Are you ready for a new Campaign in the Congo?

[Mr-AEO]

StopStart,

Rather late in the day to pitch in, but felt I had to say that I fully agree with your posts. This whole situation is on an unimaginably large scale and if things get ugly, there could be a genocide like the world has never seen. The prevarication and willy waving that the so called 'developed countries' are now engaging in sounds like echoes of the Rwandan genocide. To be honest, the UK sending a handful of troops, or some equipment is hardly going to make a difference, but it may well make the politico's sleep as night, and subdue some people into believing they can have a Happy Christmas whilst their country does good. I refer back again to the Rwandan genocide when the UK sent out clapped out Bedford trucks as a method of disposal, and then claimed to be 'helping', it was only in the R.O.P that the dismal US, UK and French efforts were shown for what they were.

If people are in doubt as to the provenance of any improved future UN mandate then read Romeo Dallaire's book called 'Shake Hands with the Devil', but be warned as it is harrowing. The poor sod has tried to take his own life several times since returning from Rwanda as the Head of the UN Peackeeping mission.

[StopStart]

I don't mean to bang on but......

Trukkie

Didn't the mighty US of A come a cropper trying to sort out a similar problem in Somolia? Being 'peacekeepers' in the middle of a civil war alongside ineffective UN troops?

Similar? No. A cropper? Yes. Peacekeepers? No. The UN mission (UNOSOM I think) was more about peacemaking and nation building. The US, operating mainly outwith the UN structure, set about hunting down one bloke (Aideid) which ultimately led to the so-called Battle of Mogadishu we all know from the films. It was a fear of similar images of dead US troops being dragged through the streets (along with broader, geopolitical issues) that led the US to dig their heels in over Rwanda. Both Clinton and Albright now acknowledge they were wrong - having seen both apologise on film, it goes way beyond trite political contrition.

I would suggest that european troops would be seen as invaders and would probably make the situation worse and maybe unite the warring factions.

That's a little simplistic and, given the likelihood of the factions ever uniting, very unlikely. European troops could be talked up into "white devils" by the various random generals etc but they're not preaching to a very large audience and certainly not on a national scale. You are correct to state that the UN is by and large a toothless tiger but it is worth noting that we in the west generally keep it that way. It has been suggested that keeping the UN force at low levels in Rwanda actually in some ways contributed to the subsequent violence. Those involved assumed, correctly, that the UN had neither the stomach nor the resources to stop what they had planned. How right they were.

PN -

The crucial word here is west and the use of helicopters from those countries not committed elsewhere.

And there are a lot of them not committed elsewhere. Overstretch here doesn't mean the same in Europe, Australia, NZ, Asia etc etc Perhaps "west" was the wrong word. How about "developed nations"?

Angelorange - thanks for the link, just ordered it off Amazon

Mr AEO, you're correct that is indeed a very good yet harrowing book. The poor sod was well and truly hung out to dry by the petty-minded bureaucracy and ineptitude of the UN.
I'd also recommend Linda Malvern's book A People Betrayed (the paperback's a bit cheaper mind... )

[West Coast]

Should we bomb London?

If you guys promise to burn down Washington again, we'll take out Downing Street for you.

As to Somalia, my travel agent the US Marines sent me there for an extended holiday. The mission started out simply as a humanitarian one then mission creep eeked in to the lexicon and we stretched further and entered the civil war.
The beginning stages were quite successful as the famine was in large part man made via feudal turf wars. A technical blocking a bridge stopping food shipments because a "tax" wasn't paid is no match for a Cobra gun ship. Then some genius in the UN (and the one in the White House as well) decided that nation building was the word of the day. We all know how it went from there.

I don't know if it's the right thing for your lot to head to Africa, for you to decide. What I do take a degree of exception is to some posters who view a UN mandate as the legitimation of a mission. As if moral clarity is somehow crystallized and the path forward clear via UN vote. Not advocating war by fiat, but the moral authority to act exists because of the circumstances of the particular mission and not via political decree.

