This World s10e09 Episode Script

1 Congo, one of the wildest, most colourful and anarchic countries on our planet.
For centuries, adventurers and explorers have come here, staking their lives on making fortunes.
The huge Congo River would be the key that unlocked the riches of Central Africa.
Today the country often makes the news for horrifying violence and barbarity.
Many millions have died in recent wars.
This harrowing place really does provide a little window into the goings-on in this unstable part of Congo.
I'm going to find out how Congo's troubles today are rooted in the past-- unravelling an astonishing history that links Congo's story to the rest of us and that of the world.
This area has provided the raw materials that have contributed to our industrial development for generations.
I'm travelling through Congo to find out how slavery, colonialism, corruption and war have shaped the history of this beautiful but troubled land.
The minerals under these mountains could give Congo a much better future.
This is the mouth of the Congo River.
This is where it pours into the Atlantic at a rate of a million and a half cubic feet every second.
Up that way is 3,000 miles of river.
Of all the rivers on the planet, only the Amazon contains more fresh water.
I visited a fishing community near the mouth of the Congo River.
For centuries, people fished these waters unaware of the world outside.
In 1482, the inhabitants on this coastline would have seen an extraordinary sight-- ships carrying the first Portuguese expedition to these waters.
It was a ground-breaking moment in the history of Congo.
It was the start of European involvement, and much of that would be predatory.
The Portuguese encountered an organised and complex African society here, with its own capital city and king.
The ancient Kingdom of Kongo was based around here-- near today's Democratic Republic of Congo's narrow strip of Atlantic coast.
These early European explorers traded guns and goods with local chiefs, in return for a very specific and lucrative cargo.
Simon Lemo-- one of the chiefs of the fishing community-- showed me artefacts left over from the slave trade.
Over the next few hundred years, at least four million slaves were removed through this stretch of coast, some to British colonies in the West Indies, helping to make the cities of London, Liverpool and Bristol rich.
The slave trade utterly destroyed the Kingdom of Kongo.
The Europeans defeated it militarily, killed its king, wiped out its ruling elite.
The slave traders realised it would be far easier to harvest slaves from the interior if it was in a condition of chaos.
They destroyed a complex African society and decimated the population.
European expeditions-- one of them British-- tried to explore further inland up the Congo River but they never got very far.
In the colonial period, the Europeans relied heavily on rivers to help them penetrate new territory.
This is why this part of Central Africa remained off limits for so long.
Only a hundred miles from the sea, the Congo River is ripped apart with 220 miles of extraordinary rapids and cataracts like this one.
These rapids are what kept Europeans out of Central Africa for centuries.
Gushing at ten million gallons of water a second, these rapids have the greatest flow on the planet.
The river here could generate more hydroelectricity than any other place in the world.
If it's harnessed properly, this could power the whole of Africa.
It took centuries before the barrier of the rapids was passed by explorers.
Astonishingly, the breakthrough came with an expedition in the late 19th century that came from the other direction.
The explorers travelled from the Indian Ocean, thousands of miles across Africa using the navigable stretches of the Congo River.
It was one of the greatest journeys in history.
In 1877, they arrived here-- the town of Boma, 60 miles from the mouth of the river.
Welsh-born Henry Morton Stanley took 999 days to reach here from the East coast of Africa, traversing the continent.
By crossing Central Africa, Stanley had achieved something that no-one had ever done before, and he'd blazed a trail into the African interior that other Europeans were only too eager to follow.
When Stanley arrived in Boma, there was just a small number of Portuguese traders here, but he had a much bigger vision.
Stanley hoped that Great Britain would claim the land he'd travelled through.
But British colonial interests at the time lay elsewhere.
One man, though, was very interested-- Leopold, King of the Belgians.
He didn't have an empire and he was desperate for one.
Together, he and Stanley set to impose their control on the vast swathe of Central Africa not already occupied by other European powers.
Boma became the capital of Leopold's private colony-- the Congo Free State.
I went to visit one of Boma's oldest secondary schools to attend a history lesson.
Leopold's story is part of the curriculum.
Leopold's personal fiefdom brought together 200 different ethnic groups into one territory that was 80 times the size of Belgium.
It would take its name from the Congo River, and it's absolutely enormous-- the second largest country in Africa today, and it's the size of Western Europe.
