and
rich soil make it fertile, beneath the soil
abundant deposits of copper, gold, diamonds,
cobalt, uranium, coltan and oil are just some
of the minerals that should make it one of
the world's richest countries.
Instead it is the world's most hopeless.
The interior of the Congo was opened up in
the late 19th Century by the British-born
explorer Henry Morton Stanley, his dreams of
free trading associations with communities he
met were shattered by the infamous King of
the Belgians, Leopold, who hacked out a vast
private empire.
Congo rubber was in high demand after the
pneumatic tyre appeared on the market in
1888
The world's largest supply of rubber was
found at a time when bicycle and automobile
tyres, and electrical insulation, had made it a
vital commodity in the West.
The late Victorian bicycle craze was enabled
by Congolese rubber collected by slave
labourers.
To tap it, Congolese men were rounded up by
a brutal Belgian-officered security force, their
wives were interned to ensure compliance and
were brutalised during their captivity. The men
were then forced to go into the jungle and
harvest the rubber.
Disobedience or resistance was met by
immediate punishment - flogging, severing of
hands, and death. Millions perished.
Tribal leaders capable of resisting were
murdered, indigenous society decimated, proper
education denied.
A culture of rapacious, barbaric rule by a
Belgian elite who had absolutely no interest
in developing the country or population was
created, and it has endured.
In a move supposed to end the brutality,
Belgium eventually annexed the Congo
outright, but the problems in its former
colony remained.
Mining boomed, workers suffered in appalling
conditions, producing the materials that fired
industrial production in Europe and America.
Uranium used to construct the atomic bomb
was sourced from Congo
In World War I men on the Western Front and
elsewhere did the dying, but it was Congo's
minerals that did the killing.
The brass casings of allied shells fired at
Passchendaele and the Somme were 75%
Congolese copper.
In World War II, the uranium for the nuclear
bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki came
from a mine in south-east Congo.
Western freedoms were defended with Congo's
resources while black Congolese were denied
the right to vote, or form unions and
political associations. They were denied
anything beyond the most basic of educations.
They were kept at an infantile level of
development that suited the rulers and mine
owners but made sure that when independence
came there was no home-grown elite who
could run the country.
Independence in 1960 was, therefore,
predictably disastrous.
Bits of the vast country immediately
attempted to break away, the army mutinied
against its Belgian officers and within weeks
the Belgian elite who ran the state evacuated
leaving nobody with the skills to run the
government or economy.

Of 5,000 government jobs pre-independence,
just three were held by Congolese and there
was not a single Congolese lawyer, doctor,
economist or engineer.
Chaos threatened to engulf the region. The
Cold War superpowers moved to prevent the
other gaining the upper hand.
Sucked into these rivalries, the struggling
Congolese leader, Patrice Lumumba, was
horrifically beaten and executed by Western-
backed rebels. A military strongman, Joseph-
Desire Mobutu, who had a few years before
been a sergeant in the colonial police force,
took over.
Mobutu became a tyrant. In 1972 he changed
his name to Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku Ngbendu
Wa Za Banga, meaning "the all-powerful
warrior who, because of his endurance and
inflexible will to win, goes from conquest to
conquest, leaving fire in his wake".
The West tolerated him as long as the
minerals flowed and the Congo was kept out
of the Soviet orbit.
He, his family and friends bled the country
of billions of dollars, a $100m palace was
built in the most remote jungle at Gbadolite,
an ultra-long airstrip next to it was designed
to take Concorde, which was duly chartered
for shopping trips to Paris.
Dissidents were tortured or bought off,
ministers stole entire budgets, government
atrophied. The West allowed his regime to
borrow billions, which was then stolen and
today's Congo is still expected to pay the
bill.
In 1997 an alliance of neighbouring African
states, led by Rwanda - which was furious
Mobutu's Congo was sheltering many of those
responsible for the 1994 genocide - invaded,
after deciding to get rid of Mobutu.
A Congolese exile, Laurent Kabila, was dredged
up in East Africa to act as a figurehead.
Mobutu's cash-starved army imploded, its
leaders, incompetent cronies of the president,
abandoning their men in a mad dash to escape.
Mobutu took off one last time from his
jungle Versailles, his aircraft packed with
valuables, his own unpaid soldiers firing at
the plane as it lumbered into the air.
Rwanda had effectively conquered its titanic
neighbour with spectacular ease. Once installed
however, Kabila, Rwanda's puppet, refused to
do as he was told.
Again Rwanda invaded, but this time they were
just halted by her erstwhile African allies
who now turned on each other and plunged
Congo into a terrible war.
Foreign armies clashed deep inside the Congo
as the paper-thin state collapsed totally and
anarchy spread.
Hundreds of armed groups carried out
atrocities, millions died.
Ethnic and linguistic differences fanned the
ferocity of the violence, while control of
Congo's stunning natural wealth added a
terrible urgency to the fighting.
Forcibly conscripted child soldiers corralled
armies of slaves to dig for minerals such as
coltan, a key component in mobile phones,
the latest obsession in the developed world,
while annihilating enemy communities, raping
women and driving survivors into the jungle
to die of starvation and disease.
Bags of coltan, used in mobile phones, and
manganese are carried at a mine
A deeply flawed, partial peace was patched
together a decade ago. In the far east of
the Congo, there is once again a shooting war
as a complex web of domestic and
international rivalries see rebel groups clash
with the army and the UN, while tiny
community militias add to the general
instability.
The country has collapsed, roads no longer
link the main cities, healthcare depends on aid
and charity. The new regime is as grasping as
its predecessors.
I rode on one of the trainloads of copper
that go straight from foreign-owned mines, to
the border, and on to the Far East, rumbling
past shanty towns of displaced, poverty-
stricken Congolese.
The Portuguese, Belgians, Mobutu and the
present government have all deliberately
stifled the development of a strong state,
army, judiciary and education system, because
it interferes with their primary focus, making
money from what lies under the Earth.
The billions of pounds those minerals have
generated have brought nothing but misery
and death to the very people who live on
top of them, while enriching a microscopic
elite in the Congo and their foreign backers,
and underpinning our technological revolution
in the developed world.
The Congo is a land far away, yet our
histories are so closely linked. We have
thrived from a lopsided relationship, yet we
are utterly blind to it. The price of that
myopia has been human suffering on an
unimaginable scale.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24396390

