I'd Rather Fly a Chopper by Rajesh Isser

Author:Rajesh Isser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: null
Publisher: HarperCollins India
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Don’t Cry for Me

The Democratic Republic of the Congo has borne the worst of colonialism: a past whose darkness is so candidly brought out in researched works like King Leopold’s Ghost, with a conservative death toll of 10 million in just twenty-three years (1885–1908) and a present that continues to batter poverty-stricken Congolese with every criminal act and horrific method known to man. The daily death toll due to malnutrition and lack of healthcare because of the strife is around 1,500.

Even when the Belgians left, it is widely believed that the US and the ex-colonists of the Congo ensured that the first elected president (Lumumba) was assassinated and replaced by an inept, corrupt but compliant General Mobutu—in a way, the ‘whites’ never left.* Once, while flying in an area that was reputed to be close to the mines that supplied uranium for the two atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a Congolese UN worker spoke of a legend—the US Marines still guarded the mines. One will never know the truth, since the area was out of bounds. But it is a fact that unscrupulous businesses and multinationals from the West, and now China, pull the real strings. Various players in the fray for exploiting the mineral wealth do what they do to feed insatiable appetites. Even under the rubric of peacebuilding, and right under the nose of the World Bank, the Congolese government sold off the rights of 75 per cent of the copper and cobalt reserves in a shady deal that reportedly brought no gains to the state or the people.

Slavery in illegal mines, sexual exploitation and abuse, crimes against children, etc., are all there to be seen in the Congo even today. It seems that the 2006 elections just managed to transfer the tools of power and exploitation from one set of hands to another. Whether real sustainable peace is even possible in the current format of peacebuilding, whose terms are driven by the donor community, only time will tell. Africa, and in particular the Congo, requires India’s help, but in the current UNPK context where we are only contributing troops, the results are highly debatable. The large Indian diaspora in eastern Congo told us many times that India can really help, provided the West allows us to! We definitely should not end up doing someone’s dirty work; even if they proclaim us to be the gold standard in peacekeeping. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness surely has an underlying message that the real darkness lies elsewhere, in the greed of man, especially in those that have been causing Africa to bleed for centuries.

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