Congo and Africa's World War: Crash Course World History 221 Video Lecture | A Complete Guide to World History : 2 - World Knowledge

Hi, I'm John Green, this is Crash Course World History,
and today were going to talk about the Congo.
Mr. Green! Mr.Green! We're gonna to talk about
the Conga?
No, Me From the Past, you idiot, that is a
dance. However, your epic, epic ignorance
does indicate that perhaps we don't do a
particularly good job when it comes to talking
about African history in world history classes.
So today we're gonna look at what happened
to the Congo after decolonization but in particular
what happened during the 1990s and early 2000s
as Congo, or Zaire, or the Democratic Republic
of Congo was embroiled in what some people
have called Africa's World War.
European colonization in Africa was generally
pretty, you know, bad. But it was particularly
terrible in the Congo. There's a great book
about it called King Leopold's Ghost, which
details the brutality of life under Leopold's
Congo Free State, and the international efforts
to improve things there. Leopold essentially
owned Congo, and he ruled it as his private
fiefdom from 1884 until 1906, when he was
forced to turn over the colony to the Belgian
government. From 1906 until independence in
1960, the territory was known as the Belgian
Congo and while the Belgians were far less
brutal than Leopold's agents had been, life
for the Congolese under Belgian rule was also
not good. And then there was this sudden decolonization
in the Congo and in a lot of ways the region
was unprepared to become an independent state,
like the Congo's new leaders didn't have much
formal education or leadership experience.
There weren't many trained experts in, really
anything, there were very few college graduates,
no one had the skills to run an army or a
government or an economy. But I wanna be clear:
that wasn't the Congo's fault, it was because
there weren't educational or leadership opportunities
available to Congolese people.
In 1965, a former army sergeant and journalist
named Joseph Mobutu staged a coup and seized
control of the government. Now, he turned
out to be a terrible leader, but in his first
decade in charge, he did some good stuff.
For instance, he hosted The Rumble in the
Jungle, arguably the greatest heavy-weight
boxing match of all time between Muhammad
Ali and George Foreman, featuring the famous
rope-a-dope.
Stan says he did some actually important things
and that boxing isn't actually important.
Okay! From 1965 to 1975, Mobutu was able to
build the economy based on this huge copper
boom. And then he destroyed the economy by
appropriating most of the local businesses
and turning them over to his cronies. He built
the first hydroelectric dam in the region
as well as hospitals and, most importantly
for his rule, a state television system that
could broadcast national pageantry that celebrated
Mobutu and his family. Mobutu also changed
the name of the country in 1971 from Congo
to Zaire and he changed the names of many
colonial cities like Leopoldville became Kinshasa,
Stanleyville became Kisangani, Elisabethville
became Lubumbashi. And initially his coup
was seen as a positive by many Congolese,
but pretty early on it became clear that this
wasn't going to be like a peaceful open government.
And Mobutu's Zaire was also really corrupt,
like the underlying source of Mobutu's power
was his ability to grant favors to his friends,
a strategy known as clientelism or cronyism
and Mobutu was great at it. And in order to
keep his cronies happy, Mobutu raided the
National Treasury again and again, he actually
stymied development, in order to get more
foreign aid, which he then used as an alternative
source of income. And then there was this
huge crash of commodity prices, including
copper, that followed the Vietnam War and
that plunged Zaire into debt. In 1975 Zaire's
foreign debt totaled 887 dollars.
The next year, the IMF launched its first
stabilization plan for Zaire, a loan of 47
million dollars. In exchange for that loan,
Mobutu agreed to cut public spending, devalue
the currency, raise taxes and put the country's
financial house in order. Needless to say,
that did not happen, there was a need for
more and more and more loans, and by 1990
Zaire's total national debt topped out at
10 billion dollars.
But even as Mobutu drove Zaire into decline,
there were no serious challenges to his power,
because opposition was incredibly risky, critics
of the regime faced arrest, torture, exile
-- at times murder. And in the end it was
outside forces that forced Mobutu from power.
