The Myth of International Protection. Claudia Seymour

Map of research sites. Credit: Sean Bennett.

CHAPTER ONE

      A Beginning

      ARRIVALS

      I first arrived in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in early 2006, deployed as a child protection adviser to the United Nations (UN) peacekeeping mission. Having just completed a posting in war-ravaged Liberia, I had already witnessed the impacts of terrible violence and destruction. While I had experienced the positive potential of international aid interventions in conflict zones, I had also been confronted by their failures. My faith in the capacity of an individual to “do good” in the world was slightly shaken, but I was not yet ready to surrender it. Still hopeful, I was intent on continuing my quest into the darkness of humanity, trusting that, in the end, light would be found, and good could be done.

      If any country needed good, it was the DRC. It had just emerged from a devastating war fought on a continental scale. Millions of Congolese people had died directly and indirectly from the violence.¹ Following more than a century of misrule and violent exploitation, the DRC was one of the poorest countries in the world. When I arrived there, life expectancy at birth was barely fifty years, while health care and other basic services were almost entirely absent throughout large parts of the country. Atrocious human development indicators belied the DRC’s extreme natural resource wealth.

      In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the DRC hosted the world’s largest international peacekeeping mission.² My rapid indoctrination to UN peacekeeping started in Kinshasa, the vibrant but decrepit Congolese capital. My early days in the DRC were a blur of meetings, briefings, and security orientations, as I navigated the bewildering administration that churned behind high white-and-blue, barbed-wire-topped walls. On my third day in the country, I was informed that I would be dispatched to Kisangani to manage the UN mission’s child protection mandate in the two eastern provinces of Orientale and Maniema. I took to peering at my freshly printed maps and to burying myself as deeply and quickly as I could into the available history of eastern DRC.

      Through this early orientation, I learned that the city of Kisangani, nestled in the vastness of the Congo Basin forest, had been administratively established in 1883 as a trading hub under Belgium’s King Leopold II. Before independence from Belgium in 1960, Kisangani had served as a center of Patrice Lumumba’s anticolonial resistance movement. In 1964, the Simba rebellion against the Western-supported government in Kinshasa—one of the many Cold War transpositions on the African continent—based its military operations out of Kisangani, drawing on reserves of soldiers and mercenaries of all nations and presaging the entrenched internationalism of Congolese wars. In the post–Cold War era, Kisangani would again witness catastrophic violence. During the 1996–2003 wars—what Gérard Prunier would term “Africa’s World War”—thousands of civilians perished as Uganda and Rwanda fought for control of the lucrative eastern region.³ The UN peacekeeping mission that I had just joined was still endeavoring to piece the country back together after those wars.

      It did not take me long to appreciate how such a violent history becomes manifest in the present. In places so destroyed by war, so cut off from any prospect of economic development, people were left to fend for themselves as services and support systems decayed all around them. With their poverty constantly closing in, people had little recourse but to express fury. Quick eruptions of mob violence occurred regularly in Kisangani. More than once, John—my long-suffering, devoted, and now departed Congolese colleague—would save me from a rock-throwing crowd poised to hijack any passing white UN Land Cruiser, shouting at me to close my window, lock my door, and drive through the crowd or make a quick U-turn to escape.

      By 2006, the front lines of conflict had at last receded from Kisangani’s sprawling streets. In their place, urban misery had encroached, appropriating any hope for peace and bringing chronic desolation. Destroyed by the war and asphyxiated by the absence of infrastructure that could sustain legitimate trade, the local economy of Kisangani was devastated. Consequently, the social supports that had held life together so precariously during the many decades of extreme hardship were now barely holding on.

      One obvious indicator of this failing social system was the rapidly rising population of street children. By 2006, their numbers in Kisangani had swelled, as children living in households on the furthest edges of precarity were pushed out of their homes, blamed by adults for all possible household hardships, from AIDS to the breakdown of families, to the suffocating impossibility of meeting daily survival needs. With no recourse but to their own capacities to navigate the streets of Kisangani, these children would become an important focus of my child protection efforts there. I followed them into the depths of postwar misery, where accusations of modern witchcraft flourished. I convened meetings with parents, pastors, and community leaders; organized radio awareness campaigns; mobilized lawyers; and conducted countless visits to church compounds where extreme torture was being sold as exorcism by profiteering pastors.

      I exhausted all available possibilities to convince those I met that children must not be sacrificed in reaction to all that had come before them. But the tides had long since risen, and I could not help these children. In my personal journal, I documented one of uncounted moments of hopelessness I confronted in the streets of Kisangani:

      19 November 2006: Sunday night. I light a candle in honour of La Vie, the corpse of the boy we uncovered this morning. His body, mutilated by the black-gray scars of a hot iron, was already starting to swell in the heat of the midmorning sun. How old had he been? Maybe seventeen? No one knew. A child of the street, mourned in trembling wails by his street sisters, by the angry tears and clenched fists of his street brothers—to everyone else, his was a life worth nothing. Shuttling between the morgue, the mayor, the funeral procession, through the Kisangani streets down to the river, we laid his body in a pirogue to cross the river Congo—to the home of a father who had so long ago abandoned his son—to its final resting place.

      Within me, such poverty and helplessness transformed into anger and an overwhelming sense of defeat. My time in Kisangani was hot and hard and left me without any feeling of satisfaction in a job well done. But before these grim expressions of humanity’s hardship could extinguish what was left of my faith,