Tales from a Damaged Country Snapshots from Eight Months in the Democratic Republic of Congo By Colonel P J Tabor, The Blues and Royals orking with the United Nations, of which I had no previous experience, was always going to be interesting and unusual. When I handed over the reins of the Command and Staff Trainer (South) in Warminster in June 2004, an operational tour was a certainty, as there were still ten months before I was due to take over my current post. As there were no jobs for colonels in Iraq, I arrived in Kinshasa as Chief of Staff (COS) (designate) of the United Nations mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), called MONUC - the Mission de l’Organisation des Nations Unies à la République Démocratique du Congo, on 14th September 2004.
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The DRC, formerly Zaire, is one the world’s poorest nations. 1700 kms from East to West and 1600 kms from North to South, it is also one of Africa’s largest countries. Since the Belgians left precipitately in 1960, decline has been rapid. Vast mineral wealth has been squandered, infrastructure has been largely overtaken by rainforest, there are few paved roads or railways, and it takes seventeen days by boat from Kinshasa to Kisangani from where there are still another 800 kms to the eastern border. It is, however, a stunningly beautiful country especially in the east where it borders Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. The UN has had observers in the DRC since 1999 and combat troops since 2002. The legacy of five years of war is a continuing humanitarian disaster with huge numbers of displaced people. About 3.5 million people have died from the consequences of war, specifically from disease and malnutrition. MONUC is the UN’s largest mission tasked with providing stability up to and beyond the country’s first democratic elections planned for this year. MONUC has two other major tasks: bringing peace to the north-eastern province of Ituri and repatriating the ExFAR/Interahamwe, the genocidaires responsible for the mass killings of Rwandan Tutsis in 1994. The UN sanctioned a force of 17000 troops from over 50 nations to control specific areas in the east. Three brigades are deployed in North and South Kivu and Ituri and a fourth in and around the capital, Kinshasa. Other major tracts of the country, specifically Katanga, are lawless and virtually unmonitored. MONUC requested a further brigade for Katanga but without success, and so only about 40 observers patrol a province three times the size of France.
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The UK’s contribution to MONUC was a Colonel and four Lieutenant Colonels: me as Chief of Staff, and three SO1s: the MA to the Force Commander, Chief Plans and Chief Military Information, (Intelligence), and a fourth Lieutenant Colonel deployed in Bukavu, one of the more volatile eastern cities. Perversely, I enjoyed working with soldiers from so many nations. The mandatory skills for UN officers are that they must speak English and know how to drive. I was astounded at the number barely able to do either. However, so prestigious are these posts deemed by some governments that failure cannot be countenanced. When a senior Chinese officer failed his UN driving test twice and was heading for instant repatriation, the Chinese ambassador visited the Head of the Mission to protest. He stayed. China provides MONUC an engineer company and a hospital! Some officers are there merely to make more money than they will ever earn again. Some are there for a rest. But many make major contributions to this complex peace keeping operation. My personal staff officer was a Chinese major who wrote almost faultless English certainly better than most British officers. He did all my UN administration which is mind-bogglingly complicated and, if not done absolutely correctly, results in claims being rejected and money lost. The most effective staff officers were South African, many of whom had extensive operational experience in Burundi, Congo and previously in Angola. In the Divisional Headquarters we set up in the second half of my tour, I found it was invariably the South Africans who ran day to day operations and ran the intelligence cell, and worked as late as the Chief of Staff! Officers on the staff from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh were hardworking and thorough. I was surprised at how well Indian and Pakistani officers got on in MONUC, but the political difficulties between their two countries within the higher reaches of the UN were unending. Egyptian officers were most effective, very computer literate and spoke excellent English, Russians were also very professional, and I made good friends with a Lt Col Yuri Cherep, a highly amusing logistician with impressive but heavily accented English. UN logistics are civilian-run with military officers providing only limited staff input. Most of the civilian logisticians are ex-military, however, many from Australia and Eastern European countries.
At Rutshuru in the Eastern Congo with some soldiers from one of the former
They were actually very good but that did not prevent constant battles and arguments between the Force and the Directorate of Administration. There is nothing that can really prepare you for Kinshasa. It is a huge disaster of a city with about 13 million inhabitants, 85% officially unemployed. It is marked by appalling poverty, sprawling shanty towns and daily incomes seldom more than one US dollar. In the heady days of the Belgian Congo, Kinshasa was known as ‘Kin’ la belle’, now because it resembles one huge rubbish dump, it is referred to as ‘Kin la poubelle’. There is an intangible atmosphere of menace that surfaces at intervals. You never feel entirely at ease. The locals do not trust the UN whom they accuse of siding with the national enemy, Rwanda, after a nasty incident in and around Bukavu in June 2004. With so little to do, they merely hang around waiting for something to happen. Get involved in the most minor of shunts on the roads – easily done – and an instantaneous, threatening crowd gathers and, if in a white UN vehicle, one is automatically on the back foot. Every day we four Brits, who shared a house in the rather smarter Gombe area of Kinshasa, would travel by UN 4WDs (we each had our own) to the headquarters along either the main thoroughfare of the city, the ‘Trente Juin’, or by the smaller ‘Avenue de Justice’. On the latter, a large school sat on one of the cross roads. Traffic was a nightmare and without traffic lights pretty dangerous not least for the many small children walking to school at 0715. A couple of cripples with crutches would daily approach our cars forced to a stop by