Rolling Great Lakes region thread

scottdisco

rip this joint please
blowing my own trumpet :eek: but a post of mine here is relevant to our last few posts on thread. (make sure you check out the link of Craner's post i throw down at the bottom: back when Craner was prolifically blogging across quite a few spaces, peerless, you went to him for politics and Luka for verse :cool: )
 

sufi

lala
DRC: Humans versus animals in a conflict zone

GOMA, 4 August 2010 (IRIN) - On a Friday in Goma central prison in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, 25 dirty, barefoot men accused of illegal fishing in Lake Edward are gathered before three judges, who come once a week to hear cases against those locked up in a building unrenovated since the Belgian colonial era.

Most of the men immediately admit their guilt. One explains he was hungry. Another needed money to pay school fees. "Life is hard. That is why I did it," says a third.

Their alleged crime is fishing in Virunga National Park, a protected area in North Kivu province that is home to about 200 of the 720 mountain gorillas left in the world, lions, elephants, buffalo, antelope, hippopotamus, crocodiles and monkeys. Africa's oldest national park is among its most diverse, with active volcanoes, snowy peaks, great lakes and the glaciers of the Rwenzori mountains. Park officials say it contains more species of birds, mammals and reptiles than any other protected area on the planet.

But its location - in the most unstable part of an unstable country where competition for land [http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=89708] is fierce and more than three million people live within a day's walk of its borders - often brings it into conflict with local residents.

Members of a farming cooperative in North Kivu's Rutshuru territory are among those unhappy with the park. "Because of the war we have many IDPs [internally displaced people] and need many farms. It is difficult to live without our land," said Kasereka Kikolera Koseye, a member of the cooperative from the town of Kiwanja.

"There are many ways to protect the animals," he said. "But we are really struggling to cultivate the soil."

A Pygmy displaced in 2008 by fighting between the government and the National Congress for the Defence of the Congolese People (CNDP) [http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=89494] rebels says his people used to live in the park, hunting and gathering as they had done for generations. "The gorillas are staying there now and the government has decided to protect the gorillas," said the man, who now lives in an IDP camp in Kiwanja. "We don't know where to go."

Boosting development

The Congolese Wildlife Authority (ICCN), which runs Virunga, is aware that excluding local people from more than 790,000ha of prime North Kivu soil is not popular in a country where most people live on less than US$2 a day.

But it also knows that to protect the animals it must win over their human neighbours and so has implemented education and economic development projects.

ICCN is building a 300KW hydroelectric plant in the north of the park, enough to provide electricity to the park station as well as to about 50,000 people living in the area. It has also built seven local schools with funding from the European Union.

Elsewhere, it hopes to bring up to 150 children per week to the park's Rumangabo headquarters to see two young mountain gorillas rescued after their parents were killed in 2007. Ndeze and Ndakasi were moved from Goma several months ago to the Senkwekwe Centre where they are tended by four rangers.

"The centre is not just about caring for gorillas. We're going to use it for education," said Samantha Newport, Virunga's communications director. The centre is named after the murdered Silverback gorilla.

Eco cooking

One of Virunga's most challenging - but crucial - projects is to change how residents cook. Most use charcoal [http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=85462], about 90 percent of which is taken from the park. Goma residents alone consume more than 1.3 million sacks per year, making deforestation the park's biggest threat.

ICCN is trying to tempt people away from charcoal by offering a sustainable replacement - biomass briquettes made from organic materials, including grass, leaves, agricultural waste, scrap paper and sawdust.

The briquettes are produced by local women using equipment provided free by the park. Virunga then buys back the briquettes and sells them in Goma to hospitals, schools, the UN mission and even the prison.

"We now have 3,600 people and 600 presses making the briquettes," said Newport. "They're made by women, which means they don't have to go into the forest to collect firewood and risk getting raped [ http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=89802 ]."

She says the briquettes are 30 percent cheaper than charcoal, which consumes up to 80 percent of locals' income. But Newport knows the ICCN goal of permanently displacing charcoal as the dominant household fuel in North Kivu is ambitious. "It's really hard to change people's cooking habits," she said.

Rebuilding

Kalengira village chief Kanuma Mwendapole says lack of access to Virunga is hindering reconstruction. "Many houses were destroyed, but we can't get into the park to cut down the trees and build more," he said.