The pupils here have formed firm views about their country's past.
Above the rapids, boats now travel along Stanley's old route.
The Congo River is navigable for 1,000 miles, running right through the heart of Central Africa.
All human life is here on this extraordinary boat.
It's one of many that provide a vital link for passengers and goods between Congo's large river cities.
Our captain has been sailing these waters for 20 years.
So from Kinshasa, the capital, right the way to Kisangani inland, how long would that take by boat on average? And what about by road? Back in the late 19th century, the Congo River was crucial to the colonial project.
To Leopold, this river with its tributaries was a highway, that would allow him to open up the interior that for so long had been inaccessible to white men.
I stopped off in the river town of Mbandaka on the Equator, deep in Congo's enormous rainforest.
The settlement was founded by Leopold's agents in 1883.
It was one of many colonial river stations that served as a base for Leopold's army to impose control over Congo's tribes.
It was a huge and ambitious project, which cost an absolute fortune.
King Leopold had got himself badly into debt investing in infrastructure for his new private colony.
He badly needed to find a way to get something back on that investment.
And that's when another Brit rode to the rescue.
John Dunlop invented the rubber bicycle tyre, and in doing so ignited the late 19th century's love for biking.
And it wasn't just bicycles.
Soon the entire industrial world had fallen in love with rubber, using it for things like insulation on electrical cabling.
Fortunately for Leopold, half of the world's wild rubber supply was here in the Congo.
I was taken into the rainforest-- the world's second largest after the Amazon-- by members of a local pygmy tribe.
They still collect wild rubber, which they, like their ancestors, use as poison to kill wild animals.
The local hunters stopped to set up camp to collect the rubber, which is tapped and ground out of the bark of trees.
So am I making the poison here? I attempted to give them a hand.
Okay, bigger one.
You have a bigger one? Thank you.
That's much better.
Yeah.
- Ah! Wonderful! - Ah! That's more like it.
This sticky white substance, wild rubber, made Leopold a vast fortune.
Back in the late 19th century, Leopold had a problem-- how to harvest enough of this wild rubber to take full advantage of soaring global rubber prices.
The answer was brutally simple.
Use the military out here to force the Congolese people into the jungles to collect it.
The Congo became one vast labour camp, and the punishments meted out were barbaric.
On their way to hunt, the locals stopped to re-enact, for our benefit, scenes of how their ancestors were forced to collect rubber by Leopold's agents.
Even after 100 years, there's still a strong sense here of the brutality and horror of that era.
Congolese refusing to harvest rubber could be shot.
Hands were collected by soldiers to prove they'd killed, but the limbs of the living were also severed.
Nobody knows for sure how many Congolese died as a result of the disease and starvation caused by Leopold's administration or the murder that it carried out.
Figures range from the low millions up to ten million, which is half of the Congolese population at the time.
Either way, it's one of the greatest atrocities of the 20th century, and yet today, it's virtually forgotten.
A ground-breaking international human rights campaign exposing the cruelty eventually forced Leopold to give up his private colony that he'd never set foot in.
He handed it over to the Belgian government in 1908.
A new country was established the Belgian Congo.
It would be another valuable natural resource that would provide riches to the Congo's new rulers.
I'm perched on top of 850 tonnes of Congolese copper heading straight out of the country.
I travelled to Katanga Province in Southeast Congo.
This is one of the most mineral-rich areas on earth, as the European colonists were soon to discover.
The Congo's new rulers, the Belgians, were as keen as Leopold had been for this place to make money.
The international rubber price dipped at the beginning of the 20th century, but luckily for the Belgians, just then the world's largest supply of copper was found here in Katanga Province.
That copper went on to fuel industrial expansion all round the world.
By 1911, mining here began in earnest.
The Belgians brought massive scale industrial capitalism.
They founded one of the most important mining companies in history-- the Union Miniere du Haut Katanga, half of whose investors were British.
The company soon became the largest copper producer in the world.
Its successor company continues to mine in Congo on a vast scale.
The director of the mine showed me around.
The Congo provided key minerals for the development of Europe's industrial economies.
In 1914, the Congo's riches would be put to more sinister use in the First World War.
Many of the infamous battlefields in France and Belgium are a long way from here, where men did the dying.