So the Rwandan genocide of 1994 is familiar
to many Americans, often as an example of
the impotence of America in the face of post-Cold
War problems, and also because it was horrific.
But less well known is the role that these
events played in the disintegration of the Congo.
So conflict in Rwanda between Hutu and Tutsi
people probably pre-dates Rwanda's independence
from Belgium in 1962. But the path to genocide
began in 1990, when the Tutsi-led Rwandan
Patriotic Front began to cross the border
into Rwanda from their bases in Uganda.
Between 1990 and 1994 approximately 20,000
people were killed and 1.5 million displaced
in this conflict.
And then in 1994 the plane of Rwanda's Hutu
president was shot down and Rwandan Hutus
began murdering Rwandan Tutsis, killing between
800,000 and a million people in three months.
This did not stop the Rwandan Patriotic Front,
which in fact increased its attacks on Rwanda
and then under leader Paul Kagame, they succeeded
in taking over the country, leading to more
than 2 million people fleeing, most of them
to Eastern Zaire. Almost 850,000 people crowded
into refugee camps around the city of Goma
in Zaire.
Kagame desperately wanted to hold the Hutus
living in those refugee camps accountable
for crimes against Tutsis, but in order to
do that, he would have to invade a sovereign
territory, so he helped to set up the Alliance
des Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération
and yes, I did take three years of high school
French.
The AFDL or ah-eff-deh-ell for us French speakers,
was made up of Zairians and would do the dirty
work of killing Hutu refugees for Kagame,
and to outside eyes, it would appear to be
a domestic uprising against Mobutu.
So on May 29th, 1997, the victorious AFDL
leader Laurent Kabila was sworn in as
president of the newly renamed Democratic
Republic of Congo. Mobutu fled to Morocco
and died there four months later. And that's
where the story should end, with the fall
of the dictator and the rise of a new nation
that lives up to the "democratic" in its name.
But that did not happen.
Between 1997 and 2000, everything in the Congo
fell apart and the country descended further
into chaos. Kabila's rapid conquests of Zaire
and the ouster of Mubutu along with the killing
of hundreds of thousands of Rwandan refugees
was what some call The First Congo War. The
Second Congo War was the revolt against Kabila
that lasted from 1998 to 2002. Kabila proved
inept and authoritarian and an astonishingly
poor head of state, but his biggest mistake
was expelling the Rwandans who had helped
put him into power, which is what started
The Second Congo War. Like a lot of conflicts,
this isn't a straightforward good versus evil
thing, and it's also not a thing with just
two sides. There are also a lot of initialisms
involved, which makes it a little bit hard
to follow, but its basic contours are relatively
straightforward. Let's go to the Thought Bubble.
So Rwanda invaded the Congo and nearly took
Kinshasa, but Kabila was able to put together
a coalition of other countries that saw Rwanda,
Uganda, and Burundi as a threat. This coalition
which included Angola and Namibia stopped
the Rwandan advance and the fighting, leading
to the Lusaka peace agreement, which, as you
might suspect, did not last. The fighting
instead shifted to the eastern part of the
DRC, especially the rich mining regions of
Kivu and Katanga, and pretty quickly, the
cause of the fighting turned from politics
to profit. Kabila's government supported local
militias who fought the Rwandan and Ugandan
armies, and then eventually each other over
control of the valuable gold, diamonds and
other resources there. Fighting provided a
sense of purpose, and also one of the only
ways to make a living in a failed economy.
It was also incredibly brutal. According to
one man who participated in the horror,
"A soldier is like a dog. If you open the
gate, he causes damage. In the morning, before
we were sent out, our leader would say: 'Go
out and do something foolish.' We ransacked
houses, we took cell phones, money, and gold
necklaces from people."
There was also widespread rape and murder.
