DRC redux
I've posted before about the DRC, and it's back in the news.
It's not, unfortunately, that the violence is new or that it's profoundly different than what's been going on for years and years, but, I guess with the American election winding down, there's just not enough "exciting" news and we have time to look back to all that horrible "tribal" stuff in Africa. When will they ever just learn to be "civilized" and stop fighting? Poor journalists. This is such a downer.
Please.
In case the internet filter is too opaque, I'm not serious.
Conflict reveals flaws in U.N. peacekeeper force
The refugees watched in anger as the U.N. tanks headed away from the battlefield and the Tutsi rebels they were supposed to be stopping.
"Where are they going? They're supposed to protect us!" shouted Jean-Paul Maombi, a 31-year-old nurse who had fled his village because of the violence. Nearby, young men hurled rocks at the U.N. troops.
The quick unraveling of the world's largest U.N. peacekeeping effort has come as no surprise to the mission's critics, who complain the force was unprepared for its main task - protecting civilians from the war.
...
(Read more.)
Oh hey. That's not really new either.
The UN Peacekeepers, as sharp and snappy as their blue berets are, have long been fraught with supreme incompetence. But, one must ask what the source of this really is.
Is it that they're poor soldiers?
Not likely.
Is it that they're base and immoral people?
Some of them, maybe, but those tend to be actively mistreating those they're supposed to be defending instead of just failing to defend them.
Is it because they have no real mandate to do anything unless they themselves are fired upon?
Unfortunately, not this time.
Is it because there's no real political will from the UN or from the countries where the troops originate?
Absolutely.
(from the above source)
Fewer than 6,000 of the mission's 17,000 troops are deployed in North Kivu, the site of the current fighting, because unrest in other provinces has required their presence elsewhere, the U.N. says. By comparison, rebel leader Laurent Nkunda commands about 10,000 fighters.
Alan Doss, the top U.N. envoy in Congo, said the U.N. troops have performed "really with great distinction," but are stretched to the limit and need reinforcements quickly.
The inability to protect civilians is particularly frustrating for the U.N. mission in Congo, which got a strong mandate, including the power to use force, in part because of lessons learned in Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia and other regions of Congo, where failure to prevent civilian killings became a mark of shame.
...
Perhaps most fundamental is the complexity of the mandate handed to the force, known by the French acronym MONUC. The peacekeepers have been charged with simultaneously protecting civilians, disarming rebel fighters and policing buffer zones separating the insurgents from government troops.
"I think the sense is that they've really been hung out to dry," said Erin Weir, the peacekeeping advocate in Goma for Washington-based Refugees International. "The U.N. Security Council handed MONUC an exceptionally complex set of tasks to accomplish, but never came through with the resources or the political support to get the job done."
'No coherent army'
The mission also has been charged with supporting a ragtag Congolese force of 30,000 soldiers cobbled together from a defeated national army and several of the rebel groups who vanquished it in 1996.
"Our mandate tells us to support an army that doesn't exit," one U.N. official told The Associated Press recently, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media. "There is no coherent army."
The DRC has been a place of recurring oppression, violence, and atrocity since King Leopold made it his own private hunting ground. I hope I don't have to tell you that his game wasn't of the four-legged variety. It was human strife.
The U.N. renewed the Congo mission's mandate and expanded it in December 2007, empowering the peacekeepers to use force to disarm Nkunda's fighters, but saying they must give priority to protecting civilians.
In January, the mission was asked under a regional peace deal to police buffer zones to separate the Congo army from areas controlled by Nkunda's Tutsi rebels.
...
But they were also charged to work alongside the Congolese army to disarm Rwandan Hutu militiamen who fled to Congo after perpetrating the 1994 Rwandan genocide that killed half a million Tutsis. Complicating matters, these same militiamen had sometimes been used as irregular reinforcements in Congo's army, whose soldiers include many Hutus.
That mandate has caused Rwanda, Nkunda and at least one non-government organization to accuse the peacekeepers of aiding and abetting those behind the Rwandan genocide.