Park officials know that convincing the villagers of Kalengira that Virunga's trees are more valuable housing gorillas than sheltering humans will be a huge challenge. Newport believes that tourism and its potential income could be one way to get locals involved in protecting the park.

Permits for mountain gorilla viewing in Virunga are $400 and climbing the Nyiragongo volcano costs $200 - 30 percent of which goes directly to local communities.

"I don't think that people have forgotten that tourists used to come here," said Newport. "People are also aware that the DRC is perceived in a catastrophically negative light."

Tourism flourished in the 1950s and again in the 1970s, but years of war and neglect have taken their toll on the park infrastructure, meaning tourists are sparse: just 120 visited in May.

There are no real roads or electricity and the 250km "gorilla sector" is the only part of the park that is safe for visitors.

Tourists are given an armed guard for all forays into the park; rangers still clash with the four armed groups operating inside its borders. More than 150 rangers have died defending Virunga in the past 10 years - the latest killed as he installed toilets for volcano climbers.

"Ultimately tourism will be very beneficial but we need to do things slowly," said Newport. "To work in Virunga you have to have a lot of energy and remain optimistic."

Back at Goma prison, the fishermen file out of the makeshift courtroom to await their fate. Verdicts will be handed down at a later date.
 

sufi

lala
An Extraordinary Rendition

Stephen R. Weissman

Intelligence and National Security
Vol. 25, No. 2, 198-222, April 2010


Abstract

Controversy over alleged CIA responsibility for the 1961
assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba continues to
swirl despite a negative finding by the US Senate Church Committee
in 1975. A new analysis of declassified and other Church Committee,
CIA and State Department documents, memoirs of US and Belgian
covert operators, and author interviews with former executive
branch and Church Committee officials shows that the CIA Congo
Station Chief was an influential participant in the Congo
Government's decision to "render" Lumumba to his bitter enemies.
Moreover evidence strongly suggests the Station Chief withheld his
advance knowledge of Lumumba's fatal transfer from Washington
policymakers, who might have blocked it. Flaws in the Church
Committee's verdict are traced to CIA delays in providing key
cables, staff overreliance on lawyers' methodology, and political
pressure to water down original draft conclusions. What happened in
Lumumba's case provides insight into the contemporary problem of
establishing accountability in US anti-terrorist programs. Current
rendition policies are also characterized by ambiguous performance
standards for covert operators on the ground and difficulty in
pinpointing US responsibility within the intimate relationship
between the CIA and foreign government clients. The Church
Committee's experience clarifies the conditions for meaningful
outside regulation of anti-terrorism operations today.

Excerpts

[in film footage taken after Lumumba's capture, available on
] "a tall dark man in his
30s with a small beard and mustache and open collared white shirt
sits in the back of an army truck, his hands bound behind him. One
of the numerous non-American soldiers around him brutally pulls his
hair to raise his face to the cameras; another gratuitously
tightens his bonds, causing him to grimace in pain. ... The young
Commander watches his men abusing the prisoner, smiling
occasionally. The CIA - a strong backer of the Commander - had been
trying to kill or capture the 'target' for months. Recently, the
CIA Station Chief had met with security officials to make sure the
right roads were blocked and troops alerted. According to the CIA
Director, the prisoner's background was 'harrowing' and 'his
actions indicate that he is insane'. Within weeks of this incident,
the authorities decided to transfer the prisoner to another
government - one that had threatened to kill him. They immediately
informed the local CIA Station Chief of their plan. Three days
later, the prisoner and two colleagues were hustled onto a plane
bound for enemy territory. Savagely beaten throughout the flight,
the prisoners were taken away after landing and never seen again."

*************************************************************


U.S.-Africa 'reset' requires honesty about America's wrongs


Providence Journal August 1, 2010


http://www.projo.com

By William Minter

Washington

To celebrate 50 years of African independence, President Barack
Obama will hold a town hall meeting this week with 120 African
youth leaders. The president will probably revisit themes from his
visit to Ghana last year: that Africa's future is up to Africans,
and that neither colonial exploitation nor Cold War interventions
are valid excuses to evade African responsibilities.

He's undoubtedly correct about that, as African activists agree.
But there are also lessons from the past that should not be
ignored. Over the last five decades, decisions made in Washington
and other global capitals have profoundly influenced what happens
in Africa. Fresh evidence confirms U.S. responsibility in one of
the most notorious cases of Cold War intrigue: the assassination of
Patrice Lumumba.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is one of 17 African countries
celebrating a half century of independence this year. Today, it is
the most fragile of Africa's large regional powers and it remains
the one most exposed to external influences that fuel conflict.

