I was food shopping when I read the news. Nearly 22 million people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are facing starvation and malnutrition. Now. In 2021.
You have to wonder how a country with eight months of rain, more than 50% of all the rivers, lakes and wetlands in Africa, and more agricultural land than any African country, with the potential to feed up to 2 billion people, gets to the point where it is unable to feed its population of 100 million.
I felt broken, even guilty, and powerless. I reached for my phone and ended up surfing the net, reading one report after another; asking myself over and over again: how did we get to this?
I first wrote about famine in the DRC in 2017, when 7.7 million people were on the verge of starvation. Then, the UN said the scale of the crisis was on a par with Syria and Yemen. Barely three years later it has surpassed Yemen to become the world’s worst famine crisis. Yet we still rarely hear anything about it.
To put it in perspective, if the 22 million Congolese people facing starvation were a country, it would have a population larger than the Netherlands and Ireland combined – facing the world’s worst hunger and malnutrition crisis.
Traditionally, famine has often been caused by wars and natural devastation such as drought. In the DRC’s case, however, impunity is the root cause. The terrible irony is the seed of this starvation was actually planted by the international community as early as 2010, when the UN published a groundbreaking mapping report, documenting 617 war crimes, crimes against humanity and even crimes of genocide committed in the DRC between 1993 and 2003.
By then, Congolese people had already been ravaged by years of imported conflicts, which killed more than 5.4 million people between 1998 and 2008 – mostly through starvation or disease. Half of those who died were children – an entire generation, you could say – and fuelling these crises, according to the report, was impunity.
Instead of creating an international criminal tribunal for the DRC to try the reported crimes and end the climate of impunity that has fuelled the violence, the international community chose to turn a blind eye, ostensibly for “peace”. Yet there is still no peace to keep. In my opinion, this was to protect their clients; people such as Joseph Kabila, president of the DRC from 2001 to 2019, whose security forces were linked to killings and torture, and the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, who allegedly supported the M23 militia gang responsible for atrocities in the DRC.
In doing so, the international community has not only denied Congolese people justice but also sanctioned a culture of impunity. This impunity has continued to fuel insecurity, emboldening our killers and our rulers to do with us as they wish. It has fuelled violence and mass displacement to keep Congolese people cowed – and, in the process, destroyed farming and food production, which has inflamed an already dire humanitarian crisis.
Here is a recent example of impunity. Last July, the DRC’s new president, Félix Tshisekedi, promoted General Gabriel Amisi, known as “Tango Four”, to the rank of army inspector general in spite of him being under US and EU sanctions for alleged human rights violations.
Then there are the growing numbers of militia who are killing Congolese people today. When the international criminal court was created in 2002, forcing Rwanda and Uganda to withdraw their invading troops, the DRC had fewer than 12 Kigali-Kampala-Kinshasa-backed militia groups. They killed for minerals such as tungsten, which makes the phone you are reading or tweeting this from vibrate when you receive a call or a message.
Because of impunity, and in spite of tough conflict minerals laws in the US and EU, we now have more than 100 “devolved” militia groups killing, raping, looting and displacing people. This ratchets up our misery caused by diseases, displacement and destruction of local food production and food chains. This is how, 10 years after the UN mapping report, we find ourselves with nearly 22 million Congolese facing hunger and malnutrition.
As I write, about 6.6 million Congolese are internally displaced because of violence; three times as many as in 2002. We also have more than 17,000 UN peacekeepers; almost four times as many as we had in 2002 but, because of impunity, there is still no peace to keep. I fear that until we create an international criminal tribunal for the DRC to end the impunity at the heart of these crises, more Congolese will be killed, displaced, raped and pushed into starvation.
This is an internationally sanctioned catastrophe to which we all need to open our eyes. We are nearing an irreversible situation and risk losing another generation of Congolese people to starvation. Young Congolese have been using #CongoIsBleeding on social media to mobilise the world to act on the impunity that is fuelling violence, and fanning starvation and malnutrition. We should amplify their voices.