Nkunda said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press Thursday that he wants direct talks with the government to discuss security in the region, as well as his objections to a $5 billion deal that gives China access to the country's vast mineral riches in exchange for a railway and highway.
Demand for minerals has fueled Congo's conflicts for years, and experts say little has changed since a U.N. investigation concluded in 2001 that the fighting has been mainly about "access, control and trade" of five key resources: diamonds, copper, cobalt, gold and coltan, which is used in cell phones and laptops.
As (I believe) I've posted here before, the problems in the DRC are not, as this article describes "drawing in" other African nations. They are inextricably linked to the problems in the other nations of the Great Lakes region. The (second) Rwandan genocide, which began April 6, 1994, the current Rwandan government's response to it, and Paul Kagame's plans for development and regional interaction are as much at fault as any other factor. The insular reactions and failure to process and address the problems in this region as regional problems is the greatest challenge of all. After all the oppression and divisiveness of European colonization, there has been a little-ceasing procession of conflict which has moved from one nation to another because of familial ties and fueled by unbelievable circumstances. Rwanda's (and Burundi's) independence and the violence incited and permitted by the last waves of "divide and conquer" politics played by the exiting colonialists is the real proximate cause of the regional conflict (the ultimate cause is, and has always been resources, and I'll get to that). This involved attempts by the Tutsi class-turned-ethnic-group, who had previously been in power under the colonial government to return to power after the selfsame colonists tried to prevent Tutsi moves toward independence by raising the status and feeding the resentment and fear of the Hutu majority the colonists (German and then Belgian) had previously suppressed through their policies. After denying them education and land and political, economic, and social agency, the colonists then place the blame wholly on the Tutsi ruling elite they had created and reinforced. A region that had once been full of local principalities with a complex and intertwining social structure had become a nation divided into two ethnic groups nursed and weaned on rancor.
Their independence was surrounded by an assault by the risen Hutu on their former Tutsi rulers and thousands upon thousands were murdered. Many of those who survived fled to neighboring states, and brought their divisions and their fear and their need for vengeance. In Burundi in particular, this inspired local Tutsi to unite, inspired by the fear that Burundian Hutu would take cue from their Rwandan brothers and complete the elimination of the Tutsi. Because of the policies that were developed from this fear, they unsuccessfully attempted just that. Strengthened by their defeat of the Hutu in Burundi, Tutsi refugees across the region began to yearn for a return to Rwanda and political overthrow.
I've been through this before, and you probably know well the story I've told you of the birth of the Rwandan genocide. And, you know a little something of the history since, and I don't want to get too bogged down in rehashing it again and again.
Violence breeds violence. The recycling and reshifting of armies and refugees and blame and vengeance and fear and hate is wrapped tightly in a region of economic instability bred out of the old, familiar post-colonial lack of infrastructure and dependence on cash-crops and resource mining. Nations cannot be built on raw goods export. People cannot prosper when they must purchase everything they need. Even in "developed" nations, when a region is bereft of industry and refinement and held prey of importers, the people turn to political and military strife.
Peace will not come to the DRC until the governments of their neighbors take responsibility for their problems and separate their policies from punishing others for the mistakes of the past that have left everyone in emotional and financial ruin. Peace will not come to the DRC until the international community, both within and without Africa, makes a concerted effort to improve the humanitarian state in these nations and demonstrate clearly that no one will need to kill to feed their families. Peace will not come to the DRC until those in power realize and own their selfishness and begin to see that they are killing their people. The problems in the Great Lakes are not "tribal warfare." They are, ultimately, resource wars. They are built upon the theft of resources from the people at a low, internationally friendly price, and fed by the hundreds of years of history of the same.
