"Blood Cows"??

You heard that right: bovines are the latest "conflict resource" to accurse the African continent. According to CSMonitor:

"Warring rebel groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo are stealing and selling livestock to finance a conflict sparked by spillover from the 1994 Rwandan genocide, in which 800,000 were killed.

Vast and volatile, the Democratic Republic of Congo has long suffered from conflicts fought over its reserves of gold, copper, uranium, and coltan, a mineral needed in cellphones and other electronics. For years, armed groups have sought control over mines and forests, their acquisitions of wealth fueling cycles of violence. Cattle may sound less glamorous than precious metals, but they're accessible.

"It's just like the mining resources," says Alpha Sow, head of the local office of the United Nations Mission in Congo (MONUC). "Part of this money goes to buy munitions."

OK, good luck trying to "securitize" that cause. It didn't work with coltan, it didn't work with timber; even "blood diamonds" didn't catch on in the public consciousness without a major movie (who is going to pay $9 USD to watch "Blood Cows"?) and only then because of a successful marketing campaign that appealed to US consumers.

Since most US beef is not raised in the DRC, it's not clear what purchase this trope will have on galvanizing attention to the Congo. What this news story shows is the inventiveness of militias in the Great Lakes region and the likelihood that any crackdown on a specific "conflict resource" will simply evince substitution effects. The unanswered question is what if anything the international communtiy can / ought to do.

Plus, exactly what does it say about the US media that it takes a story like this to be "news," when the regional war in Africa's Great Lakes region took 5,400,000 lives by August 2007, involves at least nine African nations, thousands of child combatants and shows no signs of abating? In comparison to the media blitz over the Russo-Georgian "war" (which may not even count by social science standards) this is appalling.

Congo's Gend-orilla-cide or, How Much Worse Can It Get?

If three million dead humans in central Africa isn’t enough to capture the interest of the international community, perhaps the fact that as many as 18 endangered gorillas have been killed will, suggests Sebastian Berger in an article entitled “Congo Conflict Threatens Endangered Gorillas.”

Meanwhile, the Council on Foreign Relations reprinted CFR fellow Michael Glerson’s emotional op-ed from The Washington Post in their weekly e-newsletter. “A Different Kind of Genocide” details the rape and sexual mutilation of various women and girls in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The focus of his piece seems to be proving not that these are bodily integrity violations against human beings, but that somehow the rapes constitute “genocide” – and, perhaps, that somehow this is "different" from regular genocides.

Three problems with his argument:

First, the use of rape as a tool of genocide (to say nothing of regular old terrorizing) is hardly new.

Second, since genocide is a crime against groups, not individuals, saying rape is “genocide” hinges on depicting women not as individuals but as exemplars of group identity, as if being raped as an ordinary person for any of a variety of other reasons women get raped in war isn’t bad enough. Presumably, the “real” crime here is that some “nation” is being destroyed.

Third, he’s not clear about which ethnic or racial group is trying to destroy which – rather important for a claim of genocide. No surprise considering the complexity of this conflict, which has involved seven state armies and numerous militias fighting for a variety of reasons.

Glerson’s claims of “genocide” are not based on any serious socio-cultural, gender, or legal analysis. What we have here, I think, is simply an effort to draw attention to the DRC and to sexual violence.

His aim is laudable, but his method has pitfalls.

Claims of genocide are like an epithet people fall back on out of desperation to condemn acts of political violence. But they rarely have the desired effect. (The crisis in Darfur was labeled a genocide years ago and no meaningful military intervention materialized.) And such claims have an important consequence: that of diluting people’s understanding of what the term “genocide” actually means.

By the way, the legal definition can be found here.