The future of the Republic of Congo appears bleak

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): What can be said about the future of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and of the seven foreign armies fighting on its soil, after last week's killing of Congolese President Laurent Kabila?

You can safely say that neither the late president's son, General Joseph Kabila, nor any of the nephews, cousins and in- laws who filled his government, will last long. Their power-base lies a thousand miles (1,500 kilometers) away in Katanga -- which may, in any case, be about to fall to Rwandan troops.

You can say that the Rwandan and Ugandan armies fighting in Congo are better troops with shorter supply lines than their opponents. You can observe that the Zimbabwean and Namibian governments have not managed to loot as much of Congo's vast resources as they hoped when they sent troops to back Kabila, and may be thinking of pulling out. (Whereas Uganda, with no gold reserves, made nearly as much from gold exports last year as from coffee.)

But you cannot say when the war will end, or who will win it, or how many have died because of it in the past four years (one credible estimate is a million people), or even if there will be a Congo at the end of it. As the many-sided fighting has spilled across the sprawling country, with famine, plague and genocide as its constant companions, it has come to resemble more and more the 17th-century European calamity called the Thirty Years War.

Though every European power was involved, the fighting mostly took place in the German-speaking parts of Europe, where up to a third of the population was killed between 1618 and 1648. It was a war replete with famines, plagues and massacres, and the disciplined armies that began it eventually degenerated into starveling bands of freebooters who roamed the devastated countryside like wolves, practicing extortion, rape, murder and occasional cannibalism. And it all went on for 30 years.

The Congo has not reached quite that level yet, but it could. This is happening, moreover, in the 21st century, not the 17th. The rest of the world can watch the Congolese disaster on TV -- and the question it silently asks (Africans ask it, too) is how can things have gone this wrong in Africa?

Because it isn't just the Congo. For the past decade, Africa has been full of wars like this: Sudan, Angola, Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone.... The Congo just happens to be the biggest war, since with 50 million people it is Africa's second-biggest country -- but if Nigeria blows (and it could) even this disaster would pale by comparison.

No other part of the world is suffering remotely similar levels of violence, social breakdown and economic collapse. Yet at independence 35 or 40 years ago, most African countries were more developed, better educated, with higher living standards than their recently independent Asian counterparts. The Asians have escaped the worst of the violence and are mostly escaping from poverty too, while Africa sinks ever deeper into both. Why?

People are usually reluctant to ask this question out loud, because they are afraid that someone will call them racist for asking it. But it's a question that needs an answer: why does Africa, with 10 percent of the world's population, have over half of its wars? And why is it so poor?

Think about the Thirty Years War, and all the other huge wars that disfigure the past of Europe and Asia. What they really did, over millennia of misery, was to grind all the little tribes and their separate identities into the big, coherent ethnic groups that live in those continents today.

Only eight languages now account for 75 percent of Europe's population. Only three languages account for about half of Asia's much larger population.

As for North and South America and Australasia, where most of the original population in its vast diversity was displaced by European settlement, the scene is even simpler. Around 500 little ethnic groups with their own languages in North America north of Mexico gave way to two big countries with only two languages. Up to 700 aboriginal languages in Australia were replaced by one national identity and one language, English.

These big, simple groups are a lot easier to govern, and their willingness to cooperate for the common good means they develop faster economically, too. Whereas Africa, uniquely among the continents, still contains most of the hundreds of ethnic groups it started out with.

Nobody has ground them together or killed them off, and each tends to put its own ethnic definition of the 'common good' first.

South of the Sahara, there are only three or four African languages with over 10 million native speakers. There are several hundred with between half a million and 5 million.

What this means is that African states big enough to make economic sense are usually so complex ethnically that they are almost impossible to govern.

The problem is not badly drawn colonial-era borders. There are no borders that would make both economic and ethnic sense in most parts of Africa. That is the real reason not just for most of Africa's wars, but for its economic decline too.

So Africans, to escape their current fate, have to solve a problem that the rest of the world mostly just dodged: how to run a modern democratic state containing a large number of different ethnic and linguistic groups.

The price for failure is Congo's everlasting.

The writer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.