[StopStart]

Whilst no particular fan of the UN personally, the blue beret and/or mandate does offer an element (thin veneer?) of legality to the act of pitching up in someone's garden, possibly uninvited, to sort his problems out. It's easier to turn a nation against a single "invader" than it might be to do so against "the world".

but the moral authority to act exists because of the circumstances of the particular mission and not via political decree.

The morality or otherwise of a mission depends entirely on where you stand politically/ethnically. The Hutus of Rwanda believed they had the moral right to massace the Tutsis in revenge for past injustices. Had they brought that viewpoint to the UN debating chambers I suspect they wouldn't have got a look in.

No mission will go ahead without political decree, no matter how moral it may be. An arse-covering politician will get as much backing as he can for his mission to maintain a legitimacy on the world stage. Running it by the UN is a handy way of doing that. Whilst they never specifically received a mandate to invade Iraq, George Bush et al didn't half spend a lot of time trying to get one...

The UN is an imperfect, monolithic, bureaucratic organisation that hoovers up money and churns out little effect in return. Notwithstanding that it does provide a global forum for nations to debate issues and provide a legitimacy to operations (humanitarian or otherwise) that might otherwise provoke further conflict where people only sought to bring peace and relief.

It's a different matter I guess if you consider yourself to hold the moral authority without discussion and are militarily powerful enough not require any legitimacy to act wherever you see fit.....

[West Coast]

No mission will go ahead without political decree, no matter how moral it may be.

Well, yes and no. My heartburn lies with the UN. One must only look to the Balkans in the past 18 years or so to see the UN has abdicated it's global responsibilities to regional entities such as NATO.

It's easier to turn a nation against a single "invader" than it might be to do so against "the world".

I understand the point you're trying to make, but the devil is in the details. Nations with polar opposite foreign policy goals in the UNSC are going to at a minimum barter their votes and at worst are going to veto anything they find counter to their goals. Think back to the physical absence of the Soviet ambassador during the vote over sending UN troops to Korea. Had the USSR not been boycotting the meetings, the UN resolution to provide military assistance to South Korea likely wouldn't have been approved.
I'll leave the morality of the war for others to argue, but only by the absence of one voting member of the UNSC did the will of the majority prevail.

[Fareastdriver]

Carrying out a genocidal plundering of the Congo, he looted its rubber, brutalized its people,

Yoy can't believe all you read.. Rubber is natural only to the Amazon basin. It wasn't until 1876 that the first seeds were smuggled/exported out of Brazil to London. First plantations were in Ceylon and then Malaya but it took a decade or so before the they became established. From then on Belgian Congo rubber would have been a colonial import.

[BEagle]

No British troops should be sent to the Congo!!

A technical blocking a bridge stopping food shipments because a "tax" wasn't paid is no match for a Cobra gun ship.

That is, regrettably, the only real way of dealing with such corrupt, feuding 'people' intent on taking their primitive tribal issues into the 21st century. Any 'Aid' will just go straight into a corrupt official's pocket and any food will merely end up being sold by profiteers.

By the way, was the Technical persuaded to move before the Cobra needed to make its point more obviously?

Why is NuLabor so keen on interfering in the Congo when they've done the square root of f**k all about Zimbabwe?

[Pontius Navigator]

Originally Posted by West Coast

UN has abdicated it's global responsibilities to regional entities such as NATO..

No this is more likely a political-military reality.

Few countries possess peacemaking forces that can project power - Russia, China, NATO. Others such as India and South America might be able to provide regional peacemaking.

Many African countries might also be able to provide regional peacemaking powers but more likely used as peacekeepers.

I think many of you are indeed arguing that intervention by a small number of well-equipped developed country peacemakers can have a great effect.

This must be well managed as some peacemaking countries do not field peacekeeping forces.