In July 1960, newly elected Congolese prime minister Patrice
Lumumba visited Washington. His quest: to ask the United States to
urge Belgium, the Congo's former colonial ruler and a U.S. ally, to
withdraw its troops from the Congo, where it had intervened only a
month after independence. Instead of helping, U.S. policymakers
quickly decided that Lumumba "threatens our vital interests in
Congo and Africa generally," in the words of the U.S. ambassador to
Belgium.

U.S. policy, the ambassador continued in an internal cable, "must
be to destroy Lumumba government as now constituted."

As documented by the Senate's Church Committee in 1975, the
National Security Council then decided to authorize "any particular
activity which might contribute to getting rid of Lumumba." The CIA
instigated a coup by Col. Joseph Mobutu, who would rule over the
Congo with an iron fist until his death in 1997. Mobutu's troops
captured Lumumba and handed him over to a Belgian-backed
secessionist regime in Congo's Katanga province. Lumumba was
executed on Jan. 17, 1961, only days before President John F.
Kennedy took office.

The Church Committee concluded that there was insufficient evidence
to confirm U.S. involvement in the murder plot. But new evidence
published in July in the scholarly journal Intelligence and
National Security tells another story. It confirms that CIA Station
Chief Larry Devlin gave the nod to Mobutu to hand over Lumumba to
secessionists who had vowed to kill him. Using newly declassified
Church Committee files, CIA cables, and interviews with Belgian and
U.S. intelligence officials, political scientist Stephen R.
Weissman, a former staff director of the House Africa Subcommittee,
concludes that there can no longer be any doubt: The U.S.
government shared responsibility with the Belgian and Congolese
governments for killing the elected Congolese leader.

It would be a refreshing sign of honesty if President Obama were to
acknowledge this shared U.S. responsibility when he meets with
African youth, as well as the need for critical scrutiny of U.S.
influence today. The flawed Cold War assumptions that painted
Lumumba as a threat have been discarded. But a rapid expansion of
U.S. military involvement in Africa, which began under the George
W. Bush administration, continues under Obama. This raises the risk
of new flawed judgments of complex African realities. The record
already shows some dubious consequences.

Whether under the umbrella of humanitarian action, as in the Congo,
or of counterterrorism, as in Somalia, U.S. involvement can fuel
conflict rather than promote African or U.S. security.

One danger is that African security forces can themselves threaten
their own people, as illustrated by today's Congo. Despite a peace
agreement in 2002 and elections in 2006, conflict has continued,
particularly in eastern Congo. Horrific abuses of civilians,
especially rape, have been the hallmark of this war. The United
States and other countries are training Congolese government
troops, but this has not stopped them from committing as many
atrocities as rebel soldiers. Simply strengthening security forces,
without curbing human-rights abuses, is a recipe for disaster.

Calls for more military intervention in Somalia, following the
recent terrorist bombing in Kampala, should also be examined
skeptically. The threat from the extremist group Al-Shabaab is
real. But a U.S.-backed Ethiopian intervention in Somalia in
December 2006 escalated the conflict and aided the rise of
Al-Shabaab. The United States, with two failed wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, should be wary of falling into a similar trap in
Africa. Nor should it encourage its African allies to adopt
America's flawed security paradigms.

President Obama has inspired hope in Africa and around the world.

Africans who heed his call to build the future, however, must still
reckon with the stubborn fact that the United States can be an
obstacle as well as a partner.

also some of this
King Solomon's Mines Revisited: Western Interests and the Burdened History of Southern Africa
by William Minter.
New York: Basic Books, 1986
http://www.noeasyvictories.org/books/ksmr05.php
 

zhao

there are no accidents
thanks Sufi.

an ignorant question: in what ways did Lumumba's death influence the future of the Congo? destabilized the country? made possible the rise of different political factions? which contributed to subsequent events?
 
