Individually people here as are bright and entrepreneurial as you could possibly hope to meet, collectively they (and all of us here) suffer greatly from the legacy of Mobutism and what the Congolese call Article 15 of the Constitution (the old Congolese constitution had 14 articles): “se debrouiller” which is difficult to translate exactly, but basically says “fend for yourself”.  The complete breakdown of the state in the 70s and 80s in DRC, together with this state-sanctioned corruption led to a situation where the main function of the many state functionaries is to make money. This goes way beyond what would normally be considered corruption – this means teachers charging students, doctors charging patients…so far so like privatisation…but also judges selling judgements, prison guards selling the keys, soldiers and police selling their ‘protection’, and everyone else using whatever pieces of official-looking paper they can find to levy taxes so ridiculous even Margaret Thatcher wouldn’t have dared to pull them out of her handbag.

It’s easy to say it’s corruption, but this is the rule not the exception, thoroughly embedded into all facets of how things work at every level. How do you tell a teacher or a doctor they shouldn’t charge people when they receive nothing, or next to nothing, from the state? Official salaries for a teacher, when they arrive, are something like $20 per month, though they are in the process of being increased to something more like $70, it is still far from what would allow the idea of corruption to be taken seriously.

Two recent events reminded me of this recently. One was that the Congolese government recently purchased around a dozen new boats to take passengers across lake Kivu, between the major commercial capitals of Goma and Bukavu. But there are already a dozen or so private operators that run that route, so the government decided to massively increase the taxes on private operators, so as to allow the government to undercut them. So the private operators went on strike, the government boats were not yet functional, and so everything ground to a halt for a week or so. I guess what makes this a Congo special is that few people here would trust a government boat to get from one side of the lake to the other without breaking down, running out of fuel, or worse. Even the private operators run out of fuel on the lake on a fairly regular basis (despite making exactly the same trip every day); the concept of a government authority running anything that requires them to do more than apply their special stamp to a piece of paper and pocket their fee (something that the visa authority in Kinshasa takes an average of 2 months to do) is laughable.

The second ‘facteur declencheur’ of this rant was the arrival of two charming representatives of one of the many different local courts of somewhat unclear jurisdiction in our office this morning. They had come to seize assets pre-emptively over a debt that we do not actually owe, that other courts have already agreed was an entirely frivolous claim, but in the true style of the way things are done here, our litigant waited until the president of one of the courts was away, induced the interim to sign a document authorising seizure, and voila we have people at our gates seizing vehicles – pre-emptively, as they explained, just in case we were to lose a lawsuit that is not even in process. When we followed up with our lawyer, the president of the court agreed that he had not signed the order, his interim should not have signed the order, but unfortunately there was nothing that could be done about it until next week. So we have spent the week with two of our vehicles non-operational and me going through one of my semi-regular questionings as to why I bother.

These may seem relatively minor, but it’s only a small slice of what we deal with. Recent highlights that my colleagues and other NGOs have dealt with in the last few months alone have been:

• Claims of several hundred thousand dollars in back taxes for payroll taxes that NGOs did not pay to the Congolese state for operations in the East of Congo between 1997 and 2003 – when the Congolese state did not actually control this territory, and NGOs had to pay taxes to the groups who controlled the area.
• Claims that we should pay the Congolese state $150 for every water point that we construct.
• A tax of 1% of the value of all NGO projects for ‘monitoring’ by the government.
• A pollution tax for using generators (when there is a few hours of state electricity a day in the big cities only).
• An obligatory paid ‘refresher training’ for NGO drivers (maybe this is more funny for residents who see how non-NGO drivers drive around here).

And my personal favourite:

• $36 000 for unsafe disposal of 10 cans of beans that were emptied on a tip one month past their expiry date, apparently because the kids who scavenge on the tip might have eaten them. Typically after several hours of negotiation this was generously reduced to $100 and then finally, as with all the others, dropped entirely.