[mr ripley]

What is it about DR Congo

Dr Congo has probably the largest source of untapped minerals in the world. The mineral of choice is Coltan, which most people have not heard of but try googling it. I am sure we are all using it in one form or another.

Other stuff: Gold, Diamonds, Oil, Copper, Cobalt.

Instability in DR Congo allows the countries around to nick the stuff with or without the help of locally sponsored groups.

MONUC varies in ability, Bangladesh, India, Uraguay have all been involved.

In 2003 the EU started an Op as the Uraguay troops were not coming out of barracks and were allowing some pretty nasty things to happen on their patch.

Countries involved in the Op were on the ground France (Marines and SF), Belgians (Medical), Sweden (SF) plus a few minor players. UK (Engineers)
In the air France (Mirage F1CR, Atlantique, Puma, Gazelle, C130, C160), South Africa (Puma), Canada (C130), Brazil (C130), Belgium (C130), UK (C130). And the French also used Mirage 2000 and AAR from Chad.

At the time it worked, sorted out the area and handed over to some more robust MONUC troops.

I would like to think it could be done again and personally would support involvement.

[ORAC]

The Times: Miliband admits UK may send troops to bolster UN peacekeepers in Congo

David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, admitted today that Britain may have to send troops to bolster the UN peacekeeping force in violence-torn Congo.

Mr Miliband's remark came as the Congolese Government rejected a rebel demand for negotiations, a demand backed by a direct threat to extend the conflict.............

After an emergency mission to the region this weekend, Mr Miliband and his French counterpart Bernard Kouchner are to brief EU colleagues at informal talks in Marseilles later today.

After pouring cold water yesterday on the suggestion that already stretched British troops could be caught up in a new overseas entanglement, Mr Miliband today conceded that such a move was possible. “We have not ruled anything out. It is possible,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme........

[Sunk at Narvik]

Lets hope Miliband thinks it through and the lessons of Bosnia are applied.

I applaud the instincts of the interventionists here but have serious misgivings about any UK involvement. The Congo is massive, "peacekeeping" is not the game, the UN is proven a busted flush, NATO can't even commit to Afghanistan and no UN mandate will allow the use of force to defeat one or other of the sides.

The only solution is recolonisation by a power with the manpower and political will to do it. Looking around I can't see any likely candidates.

I'm afraid that letting this run to a bloody conclusion may be the wisest move in the long run..."give war a chance" as someone once said. In the meantime turn off your TV's.

I'd be very happy to be proven wrong, but on the record from the early 90's onwards, I'm not hopefull.

[StopStart]

oh aye, he's off again....

West Coast - the UN does become a bartering market of votes at times but surely a system that tries to accord some agreement between nations must be better than one that does nothing at all? The example you quote of Korea reveals some of the intricacies faced by the UN as the world entered the Cold War. Did the USSR absentee themselves so as not to reveal their hand in supporting the North Koreans? (albeit to a limited extent) Was the war itself a civil war and thus outside the scope of the UN charter that the USA et al wanted to act under? One could argue the relative merits or otherwise of the UN until one was blue in the face but I think that goes beyond the scope of the situation originally under discussion here. I still believe that the UN or a mandate from them lends a "legality" to wading into a country to help those that cannot help themselves and face death or privation through the criminal acts of others.

Fareastdriver - whilst I'm sitting here being a self-proclaimed expert in absolutely bloody everything I'm pretty sure that rubber is indigenous to the Congo region albeit a different type to that of the Amazon (seeds of which which, as you say, were exported to London and thence to Ceylon and Malaya).