These conflicts are as much the product of Low Wal-Mart Prices! as they are of everything else. And, no, I don't mean Wal-Mart in particular. The unfortunate reality is that Marx, as much as his insights have been twisted and as much history lies in that giant can of worms, had a powerful critique that remains true today. When I make something I don't need much of and you make something I don't have and you don't need much of, we can trade our goods for what we lack. But, what if there's an additional thing I want? I can't give all my resources to you. I have to trade it to you for more of your resource so I have more than I need still that I can trade to someone else for more of their resource. Then, I have more and you have less. But, eventually, you're not going to be happy if I keep requiring more for my goods. So, instead, I'll need to stop making it myself and find someone else who can make it for less. Then I can sell it to you for the same and still make more. But, even though now you and I are more even and better off, someone is still not being paid as well as they could be. And, that's my fault. Marx warned that unchecked profiteering would result in a class war. What he didn't count on was the degree of globalization and the outsourcing of our lowest working classes.
I don't believe we're playing a zero-sum game. At least, I really hope we're not. I don't think globalization in and of itself is at fault. Rather, global exploitation without regard for the effects abroad is. I think we can have a global market of specialization without creating (or rather, maintaining) a small sphere of peace, stability, and wealth and increasingly large spheres of increased instability, poverty, disease, and conflict. I also hope that profit is not inherently harmful, not because I greatly desire to give you something at a greater cost than you can make it yourself, but because so many people do. So much of this world is fed on getting ahead and having more, but it's never just having more than we had before, it's having more than our neighbors. It isn't consumerism or stuff that requires that for some to have more others have to have less. We really are reaching a time and a world in which the old laws of scarcity have little relevance on what can actually be attained. Partly because of international development and increasing specialization (instead of trying to grow food everywhere, we can grow it only where it grows best and then ship it everywhere else, etc) and partly because of rapidly improving technology, the old ideas of what can be achieved and where the ceiling lies have all been shattered. While there were many causes of the American Great Depression, the last straw of the market crash is the most cited. But, it was two days (day-before-yesterday-and-the-day-before-that in 1929) of a less than 13% drop of around 30 points each (Dow, the S&P drops were 29.94%). 30 points. Over the last month, that same Dow has lost 15% and 1,699 points (S&P 27.2%).
The phenomenal differences of money and cost and resources and agency and opportunity between then and now are nothing short of world-changing. And, oh how our world has changed. There was a first world then, too, but it really didn't include the whole of any nation. There was a clear ruling elite, regardless of political efforts to the contrary. The distance between the exceptionally rich and the everyday (not to mention the exceptionally poor) was smaller then in figures, but larger by degree. While our modern American middle class seems to be slowly disappearing (or at least losing its middle), it really didn't exist at all before. The elite of yesteryear and the elite of today are not the same group of people. The elite of yesteryear were frozen and inherited and have, frankly, disappeared themselves... at least globally. Regionally is a different matter.
But, I've gotten quite sidetracked. What I'm getting at is this. It's not any scarcity of resources that mandates that only a very few can have everything they desire and the rest will have to fight for what they need. I really think that idea has passed into obsolescence. Today, we have the capacity to ensure that everyone is capable of having the skills to work for what they need and then working that extra bit for what they desire. There may always be "richer" and "poorer," but that truly driven by presence or lack of desire for "more." There is no longer a need or a place for "rich" and "poor" driven by an impossible lack of sufficient necessities.
As such, the only thing that continues to result in starvation and poverty and resource wars is greed and greed alone. But it's not just the greed of "local warlords." It's the greed of the rest of us too. The unfortunate reality of globalization, and the powerful magic of it, is that we can no longer blame the problems of "others" on themselves alone. When China buys mineral rights in DRC at a loss to those citizens in order to sell it to Americans at a low enough price that everyone who wants one can have that 85" television they don't need (let's leave it at 'a 35" TV would really be sufficient') and still make the multinational holding company CEOs rich enough to buy that 20th property they will never actually use and enough coke to build enough drama to replace the effort that life used to require, all while leaving citizens in the DRC unable to grow food on their land now polluted by mining refuse and blood spilt and crowded with war by those angered at the whole trade (and their inability to grow food and raise their children safely), it's no longer the fault of those who fail to grow food.
