Commodities of War: What the people without guns say about life, death and fear in the DR Congo

I was supposed to be in the Democratic Republic of Congo this week, with today being devoted to visiting the Kanyaruchina camp (right) for ‘internally displaced people’ (IDPs) near Goma. Instead, the trip’s been cancelled, I am still in London and Kanyaruchina has been abandoned, as some 30,000 people have fled (again).

The reason is the sudden escalation in fighting between the M23 guerrilla group and the Congolese government, with the M23 advancing to the outskirts of Goma over the weekend.

A BBC report from the deserted camp gives a taste of the human impact of the fighting. It’s great television, but it’s still the standard format – local people providing the backdrop to the white reporter or researcher. An Oxfam report out today takes a different approach, ‘bearing witness’ through focus groups and interviews to collect the views of over 1,300 people in 32 conflict-affected communities (and then working with those communities to help them address their concerns).

The ‘protection assessment’ exposed alarming levels of abuse of men, women and children by armed groups, including through forced recruitment, forced labour and continuous illegal taxation in one of the world’s most under-reported and egregious human rights situations. In areas subject to attack by armed groups, people expressed fears about killings, looting and abductions. In areas largely controlled by the state, people reported exploitation, including extortion under threat of violence, by the very state services which are supposed to protect and support them.

This chaos has exacerbated a trend in which communities themselves have increasingly become ‘commodities of war’ (the title of the report), fought over by armed groups – both state and non-state – and by authorities seeking to control lucrative opportunities to extort their money and possessions.  In several areas, people have felt compelled to take security and justice into their own hands due to an abusive or absent state, adding to the growing numbers of new armed groups.

The annual report, (the sixth since 2007) “identified the following protection themes emerging over the past year:

• The civilian population has increasingly become a commodity of war, as those who are fighting vie for the right to extort money and goods from people in areas they control. Abuse of power is pervasive in state-controlled as well as rebel-controlled areas, and violent extortion and coercion are rife.
• Violent attacks on civilians continue, including inter-ethnic revenge killings.
• Coping mechanisms are strained. People report increasing vulnerability and their livelihoods seriously threatened as they lack safe access to their fields and local markets.
• Men, women, and children experience insecurity differently. For example, girls expressed fears about sexual exploitation and violence, while boys talked of the risk of violence associated with killings, arbitrary arrests and illegal detentions, forced labour, and fear of forced recruitment. For women such experiences come on top of their ongoing challenge to ascertain their rights, which is linked to cultural custom and limited access to justice;
• The security situation is worse in areas that frequently change hands between government and rebel control. Most people preferred a FARDC presence to the lack of it.
• In the absence of an effective state authority, many people reported feeling abandoned by central government. In some cases, the lack of a state presence, or abuses perpetrated by the state, prompted people to take justice into their own hands.
• Many areas that have seen increasing stability over recent years have become more insecure since early 2012 as armed groups have moved into areas vacated by the army.”

I’m always reluctant to talk about ‘innocent civilians caught between two fires’ as people usually have strong views of their own on what political change might improve their lot. But in this case, reality may well approach the journalistic cliché. It will be one of the things I try and get to the bottom of when I finally get to Eastern DRC (hopefully in January).

Violence and development – what are the links?

Why don’t we talk about violence more? That was the question posed to a bunch of Oxfamistas this week by Jenny Pearce, Professor of Peace Studies at Bradford University. Jenny’s my guru as well as a friend – back in 1982, fresh back from Latin America, I attended her course on the region’s politics and economics, which I subsequently took over teaching and turned into a book, Faces of Latin America, which is still going strong 20 years later.

At that time, she was the voice of the UK left (yep, we still had one then, sort of) on the wars in Central America and her book ‘Under the Eagle’ on US intervention in the region was their bible. She was an influential voice in support of the FMLN guerrillas in El Salvador – peasant revolutionaries who had taken up arms against a particularly barbaric US-backed regime. She visited the FMLN’s ‘controlled zones’ and got bombed for her pains, and wrote it up in another book, Promised Land.

The U-turn in her thinking since then is pretty striking. She’s spent much of the intervening years working on violence with communities in numerous developing countries, combining academic research with development practice. Her conclusion is that violence, while occasionally justified, is never good. It closes down the space for participation.

