Congo: meeting the best and worst people in the world

Rwanda-DRC Frontier at Goma, January 16^th 2011

Walking alone across the frontier into DRC I am met at the guard post by Ferdinand Benge-Luendo, my friend and counterpart. It is an emotional moment: I haven’t seen him in 18 months and I feel he has probably lived a lifetime since then, here in this land of armed conflict. Amid the venality and malgovernance of Congo Ferdinand embodies all that is good in the people and the society itself. In his 50s and bald, with an impressive cannonball head, he carries himself with the authority of being a former school head master and I call him “Mzee Ferdinand”, the Swahili honourific that roughly means respected elder. He is from Walikale district, 200 KM to the west of Goma, an area that has been a centre of armed conflict and unspeakable suffering, even now. Ferdinand is an educator and peace activist with an ambition for a better future for his region and his country, and has established and run NGOs involved in peace and reconciliation in war affected communities of rural North Kivu, as well as working as a translator, interpreter and “fixer”, facilitating the work of international aid organisations and journalists ranging from The Discovery Channel film crews to The NY Times and Italian news channels.

His current focus is The Kivu Reintegration Centre, a small training school that targets demobilised and child soldiers who need assistance to learn a skill and reintegrate to their communities. With the Kivu region having experienced 15 plus years of continuous warfare involving dozens of armed rebel and militias groups, there is a huge number of people who have passed through or continue to serve in these armed groups, and even as demobilisation is meant to be ending, new recruitment is still going on. Many of these ex-combatants have lived by looting and, with some dreaming of rejoining one of the armed movements, ways need be found to provide them with life skills and livelihoods other than warfare if peace and stability is to take hold. Aside from demobilised soldiers, the centre targets street children and the war wounded.

All students of the centre are those without means who cannot pay and all are intensely vetted by Ferdinand and his staff to verify their stories. Remarkably, the centre operates without external funding and is supported entirely through cash donations from Ferdinand himself, Dominique, a civil engineer who has come to meet me also, and a few translators, fixers and computer and English language instructors who volunteer at the centre. It is a pure example of a civil society organisation emerging from a community to serve its needs.

The demand for training far exceeds the capacity of the centre and Ferdinand wishes to expand its intake and activities. This is the reason why I am here; to help identify needs and plan a strategy, write up a project document, identify potential donors involved in the sector or supporting its goals and write and send out funding applications. I have six weeks in North Kivu to help achieve these tasks, or at least get them underway, although I expect the work and the association will be ongoing

Welcoming me, Ferdinand says he feels: “blessed by God”, that he has a new son today, as of 4 AM this morning, and that he now has me, here to work with him in Congo. He will name the child in my honour. I’m embarrassed by this privilege and add that my middle name is Patrick (Patrice), a less heavy burden for a child in Francophone Congo than Douglas.

God features frequently in the conversation of these men, as it does in most of Africa where the justice and certainties of the next world contrast to their lack in the present one. As a person without faith, and coming from what is essentially a post-Christian society, religion is not an easy connection for me. But here among these men, for whom it provides rock solid certainties and the faith to wish for something better I can have no doubt or dispute about its value as a source of justice and community organisation.

***

The bonhomie of the reunion with Ferdinand and his good works is interrupted by having to pass dreaded Congolese immigration. I hand my passport through the guichet window, see the official open it, leaf through and examine a few pages, and then put it aside and begin processing the next person as if needing time to decide what to do. A moment later, he has decided and I’m ordered inside the guard hut.

“There is a problem, a serious one. Your Congolese visa was issued in South Africa. You should have got it in your country of origin. It is not valid here. We cannot let you in”.

The game has started. It is a ridiculous one, as they all are—a pantomime with feigned seriousness, mock outrage and pedantic reference to regulation that may or may not exist, combined with the suspended disbelief underlying all theatre, that what is happening and being said is not actually true. I cannot say I haven’t been warned. Foreign Affairs in Ottawa says this on its website about the DRC border from Rwanda:

“You are advised against all travel to the Kivus, including the city of Goma. Points of entry and exit from Rwanda to DRC should be avoided at all times because of the continuing insecurity and lawlessness in these areas. The DRC border with Rwanda could be closed on short notice.”

The border guard hands my passport to his colleague, a well-fed man with very dark skin who concurs with a sly smile:

“Yes, this is very grave. We have to protect ourselves, you don’t want to get us in trouble with our office. You will have to go there now and explain this”.