BEags - you are correct in your assertion that military force must be applied in a determined and effective way if it is to have any effect. That way any intervention must have robust RoEs that give the troops the right and means to prevent and protect the innocent from a good ole fashioned African slaughtering. The section of Belgian troops stopped in Rwanda by militias were advised by their UN command structures not to resist and hand over their weapons as no one was sure of the legality of their position (despite being under fire from said militias for some time). That made it much easier to stick em in a room and machine gun them. Similarly UN observers had to do just that as locals were hacked to pieces outside their compounds. Any involvement in the Congo today must be backed by robust RoEs that prevent such lunacy being repeated.

with such corrupt, feuding 'people' intent on taking their primitive tribal issues into the 21st century

Er, Northern Ireland?

I think the topic of Zimbabwe has been discussed at some length and I still believe it's a totally different set of conditions.

PN - more often than not being equipped to peacemake is the required standard to subsequently peacekeep. As mr ripley points out, the op in 2003 to bolster MONUC brought a successful resolution at the time. The well equipped peacemakers then cleared off returning the generally poorly equipped peacekeepers and 5 years later we face the same problem.

Sunk at Narvik -

I'm afraid that letting this run to a bloody conclusion may be the wisest move in the long run..."give war a chance" as someone once said

Wisest move? For whom? You and your Christmas at home? The government and their preference to spunking billions on witless bankers and Olympic sporting venues? I suppose it eliminates the problem of having to clothe and feed all these bothersome folk in the future.. Any chance we could add the feckless, lazy and worthless folk we have here at home in the UK to that list?

In the meantime turn off your TV's

Worked last time eh?



As Confucious say:

To know what is right and not to do it is the worst cowardice

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Editor's Note: Apologies for my repeated insistence in banging on with this subject. Normal service will be resumed soon

[Sunk at Narvik]

Stop,

I don't disagree with you at all. We have one million fit healthy young people "not in education, employment or training" (NEET's) here in the UK currently in the welfare trap. Then we have another dreadful African genocide which requires substantially more than a regiment or two to achieve a lasting long term solution.

However, there is no will to join up the dots and do whats neccesary...to many "ism's" to overcome.

Forget the UN, its a complete waste of time, yet there is no appetite at all for painting bits of Africa pink again, even though thats probably the only thing that will save lives in the long term.

But what I wouldn't want to see is yet more of our soldiers lives being lost (or worse, remember what happened to the Belgian peacekeepers in Rwanda?) and another intervention that drags on year after year with people rapidly forgetting why they went there in the first place. It'd be Northern Ireland on massive grotesque scale. You can't just drop in for a month and be home for Christmas, you need to stay there and govern for two or three generations and even then...look at Kenya.

[OFBSLF]

The leaders of western nations will only intervene in a conflict if it suits their economic interests

We don't have enough blood and treasure to fight injustice across the world. It always surprises me how so many people vehemently oppose military intervention in situations where we have vital economic and strategic interests, and then turn around and just as vehemently argue in favor of intervening in civil wars where we have no economic or strategic interests.

[2port]

Referring back to my "it will take more than 17,000 etc etc"....

A geographical perspective:

Iraq is just under 200,000 sq miles in area.

Iran approx 600,000.

The good DR Congo is nearly 1 million sq miles - almost impossible to police I would wager.

2P

[West Coast]

I still believe that the UN or a mandate from them lends a "legality" to wading into a country to help those that cannot help themselves

Let me approach this from another direction. Yes, a UN mandate does add legitimacy. An absence of one however doesn't reduce moral imperative. The UN may not come to a consensus on a given crisis because of politics, but the continued suffering/famine/genocide has a compelling mandate in of itself.

[mr ripley]

DR Congo may be big

The good DR Congo is nearly 1 million sq miles - almost impossible to police I would wager.

But we are talking about localised violence. Goma is a problem due to the proximity to Rwanda. But what happens there does not effect so much Bunia, which is close to Uganda or Kisingani which is miles away or Kinshasa which is close to the other Congo.

It would not be wise to assume an Iraq or Afghanistan. Nationhood as alluded to before is secondary to tribalism (and now I am shooting myself in the foot as there are some similarities with Iraq and Afghanistan) however the borders are more fluid and there is much more intervention around the perifery than people realise.