The concept that jumped out from her talk (powerpoint here) was the way that chronic violence ‘diffuses and reproduces itself’. Like a disease released into a population, or a genie escaping from the bottle, the kind of organized, political violence that Jenny saw as legitimate in El Salvador in the 1980s has morphed into social violence, gangs and kidnapping, as generations brutalised by their own experience of violence have become perpetrators themselves. Today El Salvador has no war, but one of the highest homicide rates in the world, while little has changed in the lives of her peasant revolutionary friends (Jenny returned to visit them last year).

So these days, Jenny is more interested in how and why communities and societies take action to ‘desanction’ violence – whether at local level in peace-building in Colombia, or the global shifts in thinking on domestic violence or beating children – and tackle the mechanisms for its reproduction (social inequality, construction of masculinity, the ‘othering’ of minorities, states that encourage dispersed violence by supporting militia etc).

But the difficult bit for me is the link between conflict and violence. Paul Collier’s claim that ‘civil war is development in reverse‘ has been well challenged by people like Chris Kramer at SOAS, who wrote a book with the memorable title ‘Civil War is Not a Stupid Thing’. John Gaventa’s citizenship and particiption team at IDS studied a series of examples were social movements and ‘active citizenship’ brought about lasting change. He concluded that more often than not, their actions have to be ‘contentious’ – protest, struggle, and yes, the use of violence, are an important part of the repertoire. Signing petitions and voting is not always enough.

So here’s the conundrum – social change often requires conflict, but if that spills over into chronic violence, it will in turn close down the possibility of social change. Navigating that borderline between conflict and violence is one of the many dilemmas of development. Your thoughts?

Rape is not the only story in the Congo

Emma Fanning is Oxfam’s protection manager in the DRC

If you’ve been following the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) recently – and given its unchanging, grim headlines, it’s not surprising if you haven’t – the story has probably been about rape. Large scale, brutal, dehumanising rape. The Congo has been dubbed the « rape capital » ; in just one attack in Walikale, a mining district in North Kivu, over 300 women were raped in August ; almost 7,700 rapes were reported between January and June this year, over half in North and South Kivu; programme staff look knowingly around the room and say «every Congolese man is a potential rapist ».

For most international visitors rape remains the only story: in September, after the Walikale rapes, the stream was steady, asking assemblies of women to raise their hands if they’d been raped. We once had a journalist ask us if we could find a rape victim who was herself born of rape for them to interview. Edward Behr’s famous book on the life of the foreign correspondent, ‘Anybody here been raped and speaks English’ takes its title from a question shouted across a crowd of survivors from a massacre in Stanleyville, now Kisangani (Eastern DRC) in 1964. Clearly for the international media, little has changed in Congo.  Most visitors stop for an obligatory visit at the big hospitals in Bukavu and Goma that do an excellent job, not just of ensuring medical treatment to women, but supporting their rehabilitation from trauma.

However, it becomes hard to move beyond these terrible facts – both for media and for programmes. Allocating money to sexual violence projects is a good way to feel we are doing something about DRC. But very few projects address the other forms of violence that communities experience (protection projects), or violence against children (child protection): while the whole sector is under-funded, most of the money goes to mitigating Sexual and Gender Based Violence (SGBV).

Sexual violence is indeed a terrible problem, but is it the only one, or even the most important? It depends who you talk to. If you go to the hospitals, or projects for victims, of course the story is sexual violence, and almost always, its effects on women – with the unspoken corollary of the evil of congolese men. On the other hand, if you talk to most communities, sexual violence is but one problem among many: and it’s one that worries both men and women.

· One community we talked to told us how at the beginning of the year they were looted on average once a month.
· In many communities people are regularly imprisoned without reason, women are raped by armed men and civilians, and girls are enticed into prostitution.
· Women tell us that on the way to market they have to pass through so many check points lined by the various authorities, each taking their cut, that often they make no profit on their sales.
· In one area a former rebel group integrated into the national army, recently went to schools demanding lists of children who had been demobilized: the same group forces boys to take their ammunition to the battle front, and stands over them as they fire.
· Displaced people have to pay renegade soldiers to pass to safety as they flee rebel attacks.

Funding actions to prevent and respond to sexual violence is important. But too much focus on sexual violence as the latest hot topic ignores the problems as communities actually experience them and the far reaching political change needed to stop all forms of violence. We need to listen to communities describe their experience of violence and engage accordingly. We need governments, both DRC and donor countries to engage politically. And then, maybe, we will see the lives of men and women, old and young, start to improve.