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padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
(with the caveat that I'm not an expert & this doubtless glosses over a bunch of things)

Lumumba's death paved the way for the rise to power of Mobutu Sese Seko, an enormously corrupt dictator who spent most of the next 30-odd years enriching himself & his cronies (on a, like, crazily extravagant level) while the majority of Congolese languished in poverty. Sese Seko, who came to power in a CIA-backed coup, was supported by the U.S. on "anticommunist" grounds. Lumumba wasn't a communist himself, but he was fiercely nationalist and anti-imperialist, bit of a firebrand, a man before his time (like Nelson Mandela in his younger years, kinda). of course in the Cold War terms to the U.S. that made a communist, despite his explicit avowals that he wasn't & that he disliked communism as much as colonialism. anyway Sese Seko's regime was disastrous for the Congo, as he didn't do anything to administrate the country beyond ensuring that he & his could steal as much as they wanted to, so consequently by the time he was finally overthrown the country was a) a simmering pot of ethnic & tribal hatreds & 2) ripe for plunder, with that amazing bounty of resources (hardwood timber & enormous mineral wealth & so on) an inviting target for neighboring countries (Rwanda, Angola, Uganda, a bunch of others) who would back various factions in the endless, multifacteted series of civil wars that continue more or less unabated to present day, as well as foreign multinationals. so in a not too-indirect way you could say that Lumumba's death, and the kinds of policies it was a part of, is largely responsible for the absolute effing mess the Congo is in/has been in for the last twenty years or so. granted there's no way of knowing what Lumumba would've done had he not been assassinated, but one imagines that at the very least it would've been something different. after his murder Sese Seko not only declared Lumumba a national hero but also, in an act of staggeringly shameless irony, attempted to portray himself as Lumumba's successor; Sese Seko was always kinda a master of pretending to be anti-colonial while in reality wedging himself as far up the West's collective ass as he could possibly get. Lumumba's death was also related to the secession of the mineral-rich province of Katanga under another anticommunist strong man, Moise Tshombe, supported by the Belgians (Lumumba was actually murdered in Katanga, almost certainly by Belgian security forces, possibly w/American collusion).
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
generally, while none of the them are exactly the same, you could put Lumumba in the same category as Allende, Jacobo Arbenz, Mosaddegh, etc etc
 

sufi

lala
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Countries/AfricaRegion/Pages/RDCProjetMapping.aspx

makes chilling reading, 500 pages of documented incidents, clearly tracking the political motivations behind the brutality so that the idea that somehow 'savage inscrutable tribalism' made the violence inevitable is comprehensively undermined,

U.N. report details hundreds of Congo atrocities

* Tens of thousands killed, many raped or otherwise abused
* No justice for millions of victims

By Jonathan Lynn, Geneva, Alert Net, Oct 1st

- The United Nations released a controversial report on Friday documenting hundreds of atrocities in the Democratic Republic of Congo and suggesting ways to end the climate of near-total impunity for the violence.

The report is an attempt to cover rights abuses in the former Zaire between 1993 and 2003, in which tens of thousands of people were killed and many others raped, mutilated or otherwise victimised.

The period of the report was marked by a string of political crises, wars and conflicts in the region that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people.

"No report can adequately describe the horrors experienced by the civilian population... where almost every single individual has an experience to narrate of suffering and loss," U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said in a foreword.

The report notes that at least 21 armed Congolese groups were involved in serious human rights violations, while the military forces of at least 8 other states operated inside the country.

Rape was used by all combatant forces systematically as a weapon against civilians, at least 30,000 children were recruited or used by armed forces and government security forces were among those committing the abuses, the report says.

It lists violations of rights linked to the exploitation by domestic and foreign operators of Congo's natural resources, which include copper, cobalt, gold, tin and the mineral ore coltan used for mobile phones.

Question of genocide

The release of the report was delayed by a month to allow neighbouring countries involved in fighting in the Congo, whose troops are alleged to have taken part in atrocities, to comment.

Rwanda had threatened to pull its peacekeepers out of African hotspots after a leak suggested the report had found its forces committed genocide in the Congo.

Rwanda withdrew the threat after the intervention of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, but said on Thursday the report was flawed and its publication could threaten regional stability. [ID:nLDE68T2GH]

Only a court can determine whether the violence against Hutus amounted to the crime of genocide, the report said.

Uganda and Burundi have also protested. [ID:nLDE68T0CB] [ID:nLDE68L0JS]

The period covered by the report saw the fall of dictator Mobutu Sese Seko and a five-year conflict involving several foreign armies, including Rwanda's Tutsi-led force.