What we have missed and what we continue to ignore is that globalization and specialization are magic. They can lift all of us. But they are limited. They can only lift those who have enough resources (either primary or manufactured) enough to trade and an initial capital of skilled and educated citizens; infrastructure capable of managing resources, trade, and social services; and sufficient financial resources to participate in the trade of resources and goods. With all the raw materials in the world, you can't begin to profit and grow without enough money to buy in to the system. Workers need pay and food and safety and tools and traders need vehicles and roads and offices before you can bring your goods to market. But, many of these nations are so bereft of finances, that those in power sell their rights and potential for instant subsistence leaving their people with no future and no way out. In those situations, there is no recourse but a violent search for immediate power so that you and yours can benefit from the immediate subsistence pay-off instead of the last guy. They're not fighting over the future; they're fighting over the present. They need a present to build the future, and they need to stop blaming it on the past. Their present is very much caused by our present. Yes, the cycle is continuous, but it is not causative. It is only fuel for a fire started far away.
There is hope. And there is already a solution. We have already seen the power of free public education to create and build economic and social stability and birth political agency. We are beginning to see the seemingly miraculous power of micro-credit investment. We already know the potential of infrastructure building and what clearly happens when we fail to ensure it. What we don't seem to know yet is how to begin to reassure and placate a population at war long enough to institute these measures. It's not because they are base and immoral people, it's because they've been fighting for what they need so long that they cannot believe there is another way to achieve their ends.
But there has to be a way, and I know for certain that the secret is sufficient political will. You and I have to care enough to demand that we do something about it. You and I need to realize that going without that $5 cup of coffee every single day in order to pay just a little more taxes to stabilize our spending and permit increased humanitarian investment is not stealing our precious livelihood. You and I got to where we are and the desks we sit at and the clothes we wear and the coffee we drink and the computers and cell phones we use to push air around for our living because we've been purchasing goods made affordable through the exploitation of these people.
The people in the DRC are dying because of you and me. Globalization has made it our problem. It's not fun to read. It's not fun to think about it. It doesn't give us warm fuzzies like the movies that show us a single evil native warlord who kills people and can be defeated. But, the truth is that we have to defeat our own boundless grasping selfishness in order to correct the wrongs of the past. No, it isn't my fault that royal-controlled Belgian colonists began a crusade of theft and pillaging and human exploitation. But I have benefited from it, and it is my responsibility to correct the suffering that is happening now. And, it is most certainly my fault that I purchased a cell phone because it was cheaper and more convenient than a land phone and that said cell phone has materials that came from the bloody hands of this process. Somewhere, there is a miner who got a meal because I bought my cell phone. But somewhere else there is a family starving and a child kidnapped into a militia and another family murdered by that militia because the company that mined that material for my cell phone isn't owned by or for the benefit of the people in that country.
The solution isn't to not buy cell phones. The solution is to demand change and to demand effort and to actually be willing to fight for it and pay for it yourself. Our government in this great nation of the United States is ours to run and ours to control, like so many other fortunate developed nations. Their policies will reflect what we demand, if we care enough to demand it. We must vote for people who care enough. We must call them every day until they build enough Federal will to do something. We must work and strive toward an academic community directed at solving our problems and a policy structure hungry to implement those solutions. And then, we need to build and develop international consensus and cooperation instead of fighting for still more 'me first' filth. Then and only then will we repay the debt that our success has brought upon us and create a truly free market in which everyone has the agency and the potential for participation.
It's not, unfortunately, that the violence is new or that it's profoundly different than what's been going on for years and years, but, I guess with the American election winding down, there's just not enough "exciting" news and we have time to look back to all that horrible "tribal" stuff in Africa. When will they ever just learn to be "civilized" and stop fighting? Poor journalists. This is such a downer.
Please.
In case the internet filter is too opaque, I'm not serious.
Conflict reveals flaws in U.N. peacekeeper force
The refugees watched in anger as the U.N. tanks headed away from the battlefield and the Tutsi rebels they were supposed to be stopping.
"Where are they going? They're supposed to protect us!" shouted Jean-Paul Maombi, a 31-year-old nurse who had fled his village because of the violence. Nearby, young men hurled rocks at the U.N. troops.