The war continued so long because it was so
profitable, but a turning point came when
Laurent Kabila was assassinated by some of
his own child-soldier bodyguards in January,
2001. African diplomats negotiated a ceasefire,
largely in South Africa, and the resulting
peace accord required a two-year transitional
period monitored by the largest UN peace-keeping
force ever assembled.
Thanks, Thought Bubble. So, this transitional
government continued the Congolese pattern
of corruption. According to historian David
Van Reybrouck,
"They emulated the abuses of Mobutuism with
a zeal that would have startled Mobutu himself."
In the absence of an effective central government,
non-profit organizations and local civil society
agencies including Pentecostal churches stepped
in to provide some of the services that governments
usually provide. And then on July 30th, 2006,
The Democratic Republic of Congo held elections
for president and parliament. Now, no single
presidential candidate won a majority and
in the runoff election on December 6th, Joseph
Kabila, son of Laurent Kabila became Congo's
first democratically elected president since
1960.
What kind of democracy elects family dynasties?
The Adams, the Roosevelts, the Bushes, we
tried to do the Kennedys, but they kept getting
assassinated.
Sorry, this isn't a particularly funny episode.
Even the jokes are dismal.
The DRC created a new constitution with checks
and balances, a new parliament, and a constitutional
court. On paper it looked good, but Kabila
proved to be a ruler in his father's mold.
He used violence to silence his main rival
and had little control over most of his soldiers.
The parliament voted salary increases for
themselves while shirking most of the other
responsibilities of governing.
By 2009, only 5 countries scored lower than
the DRC in the UN Human Development Index.
Today, 30% of the population is illiterate
and 54% have no access to clean drinking water.
Now, for many westerners, this is continued
proof of Congo's backwardness, perhaps
even hopelessness. And it's true that this
region has had tremendous struggles in the
50 years since Europe left more or less over
night. Having created an infrastructure that
was designed not for a nation state, but for
a colony, whose resources were to be extracted
for the wealth of the colonizer.
But these days, there is a new player in the
world of international economic development
- China. And this is one of the most interesting
stories in the world today. Initially, the
first Chinese investors in the DRC were private
traders willing to gamble on the wild west
aspects of Congolese capitalism, but in 2007,
the DRC negotiated a huge deal with the People's
Republic of China.
China would invest 9 billion dollars in the
DRC's infrastructure in return for future
revenue from DRC resources. Now, to many,
this looks a lot like neocolonialism - we'll
help build your country if only we can extract
your resources.
But at least so far, the biggest complaints
have come not from the Congolese people, but
from the IMF and other western financial institutions
that stand to lose the only leverage over
the DRC that they still possess.
So this is a very complicated relationship,
like, for instance, Congolese women are taking
advantage of new commercial relationships
with China to start their own businesses.
And that's really cool. On the other hand,
cheap Chinese textiles are destroying local
manufacture in the DRC just as they are almost
everywhere. And it's far too soon to say whether
this is going to be great for the people of
the DRC or will be just another example of
large powers using less powerful countries
as, like, pawns in some big geopolitical game.
Americans tend to have very negative views
about Africa, which they tend to imagine very
monolithically. But Africa is huge and it
is also hugely diverse. Seven of the ten fastest
growing nations in the world are in Africa.
The DRC is not one of them, precisely because
of the instability that it has seen in the
last 50 years. This is one of the largest
nations in Africa -- probably the richest in
natural resources. It's a magnet for Chinese
investment, which will certainly be one of
the most important stories in coming decades.
And it's played a pivotal role in Sub-Saharan
African history in the last 50 years. Conflicts
in the DRC also led to the largest UN peace-keeping
intervention to date, the first joint European
Union military action, and the first arrests
and trials of The International Criminal Court.
So this is a vital place in the world to understand
and to study and to pay attention to. The
events of the past 50 years in this part of
the world are important for Congolese people
who have suffered through them, but they are
also important for the rest of us. As David
Van Reybrouck argues, "Congolese history has helped
to determine and form the history of the world."
Thanks for watching. I'll see you next week.
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