Well, you could say, ”That’s sovereignty for you.” The international community cannot force the Congolese people to choose the good guy, any more than they can bomb the bad guys into submission; those days are over. But the only Congolese official I met who talked about sovereignty was an unrepentant servitor to the Mobutu government. The Congolese I talked to want to be saved from themselves, or at least from their desperate predicament. Even those who accuse Monuc of spinelessness or complicity add immediately that of course the U.N. troops mustn’t leave. They want more troops, not fewer, and more insistent political engagement. They want to see Kabila brought to heel, even if they aren’t sure how.
What, then, is to be done? After all, the doctors of the international community, for all their wealth and know-how, cannot rid Congo of its poisons; this is the work of generations. And one argument we will be hearing from the Bush administration at the Gleneagles G-8 summit meeting is that corrupt countries have to change their own political culture before the world starts pouring in aid. That is true, but rather facile. For just as Monuc has begun demonstrating, at last, that there’s plenty of space for action between passivity and warfare, so there is space between anticolonial deference and neocolonial dominion (though Congo presents a pretty strong case for the latter). And it is not just something that we owe to the Congolese. If we believe that in the post-9/11 world we can no longer afford to let failed states fester, then we plainly owe it to ourselves to stop the Congolese political class from preying on its people and to shape the nascent institutions of state in such a way as to give legitimate economic and political activity a decent shot at survival. Is that, in fact, a prescription for some kind of benevolent imperialism? If so, then bring it on.
