The deadliest war in the world
Congo's simmering conflict has killed 4 million
Sunday, May 28, 2006; Posted: 1:01 p.m. EDT (17:01 GMT)
Editor's note: The following is a summary of this week's Time magazine cover story.
(Time.com) -- Some wars go on killing long after they end.
In Congo, a nation of 63 million people in the heart of Africa, a peace deal signed more than three years ago was supposed to halt a war that drew in belligerents from at least eight different countries, producing a record of human devastation unmatched in recent history.
The International Rescue Committee (IRC) estimates that 3.9 million people have died from war-related causes since the conflict in Congo began in 1998, making it the world's most lethal conflict since World War II.
By conventional measures, that conflict is over. Congo is no longer the playground of foreign armies; the country's first real election in 40 years is scheduled to take place this summer, and international troops have arrived to keep peace.
Meanwhile, mining firms have returned, and cell phone companies -- particularly welcome in a country that has just a few thousand fixed lines serving more than 60 million people -- are doing a booming business.
But the suffering of Congo's people continues. Fighting persists in the east, where rebel holdouts loot, rape and murder. The Congolese army, which was meant to be both symbol and protector in the reunited country, has cut its own murderous swath, carrying out executions and razing villages.
Even more deadly are the byproducts of war, the scars left by years of brutality that disfigure Congo's society and infrastructure. The country is plagued by bad sanitation, disease, malnutrition, corruption and dislocation. Routine and treatable illnesses have become weapons of mass destruction.
In many respects, Congo remains as broken, volatile and dangerous as ever, which is to say, among the very worst places on Earth. And yet Congo rarely makes daily news headlines, and its troubles are often low on international donors' lists of places to help.
There are various explanations for the neglect. Perhaps the global reservoir of wealth and good will only runs so deep. Perhaps the attention and outrage being spent to stop another African tragedy, the genocide in Darfur, has left the world too exhausted to take on Congo's.
But a choice like that comes with a cost.
Congo represents the promise of Africa as much as its misery. Its fertile fields and tropical forests cover an area bigger than California, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon and Texas combined.
Its soils are packed with diamonds, gold, copper, tantalum (known locally as coltan and used in electronic devices such as cell phones and laptop computers) and uranium. The waters of its mighty river could one day power the continent. And yet because Congo is so rich in resources, its problems, when left to fester, tend to suck in its neighbors in a vortex of exploitation and chaos.
And so fixing Congo is essential to fixing Africa.
Says Anneke Van Woudenberg, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch: "If you want peace in Africa, then you need to deal with the biggest country right at its heart."
The task is enormous. Over the past year, Time reporters who visited the worst hit areas in the east of the country found much of it in ruins. Roads and railway lines have washed away or simply disappeared into the jungle. Hospitals and health clinics have been destroyed.
Electricity, for those lucky enough to receive it, is patchy. Refugees fleeing fighting between government troops and rebels talk of beheadings, rapes, massacres and villages being torched.
The gripping stories from Congo, coming eight years after the start of fighting, sound eerily familiar to the reports of atrocities committed in Darfur. In that sense they are powerful admonishments to those who believe the West's responsibilities in Darfur may have been lifted with the signing of a peace agreement in early May: Congo's warring parties, too, say they are abiding by a peace deal, monitored by U.N. troops.
But the dying continues. Congo provides tragic proof that in some places, peace and war can look a lot alike.