While this little rant has been caused by the problems I and my organisation have in trying to get things done in DRC. But I’m totally aware of the relatively privileged position I and my international organisation are in. We are quite capable of defending ourselves and generally can keep escalating things through the legal/administrative systems until we get to someone who is too far up the chain to be bought off over these types of petty claims. This kind of thing is a massive waste of time and energy that could be put to much much better use. And it’s not that NGOs don’t want to pay tax – NGOs are sadly far and away the biggest contributors to the state coffers, possibly excepting the mobile phone companies. Nor that the state should not exist: East DRC is a considerably less risky place to live in than Mogadishu.

But for people less connected and particularly the much put-upon private sector, this kind of dysfunctionality is a complete disaster. Talk to any business owner in the area about what their main problems are, and every single one can recite a litany of bureaucratic predation. I’d put it a close second to the continued armed conflict as to the biggest hindrances on economic development in this area. So if ever there was a place where a Tea Party-style small government agenda has its place, this is surely it. Sarah Palin, are you listening? Come to DRC! They like guns here too!

A great idea that will never happen

You tell’em, Wronging Rights

Hee hee [h/t Tyler Cowen]

It’s not often that an article makes me THIS mad [Tyler again]

Although actually this whole discussion makes me almost incoherent with rage

This week in Haiti has been work from 6am (or more like 5.30am when the generator wakes me up in my tent) until 10pm.

This week in Haiti has been a lot of meetings, a lot of trying to find a space to sit and a plug to use in our overcrowded half of an office that is still standing (yes that is the country director sitting on the floor in the corner).

It’s been seeing my Haitian friends and colleagues one after the other and the relief finding that most of them and their families had miraculously escaped intact, though many lost their houses and their possessions.

It’s also been confronting the facts, the places and the mutual friends of friends of mine who died, and trying to be sensitive to the trauma and loss that everyone here has been through.

It’s been dealing with the waiting for the bathroom that sharing a four bedroom house with up to 44 other people involves:

(sleeping arrangements for the dozen or so colleagues outside without tents)

It’s been being woken up various times by various people vomiting noisily, and ferrying sick colleagues to find doctors late at night. 15 or so of us have been sick – stress, overwork, the living and the sleeping conditions, the lack of water, the fact that many just arrived and had to cope with a totally different climate and diet on top of it all. Not a good combination.

It’s been getting out of the office just one time to visit one site where people are living after their houses were destroyed, the old Petionville Golf Course (and Wednesday night salsa haunt for those who used to be here):

(happy to see that you can still charge your mobile phone even in the camp).

It’s been coming to work in the shadow of our destroyed former office, and trying to work out what we can salvage from it without putting people at risk:

It’s been realising it’s ok to laugh and smile with my old colleagues and friends who have been through so much.

It’s also been remembering that there comes a point in every emergency where you have to find a quiet corner to cry.

It’s been dealing with the inevitable insect incident, this time meeting a nice big hairy spider in my sleeping bag the other day.

It’s been being slightly depressed at one point or another every day by the pronouncements of yet another expert who knows nothing about the country as to how to fix Haiti.

It’s been guilt passing small groups of people we can’t really help right now, it’s been shock, it’s been confusion and shouting, it’s been coffee, it’s been regularly riding in a car with 14 other people, and above all it’s been an awful lot of skype.

Finally, it’s been a lot of wishing that I could stay longer and do something useful, while knowing I have to leave in just 5 weeks.

Ahmed Rashid provides the best analysis I’ve seen of why Obama’s Afghanistan troop surge is a nothing more than a political ass-covering exercise, with very little chance of success. After holding out for nearly a year, I’m beginning to join the Obama-doubters. (h/t Teddy)

Wronging Rights highlights some outrageous badvocacy

“King Leopold’s Ghost” author Adam Hochschild visits Bunia to see what ex-child soldiers think of the Thomas Lubanga trial at the ICC, and comes back with a surprisingly good summary of the issues. (also thanks to Texas in Africa)

We’re trying to deal with a humanitarian emergency in Pakistan. It’s an emergency created by a US-encouraged Pakistani military campaign against the Taliban and driving millions of people from their homes. The Taliban themselves are largely the mutant offspring of the anti-Soviet Mujahedeen originally aided by the US, and the religious extremist militant groups encouraged by Pakistan themselves to fight against India in Kashmir.