Update: talk of the devil, or in this case, the Economist. This week’s magazine has a three page feature on Rape and War.

What will this year’s World Development Report say about Conflict?

The WDR is published in the fall, but this year’s WDR director, Sarah Cliffe, gave a preview of its contents at Harvard recently. The Report will focus on ‘conflict affected countries’ (CACs). What most caught my attention was her typology of three types of ‘neglected violence’ that offer particular challenges for policy-makers (comments from Ed Cairns, our conflict guru, in square brackets):

1. Repeat cycles of violence: since the late 1990s, a high percentage of ‘battle deaths’ have occurred after ceasefires. [The proportion of deaths from direct violence and from increased, for example, disease and malnutrition/destroyed services seems to vary a lot from conflict to conflict.  In Iraq, most fatalities are 'battle deaths', but in the DRC it's more typically the other way round.  And this point of course links to the point made by Collier et al that a sizeeable proportion of peace deals collapse and revert to armed conflict within a few years. There are cycles of violence, and many countries are stuck in a state of half war/half peace in between.]

2. Interlinked violence: Most CACs suffer multiple forms of violence, often 3 or 4 from a list of gang-based violence, local violence, political violence and organized crime. Yet typically different ministries are responsible for tackling different elements of these, producing serious coordination problems in already weak states. [Yes, and perhaps interlinked levels of violence as well.  For example, our work in Afghanistan has shown how local violent disputes feed and are fed by the national conflict between the government and Taliban  -  and therefore it's been a big mistake of the international community not to put more effort into local peacebuilding.]

3. Cross-border violence is far broader an issue than terrorism (e.g. Uganda’s LRA, or organized crime), but is very hard for the aid system to tackle, as it works on the basis of nation states. [The LRA is not so much cross-border because it's no longer based in northern Uganda.  It's more like violence has itself become displaced - moved from Uganda to DRC, Central African Republic and southern Sudan.  But surely it's true that aid needs to take a regional approach in response.]

Another tricky issue is the reform/risk profile: reforms that in the long term will reduce the likelihood of violence, eg by tackling inequality, typically increase risk in the short term, not least by provoking backlash and destabilization. So the WDR will spend some time considering what sequence and pace of reforms best minimise this risk.

For more, check out the WDR 2011 website or its blog

Cleaning up Dirty Elections – what works?

The Centre for the Study of African Economies in Oxford (home to Paul Collier, among others) is putting out some fascinating two pagers on its work, including two recent papers on ‘dirty elections’.

In ‘Cleaning up Dirty Elections’ Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler go to work  on a new data set spanning nearly 30 years and 155 countries (suggesting that the CSAE is expanding its empire beyond Africa) and find a mixture of ‘well duh’ and more interesting connections.

In the ‘well, duh’ category are ‘Using dirty tactics during elections helps politicians that are already in office’ and ‘Small, poor but resource-rich countries are more prone to dirty elections.’

But more interesting are:

‘Dirty elections are bad for economic growth by skewing politicians’ incentives towards pursuing bad policies rather than good ones;

Checks and balances (Term limits, a free press and constitutional checks and balances are the most effective) reduce the incentives to cheat and implement bad policies.

[Whereas] international aid has no clear effect on the quality of elections, unless there are effective checks and balances.’

Another CSAE paper analyses the impact of an ActionAid International campaign against voter intimidation in Nigeria in the 2007 elections, in which over 300 people were killed. Using violence to intimidate voters was the strategy used by the opposition politicians (incumbent politicians tended to use vote buying and fraud).

ActionAid’s campaign consisted of holding town meetings, street theatre productions and the distribution of leaflets in six states. The CSAE ran household surveys and contracted local journalists in each observed location to keep diaries of local violent events. To allow a clear attribution of the results to the AAIN campaign, comparisons were made with similar locations that were not part of the anti-violence campaign.

Main findings were that in areas targeted by the campaign:

Less violence occurred;

Violent politicians got fewer votes, because more of their former supporters abstained;

Voter turnout increased by 10%.

The campaign was especially effective with those people who were less locally integrated because they were poor or working outside the district. CSAE concludes that this group was less likely to benefit from local political deals and were therefore more receptive to the campaign messages (although I would guess that there are other possible explanations, like this group receiving less information from media and other sources, and so more influenced by a campaign).

The CSAE has not yet set up an email subscription system, but until they do, if you want to receive updates on their publications, contact Karin Loudon at karin.loudon@economics.ox.ac.uk