“Plunder, Criminalization of the State and Decline in the World System: the Case of D.R.Congo”
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“Plunder, Criminalization of the state and Decline in the world System: the case of D.R.Congo” Presented at the 10th General Conference of EADI 19-21 September 2002 for the WG ”Rise and decline in the World System” S.Marysse, University of Antwerp Institute of Development Policy and Management (Not for publication - first draft - comments welcome) Abstract The International Rescue Committee (Washington) estimated the (indirect) death toll of the ongoing first international African War from August 1998 up to the end of 2001, to more than two and a half million people. In this media silent-war people die not so often by bullets but by an amazing lack of concern by contesting foreign armies, rebel groups, armed “resistance” groups and, last but not least, an ambiguous attitude of the international community. All these groups are characterized at the political level by changing alliances that do not coincide with any long term political ideology or strategy. The once close allies like Museveni’s Uganda and Kagame’s Rwanda fought already bitter wars at Kisangani , 1000 km from their frontiers . How can one understand their official common standpoint that they fight this war and invade the Congo to secure their frontiers from incursions of ‘negative elements’ (these groups thus defined by the Lusaka peace agreement include Interahamwe, ex- FAR soldiers and Maï-Maï) ? The thesis of this paper will be that this war has to be understood by an intricate cluster of phenomena. The long term erosion of elite power and finance in some African countries, caused by the changing international geopolitics in Africa, led to different new strategies. Reconstruction of the state in some, resistance, criminalisation and war in other countries. This latter strategy seems to be more the case in those countries with rich natural endowments that can be exploited on a small scale by petty producers, weak states and deteriorating infrastructures. Those countries seem to be an easy pray for commercial military groups and factions to engage in plunder and criminal activities. War and violence seem to be viable paths and indeed strategies to conceal the enrichment of these elites. Needless to say that this strategy goes to the detriment of the population who dies, flees or survives in inhumane conditions. From Angola (from 1975 on) over Congo (from 1990 on), Sierra Leone, and Nigeria(?), to Rwanda (from 1990 on ) and Somalia, wars and internal strife seems to be there for quite a while. So natural rich endowments seem to be more of a curse than a blessing for a country. This argument also runs against a deeply anchored set of convictions that Africa’s underdevelopment is due to international economic interests and globalization processes. It seems to be more the lack of serious foreign investors interests that strangles Africa than a new scramble for the riches of Africa. We will develop these points by analyzing one case- study: that of DRCongo. 2 Contents Introduction: 1) The rhetoric on the bright future, the gloomy reality and theoretical explanations 1.1.The rhetoric on the bright future and the gloomy reality 1.2.Theoretical explanations 2) Criminalisation of the state and economic regress in the DRCongo : a prelude to the first international African war 2.1. A historical digression 2.2. Explaining the collapsed state and economic regress 3) The second scramble for Africa’s resources or plunder of Africa by Africans? 3.1.On the problematic definition of plunder and illegal exports 3.2. Plunder and illegal exports in peace-and wartime 3.3.The commodity chain of coltan 3 Introduction The first international African war is going on. From august 1998 on 2.5 million people have been killed directly or indirectly in this media-silent war, this is more than a third of the holocaust or almost one tenth of all ‘casualties’ incurred by the Soviet Union during the second world war [International Rescue Committee, 2001:1]. At least, this dramatic headcount is the figure advanced by that international NGO and by the Kabila government. Other sources estimate the death toll even higher at 73000 a month bringing the total number to more than 3.5 million deaths [Blaire Harden, 2001:36]i. A first important but partial explanation for this increase in warfare and violence is the change within the world-system after the demise of the Soviet Union. I.Wallerstein wrote immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall that with the end of the cold war violence and international warfare would change in nature because ‘ The emperor (the US or capitalist hegemony) stood naked after he lost his figleaf (of the communist countries)’ [Wallerstein 1989: 3] The end of the east-west competition would open new arena’s of threats to peace and in his almost prophetic analysis he predicted that violence and new conflicts would rather increase because underdevelopment and regress could not anymore be imputed to the wrong policies. However since the same international environment (the so-called globalization) leads to very different outcomes in this world-system, the geo-political explanation should be complemented by other factors. Why do most of the violent conflicts occur in Africa where also economic regression is most prominently going on? We shall explore some of the recent and influential theories in the first part of our paper. In the second part of the paper, I will focus and apply these theoretical insights on one of the once key-peripheral countries of the African continent: DRCongo. More specifically, we’ll explain how the warp and weft of external and internal factors have produced the collapse of the state and the economy plunging the population in misery and ultimately in war. The third and last part of the paper tackles some questions concerning the first international African war. Is this war the product of the new geo-political role of Africa in the world-system? Translating the Huntinghton thesis on the « Clash of Civilisations » that means that the unconditional help for the invading countries Uganda and Rwanda by the US and Great Britain is nothing else than reinforcing the regional agents of US-hegemony against the increasing influence of Islam fundamentalism (Sudan). The increasing rivalry between the two new African leaders however denies this simple and massive thesis. Should this war then rather be seen as a second scramble for Africa’s wealth with African military regimes as middlemen, reproducing the old good world imperialism thesis? We’ll see that history never reproduces itself but is continually old and new producing new and unforeseen realities. We will open that discussion by criticizing the definition of plunder by the UN Panel on “Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of Congo” and substitute it for a less problematic economic definition of plunder. From there on we shall estimate the extent of the plundering and their economic significance for the financing of the war. Finally we are illustrating our thesis by analyzing one case study in the plunder, that of the coltan commodity chain. 4 1. The rhetoric of the bright future, the gloomy reality and theoretical explanations 1.1. The rhetoric of the bright future and the gloomy reality There is a well-known African saying or proverb which is, at first sight, particularly suitable to describe the fate of a continent in the capitalist world-system before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. ‘ When two elephants fight each other it is the grass that suffer’ and one could paraphrase the saying to fit the post-cold war era as follows : ‘ and when two elephants make love it is again the grass that suffers’ We know that structural positions in the world-system are determined by positions of hegemony, dominance and dependency and that these positions do determine in part the « path dependency », to use the vocabulary of the now fashionable school of institutional economics, of a country. The theoretical problem and weakness of the world-system paradigm is however to analyze, understand and predict change and diversity between countries. Indeed the whole school of dependency and world-systems approach is very much penetrated by the idea that the structural position is determinant which leaves very little room for change and especially underestimate the way the local and the global interact with more autonomy to influence at the local level than is sometimes believedii. The interaction of nationals , local power groups , traditional bonds and cultural heritage with the external environment can produce substantial differences without which we could not take into account or understand, the rise of certain countries and decline of others in the world-system. That this interaction does not give way to pseudo racist explanations, by explaining the rise of Asian countries by eg a better cultural fit to the globalization process, can easily be demonstrated by the fact that differences within the same cultural horizon can be bigger than between different « civilizations » . The performances e.g of African countries like Botswana and Mauritius with a growth per capita of 7 per cent and multi-partyism contrast enormously with the general tendency of decline in other African countries and perform much better than certain Asian or Latin-American countries. We therefore very much subscribe the sentence of J .F.Bayart that « Africans here have been active agents in the ‘mise en dépendance’ of their societies, sometimes opposing it and at other times joining in it” [Bayart, 1993: 21]. This sentence means that of course African elites and powerful individuals can not by themselves change their peripheral position but that within this context they were as much an actor influencing their destinies and historical trajectories by « joining » or « opposing » dependency than were other dominant actors.