We are trying to deliver assistance to displaced people in placeswhere the army doesn’t want us to go and get in the way (no link, because no one wants to talk about it), and in a post-Afghanistan, post-Daniel-Pearl world where the main strategy of militants is blowing up innocent people, and one where they increasingly see aid workers as legitimate targets (here, here and here).

Yet, this week has seen certain journalists trying their best to make life even harder.

This totally baseless campaign (here and here) clearly targeting foreign journalists (incredibly enough from a newspaper that calls itself the “most credible” in Pakistan) is either publicity-seeking or has a political agenda behind it, and no one I’ve spoken to seems sure which.  You might just think it’s irresponsible, but coming after the Matthew Rosenberg affair it seems certain that it’s more than that. Pretty bizarre to see journalists basically working against freedom of the press, but there you have it.

This, on the other hand, is sheer irresponsible stupidity. It’s journalism so irresponsible that is even manages to surprise the jaded, cynical aid workers. OK, the guy’s obsessed with Blackwater, and yes the story is interesting, although using only anonymous sources who contradict each other makes it questionable. But in this context, the throwaway line about Blackwater operatives posing as aid workers adds nothing to the story and is quite likely to lead to more humanitarian workers being killed. And this will reduce still further the space that humanitarians have to get assistance to people who need it.

Idiot.

NB – The title of this post comes from some more irresponsible journalism, a populist an anti-paedophile campaign a few years back in the UK that got taken to some ludicrous extremes. It would of course be wrong to make Jeremy Scahill fear for his life for no good reason, but that’s exactly what his irresponsible journalism has done for thousands of other innocent people.

Here’s an old post on Butembo I never finished back in DRC…something for my friends and colleagues currently spending much more time there than they want to, after unrest in Lubero forced NGOs to temporarily leave the area. ================================================

One morning back in DRC, I found myself trying to get passport photos taken of some of our team. It was part of the very lengthy process of opening our very own bank account. Those with DRC experience could imagine what opening a bank account with the International Bank of Congo might involve, but I’ll save that story for a very rainy day. Instead I focus on one small part of the story which captures in microcosm the more general problems of getting things done in a state such as DRC. This is the story of the Butembo passport photo experience.

Now Butembo is one of the larger, and certainly one of the richest towns in DRC. So when our team had to get passport photos taken to open our bank account, I had assumed that it might not be completely out of the question. Luckily I had some passport photos with me but some of our team didn’t, so they went off to find a photo studio while I went to do some shopping.

Our new bank manager had been very helpful in pointing them in the right direction, and a short walk down the road was indeed the one photo studio in town:

Yes the arrow on the sign may have been pointing into the street, rather than at the studio, but the fact that they had added “NB – quick & good” at the bottom of their sign suggested an establishment of rare quality.

As it turned out, the first problem was to deal with the surprisingly large crowd at the desk of the photo shop. All of the people there seemed to be customers, and they all had cameras which they were waving around vigorously, but apart from that no one seemed to be doing anything. Eventually someone in the team managed to find one person who admitted to working in the shop and duly asked for some passport photos. They had then left the shop to discuss this complicated transaction, and I found them on the street outside the shop a half hour later, when I came back from shopping.

The problem seemed to be that the shop had a new camera, didn’t know how to use it, and the instruction manual they had was helpfully written only in Chinese. So about 10 people were clustered around the camera, all trying to press the various buttons on the camera at the same time. I took a look at the chaos, and decided I was better off leaving them to sort it out, and use my time in town where there was a good mobile phone network reception to make a few work phonecalls.

15 minutes more button pressing and I saw the crowd dispersed dejectedly, the Chinese camera declared the undisputed winner for successfully having resisted all efforts to make it function. But one of our team had a great idea – she had her camera with her, so why don’t they use that. This turned out to be an arrangement that pleased everyone.

