Livio Senigalliesi: Imagine No Heaven
Congo / Ituri 2009 Video by Livio Senigalliesi - text and commentary by Raffaele Masto
Time: 12 min. 03 sec.
Congo: A Never Ended War (2003-2009)
Ituri in north-east Congo is one of the remotest places on earth. The only way to get there is in one of the tiny Cessna planes the UN runs from Entebbe, the strategic airport in the north of Uganda. Around Bunia, the region’s capital, there’s often fighting between armed ethnic groups of Hema and Lendu. But more bloody still have been the incursions of the Lord’s Resistance Army, those gangs of child-soldiers commanded by the war-lord Joseph Kony assaulting villages in the vast border area that runs between southern Sudan, northern Uganda and the Congo.
The Blue Berets of the MONUC mission stand guard whilst the people flee from flaming violence and massacres. One day – while on board a UN armoured car – I was blown away by the most stomach-turning scene of my career. I’m telling it just to let you realise that the Congo, in some areas, is still stuck in the era in which Heart of Darkness was set: one where brutal, bloody and ancestral violence reigns. From one of the slits in the armour of the vehicle escorting me to the airport, I saw a man’s corpse by the side of the unmade road. He had a deep wound lacerating his chest; and a guerrilla fighter was biting into his heart. Arrows hit us as we were passing through. The guerrilla group was fighting with primitive and rudimental weapons – machete, spears, bows and arrows – had war paint on their bare skin, and thongs around their groins (1).
This is a damned place, impossible to escape from. For over twenty years, a war so obscure it doesn’t make any newspapers has been taking place. An inconvenient, dirty, and un-newsworthy conflict. Only quality Africanists like Le Soire’sColette Braeckman or my travelling companion Raffaele Masto have continued to document what has been defined as the ‘African World War’. Millions of deaths, for most part civilian, count for naught. In an archaic country, covered by impregnable jungle, there’s no civil registry and no one will ever be able to compile a trustworthy list of casualties.
The population is constantly in transit as a result of clashes between opposite factions, and the only economic activities to speak of are subsistence farming – a few square meters around the villages’ shacks devoted to the cultivation of cassava – and the extraction of tantalite (2), gold and other precious metals in open-pit alluvial mines; the second activity all done under the control of traffickers and armed bands. River coves, swamps and recesses turn into gold mines luring young guerrilla soldiers in droves, who, with rudimental sieves, isolate small nuggets and specks of the invaluable metal (though not that valuable that it can’t be eaten) from the mud. The extraction of tantalite requires deep tunnels to be dug in an unstable sludge, which teeter on the brink of collapse over the impromptu miners. All that for a handful of rice. A slaves’ job. The whole mob partakes in the mining effort, women and children included. The men smoke dope and the women hum traditional songs in time with the sounds of the giant sieves used to filter the earth.
Chombè must be just over 20-years old; he’s dressed in a pair of ripped jeans and a Batman t-shirt. He tells his story with his legs immersed in the muddy water of a large puddle a little way outside the village of Nizi, in the gold-bearing mining zone:
“We fought to conquer this territory ourselves, and now we work together to extract the minerals from it. I’m in charge. At the end of each day every bit of gold found is left with me – I know who to sell it to. Then we divide up the money, which never amounts to much.”
Chombè and his workmates labour from dawn to dusk and pretty much always make just enough to feed themselves twice a day and to return, the following morning, to their muddy pool of water. He continues:
“No… it’s not a good job, but the alternative is to go back to fighting a war. I learnt that carrying a weapon means never going without food, that when you enter a village everyone is afraid of you, that you have all the cassava and women you need. But… you have to live in the forest, and if the army finds you… they kill you.”
His words are the best explanation you’ll find for what’s happened in these remote regions of the Congo, rich in cobalt, uranium, diamonds, tin, tantalite and gold.
Such raw materials could be a blessing for folk like this; instead they’re a curse. War, political instabiity and the armed corps that infest the forest are the fruit of the greedy states, political elites, multinationals, go-betweens and economic lobbyists who jockey for control of these territories and their underground riches. None of our mobile phones and computers would function without the precious tantalite which is found here and here alone, in the Congolese jungle. Dense grey stuff, which might look insignificant enough but is so important for communications and global technological progress.
Often, I’m asked: “How do they get these precious cargoes out of the remote forest and into the international marketplace?”. The reply is contained in an UN report which refers to the endless trafficking in weapons and precious metals involving guerrilla groups active in the Ituri region, corrupt politicians, and UN pilots paid by the traffickers to fly the vaunted payloads out of the Congo and on to western markets via Kigali or Entebbe.
This report calculates that every year thirty-six tons of gold, worth over $1bn, is illegally smuggled out of the Congo through Rwanda. It also reveals the failure of MONUC, the UN’s international mission which has for years worked within the region. We’re taking about the biggest mission the UN has ever deployed in the field: over 20,000 men with a mandate restricted to civilian protection; a mandate that’s not been respected given the ever-increasing number of deaths, refugees, cases of malnutrition and raped women.
To photograph in this context has been the most arduous challenge that I’ve had to confront in recent years. Here, being technically able is not enough. Once again, logistics play a decisive role, as does experience, luck, the right travelling companions and interpreters, who know the terrain and speak all the local dialects. If they weren’t there, I think that my good friend Raffaele ad I would have ended up roasted.
Notes
(1) Further confirmation of the atrocities I’ve narrated so far can be found in chapter 12 (‘Compassion, what is that?: the Great War of Africa 1997-2002’) of the book Congo: The Epic History of a People by David Van Reybrouck, published in English by HarperCollins.
(2) Tantalite, and cassiterite, are essential minerals for the telecommunications and electronics multinationals. Our consumption drives an endless war taking place in the Congolese forests.