wfn.org | Inexplicable Shelling Complicates Kinshasans' Struggle For Survival

[PCUSA.NEWS@pcusa.org]

9-October-1997 
97398 
 
    Inexplicable Shelling Complicates Kinshasans' 
    Struggle For Survival 
 
    by Alexa Smith 
 
KINSHASA, Congo--Though mortar shells are no longer dropping onto 
Kinshasa's streets, the sound of explosions just across the Congo River 
keeps this city acutely aware that it is sitting on the edge of a war. 
 
    Puffs of black smoke rise above and then dissipate over Brazzaville, 
the capital city of the Republic of the Congo, which was cut in two last 
June when the country's president and his opponent (and eventual successor) 
went to war just weeks before the national elections. 
 
    But the muffled sound of artillery fire and booming mortars doesn't 
stay on the other side of the river.  It's a somber reminder to Kinshasa's 
more than five million residents how quickly the world can turn upside down 
-- how fast life can go from bad to worse.  And that's a numbing lesson 
Kinshasans have been taught repeatedly for more than 30 years. 
 
    "You just do your best to survive," said one 40-ish Kinshasan who has 
watched the city's roads deteriorate -- in some places into gooey sludge. 
It's health system collapse, it's legal system supplanted by soldiers 
carrying automatic weapons and now it's daily routine conducted within 
earshot of a full-blown war. 
 
    "But get used to it?  I don't think so." 
 
    Kinshasa's streets are swamped with pedestrians from morning until 
night, with barbers setting up curbside shops and small-time entrepreneurs 
squatting along the road, selling whatever goods they've got that day -- be 
it bread, biscuits, fish or cigarettes.  The point is to sell enough to pay 
for the day's food -- so not even shelling or a war just a few kilometers 
away interferes with a routine so basic to survival. 
 
    "It is indeed a schizophrenic situation ... and you still just keep 
going on because you can't do anything else," said Christi Boyd, a 
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) mission worker, whose apartment sits near the 
palm tree-lined Congo River and who daily hears the war through her 
windows. 
 
    "One day it was just very noisy ... and I just kept knitting on my 
knitting machine," Boyd said.  "The kids kept playing. And Jeff [her 
spouse] said to me, `This is crazy.'" 
 
    But it got crazier still when the war came to Kinshasa last week with 
two days of shelling that killed approximately 21 civilians.  According to 
the Congo government's minister of the interior, Muenze Kongolo, no one yet 
knows exactly why the shelling of Kinshasa took place. 
 
    "Nobody," he told reporters at a press conference here, "is accepting 
responsibility.  We have reason to believe that both parties [rebel and 
government forces in Brazzaville] are not in control of an element [within 
their ranks]. And they were shelling us." 
 
    The Congo government of Laurent Kabila retaliated with intense rocket 
fire that ended the assault on Kinshasa. Then 300 Congolese soldiers were 
deployed to Brazzaville to reportedly find the artillery sites. 
 
    There's speculation that members of deposed and now deceased Congo 
president Mobutu Sese Seko's special forces are among the rebels now in 
Brazzaville and that they're intent upon distracting and destabilizing 
Kinshasa's fledgling government, which is now faced with the enormous task 
of rebuilding the new Congo's completely wrecked infrastructure.  But some 
hold that there's little strategy behind much of the violence that has 
reduced Brazzaville to rumble and its residents to refugees, many of whom 
fled to Kinshasa. 
 
    If Kinshasans are used to anything more than improvising to get daily 
necessities, it is living with no input into the political decision-making 
around them. 
 
    It was just months ago that they celebrated liberation from the 34-year 
dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko by the forces of Laurent Kabila, only to 
be told that their country now has a new name -- changed from Zaire to the 
Democratic Republic of the Congo. Kabila installed a "temporary" one-party 
system that cuts longtime advocates of democratic reform out of leadership. 
Further, Kabila's liberation army -- visible nearly everywhere in Kinshasa 
-- includes surprising numbers of Rwandan military personnel who don't 
seem, according to anxious Kinshasans, to be headed home after that 
country's brutal civil war. 
 
    Such drastic upheaval has come hard and fast, after long years of 
literally watching the city disintegrate under the corruption of Mobutu's 
rule.  That was when the standard of living in resource-rich Zaire plunged 
from one of the highest in Africa to one of the lowest -- while Mobutu, 
bilking most of the profits, became a billionaire. 
 
    "What's normal now," said a lifetime Kinshasa resident and mother of 
nine, "is that people just accept how the situation is passively.  That 
becomes normal, just accepting.  And [passivity] becomes the attitude." 
 
    That's not hard to understand, insist Mennonite Central Committee 
workers Ann and Bruce Campbell-Janz, who say that all the years of abuse 
and uncertainty have taken a toll.  "It is a daily grind just trying to 
find enough to eat, to find medicine," said Ann in an interview with the 
Presbyterian News Service. "The population is traumatized." 
 
    Her husband added, "Most people here have daily  responsibilities and 
they just keep going on. ... They're getting through every day." 

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