We followed the man from the shop to where the photos would be taken, which turned out to be down the street, round the corner, and through some kind of carpark. Here indeed there was a photo studio, and I watched from an amused distance as the photographer energetically tried to persuade our team members to have their bank account passport photos taken with a backdrop of Copacabana Beach, or the Eiffel Tower. I half expected them to pull out the background of a smiling Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden waving some guns around, which since they are still the most popular calendar boys of Africa (rivalled only these days by Obama) I’m sure they have stored away somewhere.

Finally the photos were done, and we all trooped back through the carpark, round the corner and down the street to the shop. At this point the photographer clearly felt we were invested enough into the process that he could inform us that, actually, they had a little problem with their printer and currently it wasn’t working. Which meant that he had spent the last 2 hours or so using our camera to take photos of us, all the while knowing that he had no means of printing them out at the end of it.

At this point, looking around me I saw that there were many other shops around us advertising passport photo services. “Let’s just give up and go to another shop” I suggested. But some more Butembo-experienced of our team quickly disabused me of this notion. These shops don’t have the capacity to take or print photos, they just lead the hapless customer back to the one “real” photo studio, the one we were currently enjoying the services of, and charge a commission for the trouble. It seemed it was game over for our bank account application for that day.

We may have wasted the whole afternoon, I thought, but at least we haven’t paid them anything, a small consolation. But of course, we were to be denied even that. “Let’s just go” I said. “But we paid in advance for 6 sets of photos”. Of course we did. And we didn’t really have any other option anyway, if we wanted a bank account opened.

To cut the final chapter of the saga short, it involved me cajoling and entreating at length the people in the photo studio to see if there wasn’t any way that the non-functioning photo printer could be encouraged to function, at least for long enough to print out our photos. This may seem unlikely, but most vehicles, buildings and machinery of varying complexity in DRC are held together by little more than hope, elastic bands and maybe a few pieces of cloth. I really have seen 20 tonne trucks in DRC with broken suspension repaired by pieces of pagne cloth, and with that level of improvisation surely fixing a photo printer is possible. And so it proved. An hour or so later, once the photo shop owner was sufficiently convinced that we weren’t leaving without either money or photos, we finally got our reward. And it was even in time to give to the bank before they closed.

One step done. Only another five hundred or so similar steps between the idea of delivering humanitarian assistance in the DRC and the end products in the hands of the people who need it.

Slogans at a recent anti-Taliban protest in Pakistan (the last 2 paragraphs).

and some of Cleese’s earlier work:

Spooky coincidence or something more? You decide.

NB – to avoid any possibility of confusion of this sort, I should point out that John Cleese obviously isn’t a British agent in Pakistan.

To put it another way, they have apparently the 2nd largest fleet of aircraft in Africa, with more aircraft than all but the very biggest commercial operators in Africa.

As such, they have the capacity to employ their own dedicated press corps and hold their own press conferences.

Given the distance of most of their target audiences from the reality of the situation in East DRC, these have metamorphosed into such masterpieces of obfuscation and spin that Campbell and Rove must be revolving in their political graves. And while the Orwell’s MiniTrue was one of the pinnacles of modernism, I feel that MONUC’s wonderful press conferences are best seen as a postmodern reaction to a very postmodern war.

Here is the most recent example, from yesterday.

And here is your cut-out-and-keep handy translation guide to the what’s going on in the MONUC press department backroom when putting these things together:

Translation guide to the MONUC press conference of 29th July

“In Ituri district, the DRC Armed Forces (FARDC), with the support of MONUC forces have been taking part in operation "Pierre d’Acier" since 22 July 2009.”

Translation: “Sh*t, we’ve run out of hard things to name our super-hard super-scary military operations after because we’ve had so many of them. I know, let’s call it “Stone of Steel” – doesn’t mean anything, but wasn’t it a Van Damme film a few years back? Can’t get harder than that!”

“The joint operation enters its third phase, with the aim of neutralizing residual elements of militiamen of the Patriotic Resistance Front in Ituri (FRPI) and those of the Popular Front for Justice in Congo (FPJC) that continued to destabilize localities in Irumu territory.”