But it was bullets and shells made in large part from Congolese copper that did the killing.
In fact, the Allies' access to mines like the one in this area proved absolutely decisive in a war where industrial might was vital.
In the Second World War, the efforts of the Congolese and the raw materials they mined would have an even greater historic impact on the world.
Congo's got an extraordinary knack of coming up with just the right resources at just the right stage of the world's industrial development.
There was rubber and copper, but perhaps the best example of all is the fact that in this province here, uranium was mined that was used in the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan to end World War II.
The most concentrated release of explosive energy in the history of mankind.
In 1942, when scientists in the United States were designing an atomic weapon, the world's largest known supply of high-grade uranium was in the Belgian Congo.
But it wasn't just minerals that helped achieve victory.
Tens of thousands of Congolese died when the world wars reached Africa.
The Belgian Congo's army fought in both conflicts, helping to defeat Germany and her allies on African soil.
It was a period of profound change in the Congo.
The expansion of mining transformed the Congo.
Cities grew and a monetary economy was introduced.
By the Second World War, one million Congolese were in regular, salaried employment.
The Belgians realised that in order to get the most out of their colony, they had to treat the people far better than Leopold had done, and living conditions dramatically improved.
Congolese in the cities may have experienced a rise in their standard of living, but they were subjected by the Belgian colonisers to a hateful system of apartheid.
For Petronille Kaboba, the memories of growing up in the Belgian Congo are still strong.
After the Second World War, pressure for change from the Congolese was building, as other European colonies were given their freedom.
The country was one of the most developed in Africa, but there were deep-seated problems as independence approached.
Belgium woefully under-prepared this place to govern itself.
Of 5,000 senior positions in the colonial administration, just three were held by Congolese.
There were only 16 university graduates in this country, and not a single lawyer, doctor, economist, army officer or engineer.
I've come to Kinshasa, the Congo's capital since 1924.
It's a huge river port and is now Africa's third largest mega-city, with a population of more than ten million.
In 1960, it was the scene of celebration, as the Congolese finally enjoyed their independence.
The Prime Minister of the new country was a charismatic young leader called Patrice Lumumba.
Jamais Kolonga worked for Lumumba.
I found him listening to the surviving band members that played Congo's famous independence theme tune.
- Bravissimo.
- Bravissimo.
Very good.
The Belgians were determined to retain a strong influence.
The newly independent Congo had an army, administration and economy that were still effectively Belgian-run.
When the Belgian King arrived for the independence ceremony, Patrice Lumumba delivered a vicious critique of colonial rule in the Congo.
Lumumba's speech infuriated the Belgians.
In the weeks after independence, Congo was torn apart at lightning speed.
The rape and murder of a small number of Belgians by Congolese prompted an invasion by the Belgian Army.
A mass exodus of Belgians followed, crippling the country's administration and economy.
Katanga Province, the heart of Congo's economy, declared itself independent with tacit Belgian support, sparking a civil war.
A United Nations force was deployed with incredible speed, but didn't have a mandate to stop the conflict.
As the chaos spread, the country was to become a pawn in an even bigger struggle.
At independence, the Congolese believed it was their chance to make a fresh start and shape their own future, but the strategic position of the country and, of course, its vital resources, saw it instantly embroiled in the great superpower rivalry.
With his young country falling apart, and facing rebels backed by the Belgians, Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba asked for support from the Soviet Union.
His action unwittingly opened a new front in the Cold War.
The United States deplores the unilateral action of the Soviet Union in supplying aircraft and other equipment for military purposes to the Congo.
I'm on patrol with the Congolese Army.
It has played a critical role in shaping this country.
In the crisis of 1960, the West used the Congolese Army to maintain its influence over the country and counter the Soviet threat.
The man who would change the course of Congo's history had been the relatively low rank of a sergeant under the Belgians.
But at independence, thanks to his friendship with Lumumba, he was catapulted into the top job of the new Congolese Army.
His name was Joseph Mobutu.
He was destined to betray his friend, seize power and become a key ally of the West during the Cold War.
He was the ultimate African strongman.
Patrice Lumumba comes back to Leopoldville a prisoner.
But Congo's strongman Colonel Joseph Mobutu shown as he watches Lumumba arrive, says he is prepared to put down any uprising.
