60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

26 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness
Why has the political leadership in so many African former colonies
been keener to follow in the footsteps of the colonial masters? The
Belgian, German and Portuguese colonial regimes have often been
described as the most brutal, but how does one assess, measure or
compare the brutality of the Germans against the Hereros and the
Namas with that perpetrated by the British against the Kikuyu during
the so-called Mau-Mau insurgency, and later with the Bokassa,
Mobutu, Eyadema or Idi Amin regimes, just to mention a few.
By the time the detailed story of what went on in the concentration
camps in Kenya emerged, almost half a century had elapsed. For every
story that does come to light how many others will we not know
about? For example, in the mid-1960s fi lm-makers from East Germany
interviewed a former Nazi who had been recruited by Mobutu’s
regime to participate in a cleansing exercise against individuals,
ethnic groups and organisations considered ‘Lumumbists’. The fi lm’s
title, A Laughing Man, refers to the fact that throughout the movie
the interviewee seems to have a grin on his face. Asked at one point
how many people he thought he had killed during his assignment
he answered that he did not count and cannot remember because he
had been told that the area in which they were operating was a sort
of free-fi re zone.
Over the last few years, it has become common to hear about how
many people have been killed in the DRC since 1998. Numbers vary
between 3.5 million and 5 million. The research was done by the International
Rescue Committee. Yet, to my knowledge, no organisation,
anywhere, has ever off ered its expertise to help account for the
countless ‘disappeared’ during the Mobutu regime in Congo/Zaïre.
A great deal is known about Lumumba and his assassination, but very
little is known about the severe collective punishment infl icted on the
Congolese people who showed any sympathy with Lumumba’s ideas.
No one really knows how long it went on. 19
From 1960 to 1990, just before the National Sovereign Conference
(1991-92), an entire people was kept in the dark while mercenaries and
Congolese were wiping out entire geographical areas of the country
simply because they had been known to have voted for Lumumba.
Can there be a more massive exercise of violence than when it is kept
hidden? Larry Devlin, the CIA Chief of Station in the Congo from
19 The late Zamenga Batukezanga once wrote a poem entitled ‘If the Congo River could
speak’, alluding to the popularly known fact that political opponents were often
‘bagged’ and disposed of from helicopters fl ying over the river.