The quick unraveling of the world's largest U.N. peacekeeping effort has come as no surprise to the mission's critics, who complain the force was unprepared for its main task - protecting civilians from the war.
...
(Read more.)
Oh hey. That's not really new either.
The UN Peacekeepers, as sharp and snappy as their blue berets are, have long been fraught with supreme incompetence. But, one must ask what the source of this really is.
Is it that they're poor soldiers?
Not likely.
Is it that they're base and immoral people?
Some of them, maybe, but those tend to be actively mistreating those they're supposed to be defending instead of just failing to defend them.
Is it because they have no real mandate to do anything unless they themselves are fired upon?
Unfortunately, not this time.
Is it because there's no real political will from the UN or from the countries where the troops originate?
Absolutely.
(from the above source)
Fewer than 6,000 of the mission's 17,000 troops are deployed in North Kivu, the site of the current fighting, because unrest in other provinces has required their presence elsewhere, the U.N. says. By comparison, rebel leader Laurent Nkunda commands about 10,000 fighters.
Alan Doss, the top U.N. envoy in Congo, said the U.N. troops have performed "really with great distinction," but are stretched to the limit and need reinforcements quickly.
The inability to protect civilians is particularly frustrating for the U.N. mission in Congo, which got a strong mandate, including the power to use force, in part because of lessons learned in Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia and other regions of Congo, where failure to prevent civilian killings became a mark of shame.
...
Perhaps most fundamental is the complexity of the mandate handed to the force, known by the French acronym MONUC. The peacekeepers have been charged with simultaneously protecting civilians, disarming rebel fighters and policing buffer zones separating the insurgents from government troops.
"I think the sense is that they've really been hung out to dry," said Erin Weir, the peacekeeping advocate in Goma for Washington-based Refugees International. "The U.N. Security Council handed MONUC an exceptionally complex set of tasks to accomplish, but never came through with the resources or the political support to get the job done."
'No coherent army'
The mission also has been charged with supporting a ragtag Congolese force of 30,000 soldiers cobbled together from a defeated national army and several of the rebel groups who vanquished it in 1996.
"Our mandate tells us to support an army that doesn't exit," one U.N. official told The Associated Press recently, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media. "There is no coherent army."
The DRC has been a place of recurring oppression, violence, and atrocity since King Leopold made it his own private hunting ground. I hope I don't have to tell you that his game wasn't of the four-legged variety. It was human strife.
The U.N. renewed the Congo mission's mandate and expanded it in December 2007, empowering the peacekeepers to use force to disarm Nkunda's fighters, but saying they must give priority to protecting civilians.
In January, the mission was asked under a regional peace deal to police buffer zones to separate the Congo army from areas controlled by Nkunda's Tutsi rebels.
...
But they were also charged to work alongside the Congolese army to disarm Rwandan Hutu militiamen who fled to Congo after perpetrating the 1994 Rwandan genocide that killed half a million Tutsis. Complicating matters, these same militiamen had sometimes been used as irregular reinforcements in Congo's army, whose soldiers include many Hutus.
That mandate has caused Rwanda, Nkunda and at least one non-government organization to accuse the peacekeepers of aiding and abetting those behind the Rwandan genocide.
Nkunda said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press Thursday that he wants direct talks with the government to discuss security in the region, as well as his objections to a $5 billion deal that gives China access to the country's vast mineral riches in exchange for a railway and highway.
Demand for minerals has fueled Congo's conflicts for years, and experts say little has changed since a U.N. investigation concluded in 2001 that the fighting has been mainly about "access, control and trade" of five key resources: diamonds, copper, cobalt, gold and coltan, which is used in cell phones and laptops.
