I admire MSF / Doctors without Borders. I can only imagine the hopelessness of finding oneself in the middle of a war zone, with some horrible infection or injury. In a world with far too much talking, it is always great to see people actually doing something.
One plausible explanation of high rates of conflict in the DRC is the Belgian approach to colonisation.
> At the outset, only groups officially acknowledged as indigenous were entitled to a native authority, and with it the right to a tribal ‘homeland’ administered by chiefs appointed from within their own ranks. Not only were non-indigenous groups denied this right; they were required to pay tribute to ‘indigenous’ chiefs in the native authority where they lived. The colonial system thus rested on a dual system of institutionalised discrimination dressed up as cultural difference: by race in the cities and tribe in the countryside. The native authority system continues today to create suspicion and animosity between two politically defined groups – one indigenous, the other not – and to set the scene for violence. What used to be called tribalism – and is now called ethnic conflict – is the expression of a structural contradiction between the economics of a market system and the politics of a residual colonial system. Markets move people, and not simply products of labour, across boundaries, but a colonial mechanism such as the native authority disenfranchises anyone who crosses tribal boundaries, as millions of Congolese were obliged to do, in the service of a fluid migrant labour system. This contradiction was at its most acute in the southern province of Katanga and the eastern provinces of Ituri and Kivu. With independence from Belgium in 1960, there was a prophetic round of ethnic cleansing in Katanga and Kasai, repeated on a more dramatic scale in 1992-93, and shortly afterwards in Ituri and Kivu.⁰
Since independence, the DRC has seen millions of deaths due to conflicts largely caused by ethnic strife, principally during the Second Congolese War, which alone appears to have caused approximately 4 million deaths.¹
In this context it seems that Ebola is not particularly threatening; certainly, if one views human conflict as a disease, it has not killed particularly many. The principal conclusion from this conflict, I should think, is that the DRC is quite vulnerable to the spread of other diseases that are even more infectious.
Transport in the DRC is notoriously difficult. Many “roads” are not visible either on Google Earth or in attempting to use “remote sensing”². There may therefore be some hope that the spread of a more dangerous infectious disease could help to reduce conflict by increasing fear of contact between populations. As things stand, it seems that most contact consists of violence instead of useful things such as trade. If the jungle cannot stop the militias, perhaps disease can. (It admittedly failed to do so during the Plague of Justinian.)
1. Benjamin Coghlan et al, “Mortality in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: A Nationwide Survey”, in: The Lancet 367.9504 (Jan. 2006), pp. 44-51, DOI 10.1016/S0140-6736(06)67923-3
I appreciate your insights into Congo, but I doubt that the fear of disease and therefore of strangers, is a suistainable base for all peace.
Rather the opposite. One reason more to fear and hate the neighbours.
I agree that hatred would be increased. Peace would only follow from disease where:
1. one can avoid infection by avoiding proximity (so no waterborne disease for example),
2. knowledge of this is widespread,
3. avoidance of proximity is feasible, and
4. the increase in hatred is not sufficient to remove fear of death.
However, I think that most of these conditions are met in large parts of the DRC, apart from (1), where there is no such disease yet.
EDIT: Also (2) is endangered by the spread of unscientific beliefs; presumably political actors wouldn’t be attempting to convince others that Ebola doesn’t exist were there no possibility of succeeding in this venture.
I cant wait for some wicked ideology to stoop to new lows with a patient zero as suicide contact person.
Supress the symptoms and keep the agent walking through the bars of a city.
Bioweapons a natural, like the europeans had them.
Looking at the lay of the land as dense wilderness, with few roads, making transport difficult, that has to influence economic and political orchestration as it does contagion, no?
In other words, governing a raw jungle, with little in the way of infrastructure, means lots of areas will go ungoverned. And with that, it means the trappings of a civilization baked in modernity are gone: electricity, plumbing, other common services, heavy construction.
When modernization occurs, economic activity eventually requires degrees of consistent identification of individual people, to enable accounting and distribution. Without identity and credentials, volume of trade can’t scale.
So, how to integrate with a wilderness busily operating according to its own rules? Well, if you have to let the wilderness come to you, isn’t that inviting collisions?
It seems like colonialism and race are big juicy targets of exploitative blame, but if you look around, there’s a certain reality that the gravitational forces of modernity would have caused these tribal groups to collide and descend into conflict with any amount of activity that didn’t ease the exposure of ethnic tribal groups into modernization (and thus accounting, identification and representative credential provisioning) over multiple generations, very, very carefully. I don’t know that such a thing ever would have happened gently.