I feel sorry for this country. Colonialism is evil.

Felt like crying reading this piece, and it's only a snippet of the true rot on ground. Hypocritically, UN has the biggest and most expensive peace keeping mission in the world based in this country. Well, the reality stares us blank in the eye!

UN is just a cover being used to exploit the country more.

I weep for this country.it has to much of potentials.The world's most blessed nation in terms of natural resources yet it hasn't changed status.A nation that should be ruling africa is being ruled and ridden over.

Though I personally despise mediocrity, I'm almost tempted to say "Thank God I'm a Nigerian".

Or should it be "Thank God I'm not Congolese"?

HNosegbe: Though I personally despise mediocrity, I'm almost tempted to say "Thank God I'm a Nigerian".

Or should it be "Thank God I'm not Congolese"?

actually nigerians are more or less in the same predicament, its just that we dont have a war raging on around us at the moment.

Go to the niger delta and see what years of gas flaring and oil spills have done to that region by western oil companies.

ask yourself why our leaders never ask these oil companies to clean up the area.

cap28:
Go to the niger delta and see what years of gas flaring and oil spills have done to that region by western oil companies.

ask yourself why our leaders never ask these oil companies to clean up the area.

This is the other side of the coin; lecherous investors waiting in haste to capitalise from another country's natural wealth to the detriment of indigenous people.

Once peace has solid roots in the DRC, the Earth will lose its final treasure.

Learn from Keith Harmon Snow.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moXnYWbwph4

Ignatio: UN is just a cover being used to exploit the country more.

Patrice Lumumba was assassinated under the watchful eyes of UN troops.

igbo2011: Learn from Keith Harmon Snow.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moXnYWbwph4

Questions they will never answer.

Overview
Why are some conflicts labelled as "genocide"
while others are not? Why do we hear more
about six million Jews exterminated half a
century ago than we do about 10 million
Congolese people exterminated since 1996? Are
black and brown people more prone to genocide
than white people? How is grass-roots activism
for Africa co-opted by intelligence operatives?
What is Hollywood's role in perpetuating or
mythologising genocide?

The real terrorists are the USA, Europe and Israel.

Is it a crime for a nation to be in Africa? I cry for this Nation ...

Really, I wonder what will happen to the American states if they are disintegrated into lonely states. How I wish the plans of Gadaffi can still go on about the Unites States of Africa...

Congo is a painful paradox.
Africa's richest and poorest nation.
The entire military and aviation apparatus of america is totally dependent on the cobalt from congo,yet congo is probably africa's weakest nation.
The biggest and richest brands in the world like apple,samsung,nokia,boeing,will collapse without manganese and silicon from congo,yet that same congo is striken by concentrated poverty.
The nations of africa that should be soaring high as eagles have been converted to ants and forced to eat dust due to desperately poor leadership.
What a shame.

solomon111: Congo is a painful paradox.
Africa's richest and poorest nation.
The entire military and aviation apparatus of america is totally dependent on the cobalt from congo,yet congo is probably africa's weakest nation.
The biggest and richest brands in the world like apple,samsung,nokia,boeing,will collapse without manganese and silicon from congo,yet that same congo is striken by concentrated poverty.
The nations of africa that should be soaring high as eagles have been converted to ants and forced to eat dust due to desperately poor leadership.
What a shame.

Africans are too selfish, we will kill and massacre other Africans o behalf of the west just for some money. Then we give all the resources to the west. America might exterminate us lik they did the native Americans. If you watch the movie Lon Ranger it is similar to what might happen in Africa in the future. We have land and resources what the whole world wants. Do you think we won't be like the Native Americans?

igbo2011:

[b]Africans are too selfish, we will kill and massacre other Africans o behalf of the west just for some money. [/b]Then we give all the resources to the west. America might exterminate us lik they did the native Americans. If you watch the movie Lon Ranger it is similar to what might happen in Africa in the future. We have land and resources what the whole world wants. Do you think we won't be like the Native Americans?

Gbam.... that is the action statement.

If you guys can watch this on iPlayer than I'd fully recommend it. Very interesting programme, going back to 1500s when the Kingdom of Kongo was an organised society that was intentionally wrecked by the Portuguese. Check it out.

Not sure if there is any way for those outside UK to watch it (except through proxies) http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03cwn1m/This_World_Dan_Snows_History_of_Congo/