Congo War Evokes Memories of World War I

originally published in the Daily Nation, Kenya

In many corners of the word, the 90th anniversary of the end of World War I was commemorated on Tuesday.

One of the greatest losses of human life in history, the four-year struggle between Europe’s militaries — still called there The Great War — saw the death or injury of nearly 40 million people.

But World War I is not remembered solely for its gore, but as well for the strict, spiderweb military alliances which allowed a war of such scale to froth virtually overnight.

The single-bullet assassination of Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, in Sarajevo June 1914 by a Bosnian terrorist set off a chain reaction of war declarations so swiftly that six European powers were mobilised for war in a week.

For the next 1500 days, as one article in the New York Times said, the armies of the continent “millions of men strong clashed indecisively in horrendous conditions.” The tipping point came only upon entry of the US into the war on the sides of the Allies in late 1917. Every November, the war is remembered the world-over, but this year the anniversary is all the more relevant.

Reflections on that continental struggle are candidly incandescent to the current crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Albeit on a smaller scale, the forces at play here have too “fought indecisively in horrendous conditions.”

There too seems to be a predetermined matrix of alliances, old friendships, older enemies, and eternal back rubbing. From 1997 to 2004 Africa’s own “Great War” saw the death of over five million people, mostly Congolese, and the involvement of eight nations and 25 rebel groups.

Congo too has its own Franz Ferdinand; The shooting down by missile of the then Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana on April 6 1994 in Kigali became the sparkplug for a genocide of one million and a generation of vengeful violence that is being won, but is not yet settled.

Much like Europe’s Great War, the conflict in the Congo has never gone away, and the peace treaty in 2003 never fixed the problems that led to the war in the first place.

Now, as fighting erupts between the proxy rebel groups in North Kivu, members of the SADC are again considering involvement.

And if Mugabe can get another good business deal from the new Kabila government, he will happily take one last spin as head of state in a new Congo war.