SS, I do feel strongly about this like I think you do. I have seen the evidence of some appalling crimes in DR Congo. All the thugs respect force. In 2003 there was a lot of action that took place that taught the drugged up AK47 totting twats that they could not bully the innocent. With a proper mandate and appropriate ROE an aggressive intervention good do wonders.

IMHO

[StopStart]

Don't go me wrong folks, as I've said a couple of times I have a lot of issues with the UN but I would still maintain that they have their uses in situations where those intervening could be perceived as aggressors/invaders. A prime example would be Zimbabwe - the Brits rocking up there, on their own, to sort things out would not work "presentationally" and would create infinitely more problems than they set out to solve. That would truly become the neverending op....

West Coast, I'm in complete agreement with your point however there are only a few countries that are powerful enough to militarily impose a solution on a country on their own. You are correct when you say that the UN does not impart a moral authority - that rests with you and I.

2port, indeed it is but the current problems are confined to a relatively small border area. There is no intent/requirement to police the entire DRC, merely one to suppress rebel forces and bring relief to the refugees in the area.

The issues at stake here are the prevention of the starvation/genocide/call-it-what-you-will of a large number of innocent folk. This isn't about nation building, imposition of democracy, pillaging of mineral wealth, securing strategic advantage, toppling dictators or any other guns-blazing type ideas. "All" I'm advocating is a limited and focussed relief op with robust enough RoEs to ensure that incoming troops don't end up becoming the victims. If that op requires a couple of GRs to lob LGBs through some rogue general's bedroom window then so be it. It won't require, however, that we run up our flag over the rubble of it.

OBSLF - you are quite right, we don't have enough resources to police the ills of the whole world but should that mean we shouldn't do anything at all anywhere? If we consider ourselves to be a right-minded, developed nation then do we not have a moral obligation to something, no matter how small? I can't afford to build a £6M swimming pool at Headley Court. Does that mean that I shouldn't bother donating a tenner towards it?

On one hand some people will argue that history shows us why we shouldn't get involved whilst my personal opinion is that history shows why we must get involved and also provides the lessons such that we don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

[OFBSLF]

OBSLF - you are quite right, we don't have enough resources to police the ills of the whole world but should that mean we shouldn't do anything at all anywhere?

And how do we decide which to get involved in? Darfur? Congo? Uganda? Zimbabwe? Sri Lanka? Kashmir? Colombia?

Why should we go into the Congo and not Darfur? Why should we go into Zimbabwe and not Sri Lanka?

Undoubtedly, there are at least 10x as many conflicts ongoing across the world. There are conflicts in all of those countries with the resulting terrible suffering. The UK and the US are already overwhelmed with their current commitments in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. The US economy is circling the drain. Our deficit spending is catching up to us.

Yes, there is terrible suffering in the Congo. It would be very difficult to stop. It would require a large number of troops (that we don't have) at the end of a long and difficult (read: expensive) supply line. Neither the UK nor the US can afford to intervene. Neither the US nor the UK have strategic or environmental interests at stake.

If we have learned one thing over the past 7 years, it is that there are limits to our power. If we are going to intervene militarily, we need to go in hard and fast, with overwhelming power. Doling out 5,000 troops here and 10,000 troops there for open-ended engagements in un-ending civil wars is the height of folly.

[Warmtoast]

I thought I'd add my two-pennyworth, having been there in 1961.

As a member of 99 Squadron I and my crew were on one of the three Britannia’s sent to Accra to fly the Accra / Luluabourg (now Kananga) / Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) / Accra shuttle in January 1961, the purpose being to return to Ghana troops who’d mutinied against their seconded British officers.

My logbook shows I flew the Accra — Luluabourg (Kananga) — Accra shuttle some three times — on 26th, 27th and 29th January 1961.