Translation: “OK we know this is the 17th ‘phase’ of the never-ending operations against these d&mn militia in Ituri, but that really doesn’t sound good – let’s call it the 3rd phase of this particular operation. And seriously, we’re still fighting the FRPI since 2005? That’s just going to sound like we have no idea what we’re doing. Well we’ll just have to call them ‘residual elements’, at least then it sounds like we’re making some progress. And noone’s going to want to know that we’re using helicopter gunships against women and children armed with spears, but if we call it ‘neutralizing’ then that sounds a hell of a lot better.”

“At the end of last week, the FARDC took the control of Janda, Pkoma, Matalatala and Fitchama, villages situated within a 10-40 kilometre radius of Aveba.”

Translation: “Didn’t we take this same area a few months back? And actually several times in the last few years but then lose it again because the army doesn’t have the capacity to hold them and the underlying problems aren’t addressed? Hmm, at least find some villages noone has heard of, that way it’s less obvious and hey, ‘taking’ all this territory has to be good!”

“MONUC forces prepared the heavy weapons and fight helicopters to assist in the operation.”

Translation: “What? Protection of civilians is the main part of our mandate? FRPI is partly made up of whole villages, with women and children on the front lines, who don’t much like the army but are mostly civilian when they aren’t being attacked? We’re planning to use artillery and helicopter gunships on them? Again? Well if we slip it in here now in the press conference, at least noone can say we didn’t tell them.”

“In North Kivu province, confrontations in the past week between FARDC and the FDLR rebels (FDLR) as well as the APCLS and PARECO rebels, caused several civilian victims. According to reports, at least 24 people were killed during the FDLR attack of 20 July 2009 in the border area between North and South Kivu in Mandje village…Of the 24 fatalities, sixteen were civilians, five were FDLR rebels and three were FARDC soldiers. The exact number of victims is difficult to establish at the moment, and some sources have indicated that this number could be higher.”

Translation: “This one was an FDLR attack, not an FARDC attack so remember to put in the number of civilian casualties that the FARDC told us there were. And of course since the FARDC figures are clearly not reliable, we can always say that the number of victims could be higher, sounds better that way. Funny how there’s always many more civilian casualties than military in all these ‘confrontations’ between these armed groups, isn’t it? Almost like they aren’t actually fighting each other at all but just using the excuse to target the local population. We’d better slip some more good military language in the next few paragraphs to remind people that this is a real war and MONUC is protecting civilians as best it can by supporting the FARDC against the terrorists in best military fashion.”

“The commander of the military operation Kimia II confirmed the attack, and added that nine FDLR troops had been neutralised. The governmental troops also freed 14 civilian hostages and a boy of four years.”

Translation: “Hey, let’s use the word neutralised again, otherwise it’s beginning to sound a bit messy. Oh and here’s another good opportunity to call anyone we find in territory out of government control who hasn’t been shot by one group or another a ‘hostage’. That way you can imagine the heroic soldiers abseiling down the walls and swinging in through the windows, shooting the nasty bearded terrorists, and rescuing the blindfolded and terrified little children in the corner. Somehow calling them ‘people still living in the village who somehow had missed out on being rounded up and held hostage by the government soldiers’ just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

“A MONUC military patrol rushed to Hombo where they noted that the security situation was extremely volatile".

Translation: “Someone who talks in a language we understand, like English and er, English, told us something might be happening somewhere. We found out about it before it actually happened! Admittedly there wasn’t actually anything going on when we got there, but come on, you can’t blame us for highlighting something like this. You know it’s not every day, or every month actually, that we arrive for once before the fighting’s all over and everyone’s packed up and gone home. And hey, we can call it volatile because, well, where is there in East DRC that couldn’t be called ‘volatile’”

And… a nice clean military picture to round things off with:

I’ve just looked at the Ituri and North Kivu parts because they are the bits I know, but I’m sure South Kivu is no better. Sorry that today’s post is a bit negative but sometimes it’s hard to see the bright side in DRC.