He turns to Ferdinand and begins writing down on a piece of paper the costs of a new visa at the immigration office: $250. That is the list price, before whatever else you have to pay to get them to do it. By this time it is 6 PM on a Saturday in Congo when any government official will rather be in a bar with enough beer money to enjoy the night. I also know that I don’t want to spend the next 4 hours at the immigration bureau, and these clowns know it too. This situation is not light or amusing, it is threatening and unpleasant, and they know that also.

When the guards are distracted by other business, I lean in to Ferdinand, whose job as a fixer is to guide foreigners through these situations, and ask what his strategy is.

“We will have to pay them, there is no other choice. The issue is the price; I will handle this”.

A few minutes later, the issue is settled—$20; we’ve got off lightly. This is the easy part, we must still pass an interview with the even more loathsome national intelligence service, Agence nationale de renseignements (ANR), something which will take place after the weekend. Ferdinand and Dominique take my bag and we begin walking toward my hotel. I’m back in the Congo; I feel like I’ve come home.

***

Sunday January 16^th

My hotel in Goma—with the oversold name, The VIP—is designed with more money than taste, with tinted glass windows and garish furniture; at the entrance, incongruously, there is a life-sized mannequin in a Santa suit playing a saxophone. But it is clean, with nice gardens in which giant flightless birds are walking, and has a pleasant outdoor restaurant and bar set under a grass pahota. Perhaps most encouraging, there is a small statue in the forecourt entrance of an African woman carrying a large bundle of wood on her back and with a child balanced on top. There is some symbolism in this choice of subject as the hotel’s welcome and seems to point both to industriousness and humility, important qualities in this region of greed and rapacious behaviour.

It is good to look around on foot in a new location and on this Sunday afternoon I go jogging, heading down toward Lake Kivu and passing an army check point. The road passes along the lake shore, which smells like a public toilet, which is what it is, before continuing on toward the UN military bases, passing first the Indian Battalion (IndBatt), the South African Army Engineers and other national units, and then a neighbourhood of old colonial villas in which are housed an endless series of offices and guest houses for international aid organisations—The International Committee for the Red Cross, Norwegian Refugee Council, Medcins Sans Frontières—and every UN agency acronym from OCHA (Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) to CivPol (Civilian Police). A run down villa comes into view with an army tent in the overgrown gardens around which a group of Congolese soldiers are milling. When they see me a whoop goes up and they begin shouting: “You! Come here!” I ignore it, pretend I don’t notice and keep running. The moment I look up and make eye contact or address them it will all be over and they will be like fishermen, reeling in a big catch.

When I get back to my hotel, there is a band playing Congolese music in the bar and two UN soldiers, Russians, are carrying a third, drunk, out the door, supporting him on either arm while his head lolls lifelessly. At this point I dimly recall a ruckus outside my room at 130 AM last night with banging doors and the voices of young men and women. At the bar another Russian is arguing with the wait staff, pointing at a bill and then tearing it into pieces and throwing it at them. A group of his colleagues saunter up. They are beefy young men with clear skin and wide peasant faces and one takes a swig from a beer bottle, squirting it through his teeth to the floor as he walks through the bar. A table of well dressed Congolese men, with their wives, is watching this with distaste.

The UN peace keeping operation is not overtly popular in Congo and the government has asked that it leave by the end of this year, a goal that will not be possible and will be haggled over, although the direction of things are clear. After over 10 years of peace keeping, the job is not done, but the government no longer cares and would rather deal with the country’s problems alone. More than that, it would like to do so without outside scrutiny or interference over its dreadful human rights record, army abuses, government corruption, official impunity, weak elections, poor democratic standards and other lapses. The UN has powers of investigation and has brought cases and launched prosecutions against serving members of the military and police, although it is criticised for either not doing enough or interfering too much. We are on the flight path to the airport nearby and  a military aircraft, an Antonov painted in UN white, flys low overhead with a roar that drowns out  the Russians and their argument.

Later I ask Ferdinand what he thinks of the UN peace-keeping force, known as MONUSCO (Mission de l’Organisation des Nations Unies pour la stabilisation en République démocratique du Congo). He agrees that there are people who don’t like them, but says the country would be far worse off without it:

“They have not solved all the problems or handled everything well 100% of the time. And yes, people blame them for that, and resent them because they think the people working there make a lot of money. But they have achieved a lot and we would be in a worse situation if they were not here. I don’t want them to leave and I fear what would happen after they do”.

Yes, the only thing worse than having the UN in your country is not having them.