Live and Learn

When I started the Springboard Reading project, I didn’t really expect it to bear fruit so quickly. About 3 weeks into 2008, I know exponentially more about the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That isn’t hard – in honesty, I didn’t know a lot about it before that anyway. Anyway, today I read this:

A peace pact has been signed in Goma in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo by the government and armed groups…

It aims to end months of bloody conflict in the east which has driven almost 500,000 people from their homes.

Anneke van Woudenberg of Human Rights Watch said the historic agreement should allow thousands of people displaced from their villages in the last year to return home.

But Africa analyst Muzong Kodi at Chatham House in London was more pessimistic.

“The underlying problem is the resource war and if any of the groups disband other groups are going to replace them,” [he said].

The last one is the killer – literally. One of the tragedies of the Congo is not impoverishment, strictly speaking. I recently read a Kenyan aid worker in D.R. Congo speaking about it. In his own country the problem was poor soil and drought – here there was rain and rich, rich soil, but many of the same problems existed because of purely social and political problems.

It’s one of the most bountiful places on Earth for other things too: first rubber was the big thing. Then there were diamonds, cobalt, copper, coltan (a substance far more widely known than its name. Ever used a DVD player? cell phone? Playstation?) – which all have been extracted by less-than-pleasant chaps for the past century-and-a-bit.

So my head is inclined to go with the pessimists, I’m afraid. All the ingredients for a successfully derailed peace settlement are right there.