Ademola Araoye
Between ten and fifteen minutes after midnight on Monday, 18 September 1961, a DC-6B aircraft crashed near the airport in Ndola, a town in the British colony of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), not far from the Congo border. The plane had flown from Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) and was taking Dag Hammarskjold, the United Nations Secretary-General, and his entourage, on a mission to try to bring peace to the Congo. Only one of the sixteen passengers was found alive-Harold Julien, chief of security, who died six days later-Susan Williams.
I first heard the horrible news on CNN. Notwithstanding the overwhelming disquiet that has enveloped the globe over peculiar developments in the Trump denominated United States, the tragic import of the latest untenable human carnage in Goma registered instinctively. It was especially galling that the horror was perpetrated against the most vulnerable in society. To rape hundreds of helpless women in incarceration and then incinerate the violated hapless victims to death must qualify as one of the most horrific debasement of Man, even in the circumstances of conflict! Goma, the scene of this customary anarchy and customized decimation of the sanctity of humanity, has stuck on my mind since. More stupefying is knowing that what happened in Goma, as a constant reminder of the murderous brutality of the evil of socio-political debauchery, was no accident. It is the stuff that the Democratic Republic of Congo as a perpetual false state like many other mere territorial pretensions with ruling criminal syndicates in Africa are made of. The latest evil bore all the imprints of the predictable irrationality and the senselessness of what the Democratic Republic of Congo or even the modal African state, conjures in the minds of all human beings with the faintest capacity to think. It is easy to visualize Nigeria in this genre.
Though this time it is specifically Goma, the canvass of the permanent insanity is larger. More tragically, the contemporary versions of the unending struggles of the unfortunate humanity trapped in the DRC reflect the vicious transformation in the behavioral proclivities of African states unhinged from the constraints imposed by the Cold War environment into which the post-colonial African statehoods was birthed. Since the interregnum between the end of the Cold War and now, the DRC has been confronted with numerous intersecting and interacting foundational challenges. The universe of a vast wasteland of unending conflict called the Democratic Republic of Congo has elicited since its malevolent creation the basic queries of who owns the state and who wants to opt out of that ever boiling cauldron. This is just one of many other deadly endogenous and exogenous contestations around the Congolese state. These challenges have underpinned, in many various expressions, its ever difficult national discourse and sanguinary dynamic that are vigorously manifested. Lumumba: it was not only the United States that wanted him dead, so did the mandaris in White hall, according to Susan Williams. Moise Tshombe and Katanga. At another level of the contest, should the DRC, through which courses the majestic Congo river, the second largest country in Africa and described as a geological scandal considering the worth and range of its strategic mineral endowments, retain monistic sovereignty as one singular political entity. In relation to this and waxing superstitious, is the DRC living through a terrifying resource curse, literally and metaphorically, a price for providing the uranium that was used in the manufacturing of the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Do ghosts haunt? The link between the Congo’s uranium and Hiroshima, where more than 200,000 people were killed, is still largely unknown by the people.
As John Bele notes, another ignored manifestation of resource curse is the disastrous health effect on Congolese miners who handled the uranium, working virtually as slaves of the Belgian mining giant Union Meniere du Haut Katanga (UMHK), the owner of the Shinkolobwe mining site in what was then the Belgian Congo, today the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Shinkolobwe was the only mine that had enough uranium with the potential for making nuclear weapons. Or, even further geo-politically, must the country, geographically located in Central Africa, be strategically realigned to the orbit of South African Development Community (SADC), as the more relatively stable Southern Africa seeks to disembowel the prostrate Central Africa permanently hobbled by the domination of France in connivance with irresponsible indigenous caricatures of leadership such as the Sassou Nguessos of neighboring Congo (Brazzaville) or the Paul Biyas of Cameroon? Or, celebrated clowns like Emperor Jean Bedel Bokassa of Central Africa? What about the constant tugging at the seams of intermestic relations with the restlessness of national minority communities with their larger ethnic stock in Rwanda, the Congo (Brazzaville), Uganda, Angola, Zambia, Tanzania and Burundi. With such potentially shifting fundamentals, any of these may instigate disruptive robust interactions between Congolese forces and a myriad of self- declared interests and stakeholders that only spell doom for the poor Congolese caught in the throes of the madness of power plays. The blood cuddling bloodletting in Goma is the outcome of just only one of the many potential instigators of virulent war that is unregulated or mediated by any ethics or codified treaties governing conflict in the modern age. Goma is the hotspot of the intermestic (the interface between international and domestic factors or forces) tugs between Rwanda and the DRC. And it has proven to be deadly beyond any human imagination. Worse, the calamity is unfolding largely below the radar of international consciousness. Or, is it just the global fatigue for African irresponsibility! Nigeria and its wind sowers should take heed.