The CIA had plotted to assassinate Lumumba, but now Mobutu was on hand to dispatch the former premier to his fate.
It was one of the great political assassinations of the 20th century.
Patrice Lumumba was flown down here to Lubumbashi.
On the plane he was badly beaten.
Once here, he was handed over to Belgian-backed rebels, who drove him out of town and executed him by firing squad.
Then a Belgian officer chopped up his body and dissolved it in acid.
The Cold War had claimed another victim.
The Cold War fuelled conflict in Congo through much of the 1960s.
Appalling atrocities were committed by all sides.
Hundreds of thousands were killed.
Mobutu, with Western support, battled Soviet-backed rebel groups, finally regaining control over the country.
Emerging victorious, Mobutu seized power, making himself president.
Mobutu quickly adopted the trappings of power, and backed by Western governments including Britain, he would remain as President for the next three decades.
Mobutu wasn't interested in democracy and human rights.
Under him, suspected coup-plotters were publicly hanged, and there was violent oppression of the opposition.
Many people were scared of his form of authoritarianism, but many others were quite happy with the stability that he brought.
He also set about building a modern Congolese nation.
The first decade at least, things went well.
The economy grew at 7% per year.
It was time for a celebration.
Mobutu did nothing by halves.
In 1974, he put on one of the world's greatest sporting events-- the Rumble in the Jungle.
He invited two of history's great heavyweight boxers, George Foreman and Muhammad Ali, to fight here in Kinshasa.
This is Kinshasa's oldest boxing club.
They still spar in the same ring that was used in the 1974 fight.
Boxing coach Jimmy Mukuna was at the Rumble in the Jungle.
After years of civil war and division, the Rumble in the Jungle was aimed at giving the Congolese a sense of belonging to one nation for the first time.
It also put Mobutu at the centre of the world stage and helped cement his power.
Mobutu had changed the name of the river and of the country from Congo to Zaire.
It was his attempt to restore African identity and pride after it had so many years being stamped down on by the colonisers.
Mobutu pulled down the statues of Stanley and Leopold in the centre of Kinshasa but his economic policies were an unmitigated disaster.
He launched the largest nationalisation programme in Africa, taking businesses from foreigners.
The economy nose-dived.
The situation was made much worse by the corruption of Mobutu's regime.
Zizi Kabongo lived through the decades of Mobutu's rule.
He's now director of a Congolese radio station.
There's one place in Congo that is a powerful symbol of Mobutu's increasingly crazed regime.
It lies deep in the rainforest and is rarely visited.
I'm heading on a journey hundreds of miles into the northern Congolese jungle.
It's one of the most remote places in Africa.
After two days of gruelling travel, I finally arrived in Gbadolite.
In the late 1970s, Mobutu decided to build an enormous palace here-- his very own Xanadu.
A place to hide out, relax and listen to his favourite music-- Gregorian chant.
Jean Bangaswa was one of Mobutu's personal bodyguards for 14 years.
He showed me round the remains of this extraordinary testament to one man's megalomania.
This is the chamber, the President's bedroom? Mobutu would fly his many mistresses here, one of whom was the twin sister of his wife.
This place cost $100 million to build, some of that no doubt coming from the billions in aid money that Zaire was sucking in.
The place cost approximately $15 million to run every month at its peak, and that doesn't include the largesse that he used to distribute from his office there-- designer suitcases packed with $100 bills.
Mobutu even built a large, now defunct, international airport at Gbadolite.
It had a runway long enough for Concorde to use.
It would not be the last time Concorde would fly here on private hire.
Some of the palace staff still live nearby, including Jean Ngoyi-- a chef.
I'd heard about his great cooking, and asked him to prepare a feast in memory of the powerful dictator.
What was the President's favourite food? He liked nice wine, nice champagne, whisky, things like that? I brought my own champagne along to celebrate this bizarre occasion.
Excellent.
Thank you.
The last champagne feast in Mobutu's palace.
Even here, amongst the evidence of astonishing excess and corruption, there's strong nostalgia for the Mobutu era.
Thank you very much, that was delicious! Thank you, Jean.
Mobutu's palaces here at Gbadolite neatly demonstrate the problem with Congo's missing billions.
As you travel round the rest of the country, you see very little evidence for the titanic amount of money that's been generated here.