After quashing the 1994 genocide of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda, Kigali's army invaded Congo, where some 1.2 million Hutus had sought refuge, ostensibly to hunt down Hutu fighters who had taken part in the killings and fled to eastern Congo.

In the process Rwandan forces swept the Congolese AFDL rebels of Laurent Kabila to power in Congo.

The catalogue of atrocities -- virtually all unpunished -- is topical as U.N. officials have reported cases of hundreds of rapes in recent months by rebel groups that U.N. peacekeepers were unable to prevent, underlining the impunity with which perpetrators of violence operate in the Congo. [ID:nLDE68N0SV]

The report lists some perpetrators but does not seek to lay blame for the atrocities.

The Congo needs to reform its justice and security system as part of an effort to bring the perpetrators to justice, as its current limited ability and willingness to seek justice for millions of victims is encouraging further violations.

"If this situation is allowed to continue, there is a risk that a new generation will be created that has known nothing but violence... thus compromising the country's chances of achieving lasting peace," it said.

Source for this message:
By Jonathan Lynn, Geneva, Alert Net, Oct 1st

some repercussions already from kagame, who comes out of this looking not good at all, & is now threatening to withdraw rwandan peacekeepers if anyone mentions the g word....
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
kagame, who comes out of this looking not good at all

tbh he's been "looking not good at all" for awhile now. Rwanda is stable*, at peace etc but at the almost total cost of any kind of dissent, free press, civil libs etc. granted you could still say it's "better" than a number of dictatorships b/c Kagame etc don't abuse their people -as- much as most, but still it's rather grim. the whole thing in the Congo, I mean see upthread and etc it's just a clusterf**k on all sides - Rwandese Tutsi, exiled Hutus, Congolese Tutsis (i.e. the deposed Nkunda), Angola, Uganda, not to mention the ubiquitous foreign multinats, and of course an African crisis isn't complete without distasteful French and/or Belgian interference (I'm sure the Americans can also be blamed in various ways)...anyway, none of which excuses Kagame & his, they've done & moreso probably allowed a bunch of heinous shit to happen in their name - see again Nkunda - and, I dunno, I guess it's particularly disappointing just b/c you want -somebody- to be the good guy and yeah. and I mean it's been 15 years if the current Rwandan regime was going to change it would've happened by this point you think. this is probably all rehashing what people already know but hey.

the Prunier book on the Congo is excellent for those who haven't read it (even if I can't quite agree with some of his wilder flights of conspiracy fancy - not to stir up that can of worms again). actually anyone have similar recs on the topic? scott? jambo (you can't hide, I seen you on the carbon thread knocking g. warming)?

and I guess I should just be clear that I still think Kagame etc preferable to numerous African regimes but that's almost entirely a comment on the large number of extremely odious regimes in Africa.

*factoid for those what don't know: Rwanda elected the world's 1st ever and I think still the only (the swiss & finns have both since gotten female majority cabinets but I don't think that means female-majority MPs) female majority parliament back in '08 - yes you read that right Rwanda not one of the Euro soc dem utopias
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
oh and also I should say that I don't buy for a goddamn second any of the (rather odious) historical revisionism about the genocide itself - i.e. that it was -mostly- Hutu victims, or the simultaneously absurd/horrible charge that the RPF perpetrated the majority of the killings, or that the interahamwe etc didn't exist, and so on - but even the genocide cannot continue to excuse the current regime (tho tbf the exiled interahamwe etc have not exactly helped matters either).
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Read Severine Autesserre's 'The Trouble With the Congo' - heartily recommended for its incisiveness, plus it contains the best 'idiocy of development aid' anecdote ever.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
That looks like a tremendous book, thanks for the tip. CUP consistently publish more interesting work than their dreamy-spired rival, but they are very self-effacing about it.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
She's brilliantly clear, and human. There's a 90 minute lecture of hers on the Congo up on youtube too - haven't watched it all yet, but it's the same thesis as contained in the book.

I'm writing my Masters dissertation on the DRC, so lots more to recommend - Vlassenroot (and Haeymaekers) are the other scholars who stand out. Also - not to do with Great Lakes speciifcally, but def shedding light on them - Carolyn Nordstrom's book on the shadow economy is amazing.