There are global, regional and local contexts to Goma, in fact to the DRC as well as to all debacles in Africa. Critical contexts to the sad state of the DRC are: the barely secret contest between France and the United States in the demand for transition of control by the latter and insistence of the former to perpetuate continuity of control of Africa in the post-Cold War; the agenda of the South African Development Community (SADC) trained on and with a view to integrating Zaire into the Southern African economic sphere; and the Rwanda genocide of 1994: a planned campaign of mass killings in Rwanda that occurred over the course of some 100 days in April–July in 1994. The genocide was conceived by extremist elements of Rwanda’s majority Hutu population who planned to kill the minority Tutsi population and anyone who opposed those genocidal intentions. Some however would argue that the genocide was an extreme reaction to long term domination of the minority Tutsi over the Hutu majority. After that horrific event, the massing of armed Rwandan Hutu elements hostile to the Tutsi-led government in Kigali across the border in Goma posed a major threat. All these against the backdrop of domestic jousting among vested stakeholders with legitimate interests. Against this complex background, it was no accident that the war to remove Mobutu Sese Seko in the immediate post-Cold War years involved coalitions of African state and non-state actors on both sides of the lethal confrontation. But notably, each ally advanced its unique objective in the war that did not completely align with the main goal of the rebellion. The Laurent Kabilla mobilized rebellion of the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of the Congo/Zaire (ADFLCZ) had the sympathy of the Bill Clinton in the White House who literally revered and appreciated the perspective of Nelson Mandela in Pretoria on the rebellion in the Congo. That perspective was consistent with the evolved sensibilities in francophone Africa where sovereign conferences were seemingly transiting one party/one man rule into post-one man and post-one party state (POMS/POPS) democratic rule. In Zaire, where the longest sovereign conference took place, Mobutu had succeeded in stalemating the outcome. The only impactful decision, even if controversial, of the conference was to strip ethnic Tutsi of their Zairois/Congolese nationality. With the medley of interests at play, the ensuing war to remove Mobutu ended up as Africa’s First (World) Continental War. The two protagonist coalitions were supported by elite states, France and the United States, waiting in the wings with troops ready to deploy. Accordingly, in the immediate post-Cold War, the war in Zaire/DRC to unseat the old proxy of the West elicited a determination by the controller states to interject troops into the battle field should the war evolve in a certain direction. As often in conflict situations, the anti-Mobutu war was neither a neat nor determinate affair. The sad unending stream of civilian killings in Goma is actually the continuity of a major distinct operation within the long concluded anti-Mobutu rebellion. This brutal military engagement is the spillover of Rwandan civil war of regular Tutsi-led Rwandese Patriotic Front against Rwandese Hutu militias constituted from residues of the old Hutu government army, Forces Armee d’Rwanda (ex-FAR). M23 is no more than the rebranding of the Tutsi sympathetic Rwandan army operating ex-territory. However as per official narratives, the origins of the M23 are attributed to 2012 when nearly 300 soldiers – the majority of them former members of the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP) – turned against the DRC government, citing poor conditions in the army and the government’s unwillingness to implement the 23 March 2009 peace deal. Thus in official narratives the M23 is made up of deserters from the Congolese army. This version validates the intervention of the international community. The Congolese Army, in collaboration with the international community, is forced to defend the sovereign Democratic Republic of Congo against a risk acceptant Rwandese Tutsi leadership, theoretically backing dissidents in a neighboring state. Kigali would seem impervious to mediation by the international community to stabilize the region.
