Congo: The Forgotten Conflict

Africa has had more than its share of tragedies — Darfur, Somalia and Zimbabwe are just three of the most current. But it is the continent’s double misfortune that, all too often, the rest of the world realizes the full extent of its troubles in the later telling rather than as they happen. The world watched as Rwanda convulsed into genocide in 1994. But for many, especially in the U.S., it wasn’t until the publication in 1998 of Philip Gourevitch’s book We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, that the full horror of what had happened was brought home. By the same token, the film Blood Diamond, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, brought to wider attention the misery of Sierra Leone’s civil wars.

Congo has been the suffering heart of Africa for more than a century, and its turbulent colonial history has been well documented in novels like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, and in Adam Hochschild’s nonfiction King Leopold’s Ghost. But the more recent travails of what is today the Democratic Republic of Congo (D.R.C.) have until now been poorly appreciated. And they are apocalyptic. In January, the International Rescue Committee estimated that 5.4 million people have died in the various wars — and their related effects — that have torn through Congo since 1998. The country’s agonies are far from over — their latest twist is the epidemic use of rape as a weapon of war in eastern Congo — but, in Bryan Mealer’s new book All Things Must Fight to Live, they now at least have their definitive account.

Mealer, an American, was a young freelance reporter based in Nairobi when he was first sent to the D.R.C. by the AP in 2003. The job repeatedly put him on the front line — his book opens with a long description of a brutal gun battle between two tribal militia groups in the eastern town of Bunia. It then moves to the capital, Kinshasa, where Mealer was posted by the Associated Press wire agency in 2004, and covers the bumpy transition from war to peace. After that, it’s back to more fighting in the east, before Mealer embarks on two long journeys across the country, by boat and by rail. In June 2007 he finishes his travels and leaves Congo.

The claustrophobia and surrealism that permeates Congo’s jungles builds in the tense run-up to the presidential elections of June 2006. Mealer finds himself in eastern Congo waiting for the possible emergence of Commander Cobra, a mysterious militia leader in charge of 2,000 soldiers, mostly children, who are ruled through fear and black magic. Fighting between the government and Cobra has displaced tens of thousands, and Mealer teams up with a pastor whose experience of war only makes his faith burn brighter. The pastor acts as Mealer’s translator through the refugee camps where people are dying from disease and hunger. At one camp, they observe a boy picking termites out of the mud to eat.

This could have been a standard tale of adventure in an exotic land, interspersed with equally routine ruminations on the inner turmoil of the war reporter. It is Mealer’s gift that even when he is covering what is, journalistically, well-worn territory — the fog of war, the addictive and atrophied life of a combat reporter — his writing is not only fresh but empathetic. There can be few more obscure battles than the struggle between the Hema and the Lendu in Bunia. However, with Mealer as a guide, the names of those two warring communities become as familiar and accessible as the terms Union and Confederate.

It doesn’t hurt that the author has an ear for precision and an aversion to cliché, and is also engagingly honest. “In mid-March 2005, U.N. humanitarian chief Jan Egeland announced Congo had become ‘the world’s worst humanitarian crisis,’ ” he writes. “For the few Western journalists based in the capital, this was fantastic news, meaning we’d somehow edged out the tsunami in Asia and the genocide in Sudan in the race for absolute misery.”

Perhaps the author’s greatest feat, however, is his discipline. The best foreign correspondents understand that putting themselves in the story is sometimes effective and sometimes necessary, but they should never be the story. Mealer was just 28 when he first went to Congo, and this is his first book, but not once in All Things Must Fight to Live does he allow his presence to block out the country or its people. Rather than letting the war play out on his inner stage, he becomes a bit player in a colossal drama. “There were many ways of going in, and everyone had his own reasons,” writes Mealer. “But … there was always the same war.” With the maturity and talent he displays in this book, Mealer could have a dazzling future as a chronicler of distant lands. He has already set a new standard by which all correspondents might approach other forgotten wars.