In recent weeks, the situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has gotten much worse. The country’s East is going through another of its convulsions of violence, and civilians are being systematically attacked on an appalling scale. A recent dispute over fishing and farming rights in the Equateur province has forced approximately 218,000 people, 70 percent of which are women and children, to flee to the neighboring Republic of the Congo. The conflict in the DRC has been ongoing since 1996 and has displaced around 3.4 million people. It has gotten so terrible that the UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Gutteres compared it to the 2004 Asian Tsunami, and, after visiting the refugee camps, stated that conflict in the Congo is taking more human lives than the Tsunami every six months.
The First Congo War began in 1996, catalyzed by the Great Lakes Refugee Crisis. After the Rwandan Patriotic Front look over in 1994, 2 million Hutu refugees fled from Rwanda into Zaire. Among the refugees were members of the militia groups linked to the genocide who continued to target and kill Tutsis (both Rwandans and Zairian). Then-President Mobutu Seko support of the Hutu extremists enraged the local population and saw the creation of the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Zaire (AFDL) led by Laurent-Desire Kabila. The AFDL received the support of the leaders of African Great Lakes states, particularly Paul Kigame of Rwanda (part of the new Rwandan regime) and Yoweri Museveni of Uganda. Kabila’s control of the country and ascension to power happened quickly thereafter. Opposition to Kabila’s government began almost immediately and, despite attempts to quell rebel factions, the (smaller) conflict escalated into a conventional war shortly thereafter. The Second Congo War continued until 2003, when a peace agreement was signed. The peace agreement, signed in 2003 by the national government, the domestic political opposition, representatives of civil society and the Mai Mai, as well as Rwandan/Ugandan/Congolese militias, described a plan for a transitional government and an end to violence.
Despite the unanimous agreement of a cease-fire, little has changed in many areas of the Congo; the transitional government has rendered the state itself a liminal entity, where questions of whose state it is, and how the population is defined, are open. Additionally, the liminality of the (governmental) state affects the collective and individual subjectivities within the Congo. Guattari explains that factors, within both historical and present cultural and social contexts, effect the production of subjectivity, and that the contribution of factors (which in this case include the constant state of chaos, absence of rule of law and constant war-time mentality) that appear to be detrimental, can steer both individual and collective subjectivity down destructive paths. Thus, unless the (governmental) state emerges from its liminal state and the factors that cause this violent, abusive and detrimental subjectivity are eliminated, violence will continue and the human rights abuses will endure.
-Stephanie Lotshaw