The United Nations has since the independence of the DRC in 1960 paid a steep price to keep the peace in the embattled space. Beginning in 1961, the Secretary—General Dag Hammarskjold was killed on a peace mission in that country. In more recent times, the ferocious skirmishes in Goma have included direct engagement of United Nations blue helmets and Southern African Development Community Mission forces, also known as SAMIDRC, that have been deployed to keep the peace. In late January 2025 in confrontations with the M23, South Africa, Malawi and Uruguay announced that soldiers from their respective armies, serving under the banner of the United Nations, were killed as they battled to halt the advance of M23 rebel fighters in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). According to the South African National Defence Forces (SANDF), the M23 hostile forces had launched a full-scale attack on UN troops with the intention of taking over Goma but were unable to advance due to the heroic resistance put up by the gallant peace keepers. Specifically, two of the killed South African soldiers were part of the UN peacekeeping force. The other seven were part of the Southern African Development Community Mission, also known as SAMIDRC. Earlier, in 2024 in another province of the DRC, North Kivu, at least 14 United Nations ‘blue helmets’ in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) were killed and many more injured, in what the Secretary-General António Guterres described as the “worst attack” on UN peacekeepers in recent history. In this instance, a MONUSCO (the UN Stabilization Mission in the DRC) Company Operating Base at Semuliki in Beni territory was attacked by suspected Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) elements, resulting in protracted fighting between the suspected armed group elements and MONUSCO and Armed Forces of the DRC, known by the French acronym, FARDC. According to the United Nations, the volatile North Kivu region, located in eastern DRC, has witnessed a number of attacks on UN peacekeeping forces. In October 2024, two UN ‘blue helmets’ were killed and another 18 were injured as their base was attacked by the ADF armed group. A decade ago, by 2013, the UN had an 18,000-strong force in DR Congo. Its intervention brigade, made up of some 3,000 troops, had a mandate to disarm and neutralize rebel groups in the region. It was then the strongest mandate ever given to such a force by the UN Security Council,
Meanwhile, to talk of a beneficial restraint on the behavior of the African state by the elite states during the Cold War must sound paradoxical. But it is true in instances where peace and stability were in the interests of the elite state to maintain the status quo in their various spheres of influence. M23 evokes the emerged danger of behavioral changes in the post-Cold War in post-colonial African state environment. The unrestrained search for security, however defined, outside the framework of institutional guardrails provided by an efficient structural mechanism can only devolve into sub-regional chaos and anarchy. The Franco-Burkinabe instigated conflict against Laurent Gbagbo in Cote d’Ivoire abundantly reflected that. The definitions and delineation of domestic conflict from a conventional war in a scenario where two antagonistic states are assured of sympathies of dissident groups within the opposing state would be confusing. The same applies to when domestic forces can count on formal active support of neighboring state in their internal conflict in the state across the border. Analysts may then speak of intermestic wars rather than domestic conflicts. In that context, more ironical is that the immediate instigator of the war led by Laurent Kabilla war, representing an unfortunate return to systemic kinetic violence in the DRC in the post-Cold War, had less to do with ousting Mobutu as widely believed but more associated with the crossover and massing of Rwandan Hutu genocidists across the border in Zaire. A second factor were controversies raised by the decision of the Zairoise national sovereign conference to abrogate the legitimacy of the Congolese nationality of a tiny minority of Tutsi located in the Kivu region. Thus the heavy involvement of Rwanda that is mostly perceived to be the power behind the M23. This has set South Africa and Rwanda on a collision course. The fall of Mobutu was thus a pivotal collateral to anticipated structural changes driven by new imperatives associated with the end of the Cold War. Unfortunately, the fall of Mobutu unleashed with vengeance old domestic and regional grievances as well as ambitions of old and new exogenous interests. These are the factors that lead to the kinds of atrocious narratives emanating from the ever boiling cauldron in Central Africa.
Whether as Democratic Republic of Congo, its original name at independence in 1960, or Zaire, the imprimatur of Mobutu, the brutal impostor, that vast unpacified expanse of territory with large swathes of ungoverned and ungovernable spaces, evokes nightmarish emotions and narratives. On Zaire, I wrote in 2012 that “the troubling experience in Brazzaville (where I was witness to terrific events) was again starkly reinforced by the heart wrenching replication of the same scenario, and on a much larger scale, across the Congo River in Kinshasa. In neighboring Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo), the struggles of the national sovereign conference, the longest on the continent, Sacred Union, to achieve a peaceful transition to a new republic, was confronted with violent suppression from the Mobutiste dinosaur state. Cadavers in their twisted contortions often floated on the abused Congo River from Kinshasa to the port of Brazzaville. The Democratic Republic of Congo, as I refine the original piece … in March 2010, has known no respite from its sanguinary trajectory since the 1990s. I wish to acknowledge the agony of these known, even if uncodified, victims of this madness as the drivers of my search”. Hopefully, the ascent of Félix Antoine Tshisekedi Tshilombo, the son of Étienne Tshisekedi wa Mulumba, the original leader of Union Sacre, as president of DRC may change all that.
Finally, as I recorded in the acknowledgements to my book, Cote d’Ivoire: The Conundrum of a Still Wretched of the Earth, nation building, especially in the context of the multi-national state, invariably often descends into a horrific and traumatic project that can take on inhuman catastrophic dimensions. Rwanda, Sudan, Cameroon, Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire, Sierra Leone, Guinea Bissau, etc… However, where altruistically motivated rational men of stout reasoning and goodwill dominate the delicate process, the Armageddon of Goma and horrors associated with the DRC and indeed Africa may not be inevitable. Although, I write with Goma on my mind, let Nigeria take proper heed.
*Professor Ademola Araoye is a retired official of the United Nations and former Director of Abuja Leadership Center, a TETFUND Center of Excellence in Public Governance and Leadership at the University of Abuja. He is author of Sources of Conflict in the Post- Colonial African State (AWP, 2012).