Background
The independent Republic of the Congo [formerly the Belgian Congo] was declared on 30th June 1960. Five days later on 5th July 1960, the army (the Force Publique) near Léopoldville mutinied against its white officers and attacked numerous European targets. Armed bands of mutineers roamed the capital looting and terrorizing the white population. This caused the flight of thousands of European refugees to Brazzaville (in the French Congo) and north to Stanleyville. The credibility of the new government was ruined as it proved unable to control its own armed forces with the result that the republic’s administration and economy collapsed leaving the whole country in a state of anarchy.
To add to the woes of the new republic there were violent inter-tribal clashes between the Baluba and Lulua tribes based around Luluabourg (Kananga) and Tshikapa in the diamond-rich Kasai-Occidental province in the south of the Congo. There was no love lost between the Baluba who were economically dominant over the indigenous and more numerous Luluas.
Belgium’s colonial history in the Congo is widely acknowledged to have been one of the cruellest and most vicious of all the colonial powers and its exploitation of their colonial subjects is probably unparalleled in colonial history. So understandably, with injustices and scores to settle, not only with their former officers, but with the colonial rulers and administrators and their families still present in the country, the indigenous Congolese troops and various tribal factions embarked on a spree of pillage, plunder, rape and murder. Things were not made easier by the genocidal rivalries between the various tribes and the declared independence on 11th July 1960 of the copper and uranium-rich province of Katanga in the southeast under the leadership of Moise Tshombe.
With the new republic in a state of anarchy, Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba asked the United Nations for help and as a result on the 14th July 1960, the UN Security Council authorised the deployment of UN-led military forces to help restore order. Among the peacekeeping troops sent to help keep the peace and quell the rioting and bloodshed was a contingent of Ghanaian troops led by British seconded officers who were deployed to Tshikapa south-west of Luluabourg (Kananga).
Sadly the Ghanaian troops as part of the UN Peacekeeping Force decided that they too would join in the general anarchy and joined the Congolese army in looting and plundering the villas of the former Belgian colonists still resident in what remained of the former Belgian Congo. When the UK officers seconded to the Ghanaian peacekeeping contingent in the Congo remonstrated with the troops under their command about this unacceptable behaviour, members of 3rd Battalion, the Ghana Regiment; objected to interference with what they considered perfectly acceptable [in their eyes] behaviour against the former colonial oppressors of the Belgian Congo and they too mutinied.
This mutinous behaviour by the Ghanaian contingent, theoretically in the Congo to keep the peace, was unacceptable to the United Nations (whilst in the Congo the Ghanaian troops were ipso-facto United Nations troops NOT Ghanaian) and the UN ordered that they were to be returned home to Ghana as soon as possible. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s president was very unhappy with this and blamed the British seconded officers for his troop’s misbehaviour whilst in the Congo.
Although the Ghanaian troops arrived in the Republic of the Congo with kitbags, when they came back with us they were drawn up on the tarmac at Luluabourg with all the luggage accruements of well-heeled Europeans with smart suitcases, vanity cases, portable typewriters etc. and on one occasion they even expected us to load into the aircraft a number of very large, expensive and desirable radiograms, which we had to refuse because:

1. We knew they’d been looted and
2. We didn’t have space in the hold!

General Sir Henry Alexander
I was on one of the last flights out of Luluabourg on 29th January and we brought out General Sir Henry Alexander, the head of the Ghana Defence Force, who Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah bizarrely blamed for his troops misbehaviour. Various research papers refer to the sacking of Gen Alexander as Head of the Ghana Defence Force together with his seconded UK officers because of a dispute with Kwame Nkrumah about who actually controlled the Ghana Defence Force; but others read more into the Ghanaian’s misbehaviour in the Congo as being the catalyst on which to hang a case for the recall and dismissal of all the seconded UK officers from the Force.