That the wilderness persists, and with it conflict among diverse customs, traditions and ways of life, seems to show that maybe it’s less about the colonialism, and more about way the (now entrenched) urban areas are forced to interact with a coarse intolerance for disorganized demand. It’s probably been this parasitic/addictive feedback loop for long enough that the equilibrium is a known quantity determined long ago, through layers of stacked moral hazards.
Those layers are certainly the ghosts of a colonial era, but now what? The colonial era is over, but the parasitic core of an urbanized gravitational whirlpool still produces the effects of a faceless entity, an architecture of amoral economy. The tribal ethnic groups still fight, and their spoils get eagerly mopped up and wrung out in buckets harvested by spectators.
How does one put the brakes on a cycle like this? Efface the cities themselves from the face of the earth? Clear cut and pave over the jungle? Seems like whether colonialism is to blame or not, the problem is essentially intractable with conventional thinking? Radical changes, meanwhile, remain unthinkable.
> When modernization occurs, economic activity eventually requires degrees of consistent identification of individual people, to enable accounting and distribution. Without identity and credentials, volume of trade can’t scale.
I see no reason why they can’t; trade can operate based on immediate transfer of goods, and thereafter the prospect of continued further trade is incentive enough to continue to behave honestly.
> So, how to integrate with a wilderness busily operating according to its own rules? Well, if you have to let the wilderness come to you, isn’t that inviting collisions?
I’m not entirely sure what you mean by “inviting collisions”. If you mean that more advanced civilisations have to integrate places like Congo otherwise some sort of invasion will occur, I would suggest that this is implausible for fairly obvious reasons.
Obviously environment has significant political and economic effects, but I would caution against excessive determinism. Many more stable polities have existed in similar physical environments—just look at the Republic of Congo next door, for example, or the relative stability of Switzerland, notwithstanding transport difficulties in the mountains. The Second Congo War was abnormal even in this state of underdevelopment.
> It seems like colonialism and race are big juicy targets of exploitative blame, but if you look around, there’s a certain reality that the gravitational forces of modernity would have caused these tribal groups to collide and descend into conflict with any amount of activity that didn’t ease the exposure of ethnic tribal groups into modernization (and thus accounting, identification and representative credential provisioning) over multiple generations, very, very carefully. I don’t know that such a thing ever would have happened gently.
Tribal identities do not inevitably lead to conflict. Their propensity to cause conflict is determined by previous conditions. Colonial reliance on identity as a tool of division is one reason why these identities lead to conflict. Otherwise, they are one plausible dividing line, but by no means a determinative one.
If the claim here is that tribal identification is necessary to enable trade because identification is difficult, this is probably untrue. One path to trade is based on tribal identification, as I think you are saying. Collective responsibility ensures that tribes must maintain credibility by ensuring that individual members are honest. But trade can quite easily take place without much trust; it simply requires immediate exchange of goods. This is the method by which trade operated in much of human history.
> That the wilderness persists, and with it conflict among diverse customs, traditions and ways of life, seems to show that maybe it’s less about the colonialism, and more about way the (now entrenched) urban areas are forced to interact with a coarse intolerance for disorganized demand. It’s probably been this parasitic/addictive feedback loop for long enough that the equilibrium is a known quantity determined long ago, through layers of stacked moral hazards.
Sorry, a little confused here as well—who is coarsely intolerant for disorganized demand?
Economic patterns in the Congo are largely the product of Belgian decisions. The exploitation of natural resources is most of the economy; that started under them. Pre-colonial Congo is not my area of expertise but I imagine that whatever equilibrium was reached was not associated with slaughter of the scale of the Second Congo War. As for moral hazard, could you elaborate?
> Those layers are certainly the ghosts of a colonial era, but now what? The colonial era is over, but the parasitic core of an urbanized gravitational whirlpool still produces the effects of a faceless entity, an architecture of amoral economy. The tribal ethnic groups still fight, and their spoils get eagerly mopped up and wrung out in buckets harvested by spectators.
The situation is more contingent on international interference than is immediately obvious. To start, the current government needs to purchase weapons from somewhere; it purchases these weapons due to money earnt as a result of international involvement by mineral companies. The DRC would not be able to manufacture many weapons by itself. At the very least this would cause a reversion of tribal conflict to a state without modern weapons; this would likely reduce the death rate. The situation is not particularly easy to solve, but probably not intractable yet.
https://www.doctorswithoutborders.ca/article/ebola-amid-tens...