The schools, the roads and the hospitals are not those of a resource-rich country.
Over the years, first the slave traders, then people like Leopold and Mobutu made the money vanish, either taking it abroad or wasting it here in the Congo, leaving the Congolese people with nothing.
Outside the tranquillity of Mobutu's jungle palace, the world was changing.
The collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War meant Mobutu, the anti-communist ally, was no longer needed by the West.
Aid dried up.
Congo's economic crisis worsened.
But it was events in a tiny neighbouring country to the east that sounded the death knell for Mobutu's brutal regime.
On 6th April 1994, news reached here that the presidents of Burundi and Rwanda had been travelling in a plane that had been shot down, and they were both killed.
It was a personal tragedy for Mobutu, he was great friends with the President of Rwanda, and he ordered his body to be brought here to his magnificent personal mausoleum so it could lie with dignity until it was returned to Rwanda for burial.
Little can he have imagined this would be far more than just a personal tragedy.
The death of the Rwandan President would in fact set off a violent chain reaction of events that would eventually see Mobutu himself swept from power.
The death of the Rwandan President sparked the fastest genocidal killing spree of the 20th century.
800,000 people, mostly Tutsis, were slaughtered in 100 days.
The Hutu militias responsible for most of the killing were driven out to Eastern Congo alongside millions of refugees.
They were supported by Mobutu when they later attempted to regain power in Rwanda.
In response, the Tutsi-led Rwandan government supported a rebel army under Laurent Kabila to overthrow Mobutu.
In 1996 and 1997, it rampaged across Congo on a horrifying killing spree, heading for the President's jungle retreat.
Mobutu's final moments in the country were spent on the runway at Gbadolite.
Mobuto's panicked departure from this airport was a sorry end to more than three decades of rule.
The country he left behind him was in a state of chaos.
Its judiciary, army, civil service-- destroyed by corruption, forced to feed upon themselves.
Mobutu had predicted that after him would come chaos, and he was in a position to know, because the things he'd done whilst in power made it a certainty.
The people of the Congo were about to discover that the only thing worse than a deranged dictator was the anarchic violence that all too often follows his removal.
The country was renamed yet again in 1997, following Mobutu's overthrow, becoming the Democratic Republic of Congo.
But there was no fresh start.
I travelled to Goma-- a city of a million people on the shore of Lake Kivu in Congo's east, bordering Rwanda.
This region was at the centre of the wars that ripped the country apart.
Since then, really for the last 20 years, this area has been wracked by chronic instability.
There's been a series of wars here that have killed millions of people, and yet the catastrophe that's unfolded here has had precious little attention from the rest of the world.
The chaos that followed Mobutu's fall led to Africa's first inter-state conflict, involving nine nations.
It was dubbed the Great War of Africa.
These African invaders and their proxies, just like the Europeans before them, plundered Congo's resources to fund their ambitions.
The conflict here was the world's deadliest since the Second World War an estimated five million died.
A peace deal between the warring sides was signed in 2002, but, in reality, the fighting never ended.
This region is still wracked by conflict.
I've come to a hospital in Kirotsche in Eastern Congo.
The area around here has been badly affected by Congo's wars over the last two decades.
Of the millions of Congolese people who died during the wars, most were killed not through direct violence, but from the conditions that the conflict created.
There was a huge spread of malnutrition and disease.
Of the people that were killed, the vast majority weren't combatants, but civilians.
The death toll was particularly high because the wars followed years of state decay.
Whole areas of the country were left without proper infrastructure or medical cover.
Dr.
Chantal runs the hospital.
One in five children in Congo will die before their fifth birthday.
Joy and his parents have had to move due to recent fighting.
Close to three million Congolese are currently internally displaced as a result of conflict.
The fighting here has involved widespread and systematic rape.
Surveys suggest 40% of women in Eastern Congo have suffered sexual violence.
The UN described it as "The rape capital of the world.
" This harrowing place really does provide a little window into the goings-on in this unstable part of Congo.
There's a young lady here who, er, was raped, and has just given birth to twins by Caesarean section.
And she's being kept here until her family can come up with the money for her treatment.
It's just under £50.
Dr.
Chantal and Louise Nzigire both assist women who have been attacked.