Statistics
I made three trips in three different aircraft during the shuttle, and papers in the National Archives at Kew record that during the evacuation of the Ghanaian UN Peacekeeping Force from the Congo back to Accra in January 1961, some 12-plus Britannia shuttle flights took place between Accra, Luluabourg and return, in the process carrying some 1,370 Pax and 35,000lbs of freight.

In Retrospect
At the time of these trips to the Congo I’d been in the service for ten years and it caused me to think back to my first posting abroad in 1951 5 FTS at RAF Thornhill in Gwelo, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and to recall that the local travel agent in Gwelo was in the habit of arranging holidays to the then Belgian Congo and advertised these trips in “BUKA” the RAF Thornhill station magazine (I still have copies of BUKA which make for fascinating reading after 57-years). At the time the excellent European-run railways of Southern and Central Africa offered a cheap and reliable method of travel and getting to the Congo was relatively simple, albeit very time-consuming. From Gwelo the journey was south to Bulawayo, then north up to the Victoria Falls where one crossed into Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) continuing north via Lusaka and Ndola. At Ndola one joined the comfortable Belgian Congo railways Wagons-Lit train which then travelled to Elizabethville and then wended its way west to Luluabourg. Hotels in the Congo then were European-run and reputably clean and comfortable.
In the early 1950’s the attraction of a trip to the Congo was its uniqueness, as not many British in those days could have boasted of a journey to the Congo, what one did when there was not stated, although the travel agent’s publicity claimed it was possible to stay in continental-style hotels and visit pygmies in the jungle and watch hippos in the river. I didn’t do one of these trips but knew friends and colleagues who did and the returned exhilarated to have made such a journey.

“Blood River” by Tim Butcher.
I have read the recent book “Blood River” by Daily Telegraph correspondent Tim Butcher where he recreates and re-traces the route followed by H. M. Stanley’s famous 19th-century expedition along the Congo River. Extract here: Dangerous journey - Telegraph

Comments
What is so strange and daunting about the Congo in the 21st -century is that history there appears to have ground to a halt and has started juddering backwards. Pol Pot tried to achieve the same thing in Cambodia, whilst Robert Mugabe is doing his spirited octogenarian best in Zimbabwe, but in the DR Congo, the process of “undeveloping” has been going on for decades. The results are surreal. As Butcher comments in his book — parents struggle to explain to wide-eyed children what cars and motorbikes used to look and sound like, travelling the country’s 111,000km of roads. Today, Butcher reckons, there is all of 1,000km of road left. From west to east is further than London to Moscow.
He discovers grass-grown railway stations where the station master still comes to work each day, puts on his ancient red and blue cap, sits in his chair and waits. No train has passed through for six years. He meets a man in the heart of the jungle, pushing, in the exhausting heat, a bicycle laden with 80 litres of palm oil. He is on a 600km round trip to sell it. The journey might take two months and make him $30, if he survives.
In even the biggest towns there are no newspapers, radio or television, no land lines or internet access. Nobody knows anything. Butcher’s map dates from 1961. Leprosy and malaria are back and flourishing, along with the new kid on the block, Aids. Rebel soldiers wear dark glasses, but use bows and arrows believing they have magical properties. Congo is hugely rich in mineral resources (the Hiroshima and Nagasaki uranium was Congolese), but this only compounds its agonies. Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, Zimbabwe, Chad, Angola and Namibia have all fought to grab their share — so much for pan-African solidarity.

Finally
The quintessential question about Africa that has been mulled over and discussed by academics, intellectuals and observers ever since the colonial powers withdrew is: “Why are Africans so bad at running Africa?” — There just doesn’t seem to be a logical or sensible answer.

Some photos from my album.



3rd Battalion Ghana Regiment – Jan 1961



Luluabourg – Ghanaian Troops - Cases for loading – Jan 1961



General Sir Henry Alexander — January 1961



A pretty worthless 10-Frank Belgian Congo Bank note (still in my collection).



As reported in the press.