CUP - this is the first book of theirs I've consciously bought, sure I must've read others in the past. Very impressed.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
What's your thesis? I have a tendency to view DRC through Rwandan goggles, I must admit.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
It's the application of the greed vs grievance model on the causes of war, to the situation in the DRC between 1998-2003. My conclusion rests heavily on Autesserre's work...inshort, that local and international causes have been overlooked in the relentless focus upon econmics and politics at national, state level (and of course, more simply, the arguments that 'that's jsut the way Africa is')

Re Rwanda, I've got Mamdani's book to read when I've finished, haven't got time to read it in full at the moment, just taking bits and pieces. Same with Prunier. The situation in Angola looks interesting too - do you know much about that?
 
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padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
The situation in Angola looks interesting too - do you know much about that?

do you just mean the situation in general? or is there some new major development in Angola that's just totally passed me by? if the former then - while again not claiming to be an expert or even particularly well-read on the topic - it seems a pretty typical, if very long + bitter, post-colonial Civil War with the 2 sides neatly divided into "Marxist" + "anticommunist" more by the necessity of attracting superpower aid then actual ideology or conviction. witness the case of Jonas Savimbi: trained in Maoist China, then went from the MPLA (before it was officially Marxist) to being one of the most outspoken anti-communists of the post-colonial era. not that one can particularly blame indigenous revolutionaries of that period for being stuck between a rock + a hard place. any way, in true Cold War (and Great Lakes) fashion none of the sides seem particularly appealing and a lot of it was over diamonds and/or oil...UNITA had a whole mess of dealings with De Beers. Angola was the original Sierra Leone way before Kanye + blood diamonds before Leo D the Rhodesian mercensary...the SADF intervened on UNITA's side a bunch of times, while the Cubans did for the MPLA, the two actually fought each other, doubtless fueling Reaganite red dawn fantasies. the MPLA won and was roughly as awful as most civil war victors of the era (barring the Sandinistas). there's a very good bit - I think it's Prunier but I can't remember for certain, it may actually be mentioned upthread somewhere - that calls out the current regime as essentially a petro/diamond capitalist autocracy operating under a thin guise of socialism. Prunier definitely has some stuff on it, mostly background for Angolan interest in the DRC, which as you might guess has mostly to do with natural resources and concern for regional security along with the kinds back + forth border wars that sucked in Uganda, Tanzania, etc...anyway apologies if you know all this already.

I turned this up, it's old but has a bit of insight into diamonds + the Angolan civil war

about greed vs grievance more generally, I dunno, I read some of the original Collier-Hoeffler paper and it had some interesting points (especially the one about diasporas being a major predictor of future conflict, which makes total sense) and I know they weren't saying grievances don't matter or anything but still...like in the DRC it seems international political/economic concerns and local/ethnic/tribal/etc tensions are not only both present but often inextricably linked with one another...probably it becomes more clear if you're actually a scholar in the field + read relevant scholarly literature and so forth but it seems like a false dichotomy and kind of a silly one as well, I dunno...
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
just the situation in general really. the 'greed' mechanisms sound similar to those inthe DRC; obv as you say the two countries are similar in their manifold natural resources, though Angola seems to have kept more of the wealth than the DRC ever did. thanks for all the info - will check out that link.

As to g vs g, it is silly when treated as an absolute dichotomy as you say, but a useful framework all the same in some ways. The econometrics of Collier et al is intensely annoying though - I wish someone would call bullshit on all that stuff. It's absurdly overcomplicated when basic points as being missed.

What I've found interesting is that the discourse around the UK riots and the eastern DRC is broadly similar, in the sense that destruction is being attributed to 'criminal elements' that can then be treated as resistant to political or economic or social analysis.

With the DRC though, the more you read the more confused you get. Partly because, although a lot of the literature seems so far off base, but you don't necessarily realise this until you locate the handful of academics who are writing genuinely insightfully about the situation (inc Autesserre, as above). The history of the Kivus alone is complicated enough.
 
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zhao

there are no accidents
anyone have any good links handy to rebuke the "ancient tribal feuds" argument which minimizes the role of capitalism in explaining the on going Congolese wars?

thanks in advance
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
this book is great too, tho more general than DRC:
Carolyn Nordstrom - Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century

and

Harrow, K.W. (2005) ‘"Ancient Tribal Warfare": Foundational Fantasies of Ethnicity and History’, Research in African Literatures Vol.36 No.2, pp.34-45 - pretty sure this is available free online somewhere
 
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