What's the impact of years of conflict been on Congolese society? While many other African countries are finally experiencing real economic growth, Congo, according to the UN, has the worst living conditions for humans in the world.
Life expectancy has collapsed to 48 since independence.
The majority live on less than 80 pence a day.
Few other countries have experienced such catastrophic decline.
The city of Goma is a major base for the UN peacekeeping force that deployed to stabilise Congo from 1999 onwards.
It's now become the largest and most expensive operation in UN history, costing around £1 billion a year.
That means that the UN has spent more effort and money trying to save the Congo than any other nation on earth.
But it's been a huge challenge.
20,000 UN troops sounds a lot, but it's a vast country.
The UN has helped the country through two democratic elections.
They were won by the son of the man who overthrew Mobutu-- Joseph Kabila.
President Kabila is accused of continuing the tradition of Congo's past rulers-- of making money at the expense of the Congolese people whilst presiding over a corrupt and dysfunctional state.
Kabila struggles to impose control over the whole of the country.
The anarchy unleashed by Congo's wars spawned numerous armed groups that still operate largely unchecked, in spite of the UN presence in the eastern part of the country.
I arranged to meet one of the largest and most notorious armed groups in the area.
I travelled north into rebel-held territory.
I'm on patrol with M23, which is just one of an estimated 60 armed rebel groups operating in this region alone.
One of the key problems with the Congolese state is that since independence it's been too weak and inefficient to really impose its control across this vast state, and into that vacuum has stepped groups like this.
Armed groups in this region often formed during the wars to protect communities.
But all too often, they ended up committing terrible human rights abuses against civilians.
I was taken by M23 rebels to see new recruits being drilled.
The M23's rebellion has displaced hundreds of thousands of people in the last couple of years.
Colonel Vianney Kazarama is the group's military spokesman.
There is truth in some of the Colonel's claims, but M23's rule in this area is brutal.
Human rights groups have recently documented dozens of cases of summary executions, rape and forced recruitment by this rebel group-- M23.
I visited the front line during an uneasy truce in the heavy fighting.
We've pushed down right through no-man's-land.
This civilian settlement is pretty much deserted and we've arrived at the very, very front line of the M23 rebels.
Just there, 200 metres away, is the UN checkpoint, and the two sides are eyeballing each other.
It's a short walk through no-mans-land to the UN position.
The UN's now fighting M23 and other rebel groups in this region, after being given a tough mandate to disarm and neutralise them.
The UN's gone to war here with the support of the Congolese Army, which has a poor human rights record.
Showing us the position where yesterday we had this fighting I went on a joint patrol led by Brigadier General Ponnappa and his Congolese counterpart Colonel Mamadou Ndala.
For the Congolese people, the prize of a stable, functional and united state would be huge.
There should be money enough to fund it.
We've flown right up into the mountains and we've come upon this gold mine here on one of the summits.
Absolutely extraordinary operation.
As well as gold and copper, Congo is also rich in the resources needed to fuel our latest technological revolution-- coltan for smartphones, cadmium for computers.
And its resources have helped build the might of the growing economies of China and India.
The workers here in this Canadian-run mine are optimistic that finally Congo's resources can be transformed from a curse into a blessing.
Once other investors come into the country, so we see that the country will take off quite well economically, and that's happening.
We know that all Congolese, young engineers and all people with different skills, will find a way of tapping into the riches that the country has.
And which will benefit the development, and the development of the country as a whole.
At the end of my journey around Congo, I joined Kinshasa commuters on their way home at the end of the day.
Congo is heavily reliant on aid, the UK alone plans to give the country nearly £500 million over the next three years.
The hope remains that Congo could become an economic dynamo-- a force for peace and stability at the heart of Africa, benefiting us all.
But for the overwhelming majority of the Congo's 70 million people, it's an unremitting struggle just to survive.
For centuries, the Congolese have been buffeted by the great currents of world history-- slavery, colonisation, the industrial revolution and the Cold War.
All these have conspired to rob the Congolese of a chance to shape their own future.
Successive regimes have been more interested in plundering the land, and since independence there's been no real effort to create a modern, functioning state-- that means that this country, which should be so rich thanks to its natural resources, is one of the poorest on the planet.
And the sad truth is that, at present, there's little sign of that changing.