As (I believe) I've posted here before, the problems in the DRC are not, as this article describes "drawing in" other African nations. They are inextricably linked to the problems in the other nations of the Great Lakes region. The (second) Rwandan genocide, which began April 6, 1994, the current Rwandan government's response to it, and Paul Kagame's plans for development and regional interaction are as much at fault as any other factor. The insular reactions and failure to process and address the problems in this region as regional problems is the greatest challenge of all. After all the oppression and divisiveness of European colonization, there has been a little-ceasing procession of conflict which has moved from one nation to another because of familial ties and fueled by unbelievable circumstances. Rwanda's (and Burundi's) independence and the violence incited and permitted by the last waves of "divide and conquer" politics played by the exiting colonialists is the real proximate cause of the regional conflict (the ultimate cause is, and has always been resources, and I'll get to that). This involved attempts by the Tutsi class-turned-ethnic-group, who had previously been in power under the colonial government to return to power after the selfsame colonists tried to prevent Tutsi moves toward independence by raising the status and feeding the resentment and fear of the Hutu majority the colonists (German and then Belgian) had previously suppressed through their policies. After denying them education and land and political, economic, and social agency, the colonists then place the blame wholly on the Tutsi ruling elite they had created and reinforced. A region that had once been full of local principalities with a complex and intertwining social structure had become a nation divided into two ethnic groups nursed and weaned on rancor.
Their independence was surrounded by an assault by the risen Hutu on their former Tutsi rulers and thousands upon thousands were murdered. Many of those who survived fled to neighboring states, and brought their divisions and their fear and their need for vengeance. In Burundi in particular, this inspired local Tutsi to unite, inspired by the fear that Burundian Hutu would take cue from their Rwandan brothers and complete the elimination of the Tutsi. Because of the policies that were developed from this fear, they unsuccessfully attempted just that. Strengthened by their defeat of the Hutu in Burundi, Tutsi refugees across the region began to yearn for a return to Rwanda and political overthrow.
I've been through this before, and you probably know well the story I've told you of the birth of the Rwandan genocide. And, you know a little something of the history since, and I don't want to get too bogged down in rehashing it again and again.
Violence breeds violence. The recycling and reshifting of armies and refugees and blame and vengeance and fear and hate is wrapped tightly in a region of economic instability bred out of the old, familiar post-colonial lack of infrastructure and dependence on cash-crops and resource mining. Nations cannot be built on raw goods export. People cannot prosper when they must purchase everything they need. Even in "developed" nations, when a region is bereft of industry and refinement and held prey of importers, the people turn to political and military strife.
Peace will not come to the DRC until the governments of their neighbors take responsibility for their problems and separate their policies from punishing others for the mistakes of the past that have left everyone in emotional and financial ruin. Peace will not come to the DRC until the international community, both within and without Africa, makes a concerted effort to improve the humanitarian state in these nations and demonstrate clearly that no one will need to kill to feed their families. Peace will not come to the DRC until those in power realize and own their selfishness and begin to see that they are killing their people. The problems in the Great Lakes are not "tribal warfare." They are, ultimately, resource wars. They are built upon the theft of resources from the people at a low, internationally friendly price, and fed by the hundreds of years of history of the same.
These conflicts are as much the product of Low Wal-Mart Prices! as they are of everything else. And, no, I don't mean Wal-Mart in particular. The unfortunate reality is that Marx, as much as his insights have been twisted and as much history lies in that giant can of worms, had a powerful critique that remains true today. When I make something I don't need much of and you make something I don't have and you don't need much of, we can trade our goods for what we lack. But, what if there's an additional thing I want? I can't give all my resources to you. I have to trade it to you for more of your resource so I have more than I need still that I can trade to someone else for more of their resource. Then, I have more and you have less. But, eventually, you're not going to be happy if I keep requiring more for my goods. So, instead, I'll need to stop making it myself and find someone else who can make it for less. Then I can sell it to you for the same and still make more. But, even though now you and I are more even and better off, someone is still not being paid as well as they could be. And, that's my fault. Marx warned that unchecked profiteering would result in a class war. What he didn't count on was the degree of globalization and the outsourcing of our lowest working classes.
I don't believe we're playing a zero-sum game. At least, I really hope we're not. I don't think globalization in and of itself is at fault. Rather, global exploitation without regard for the effects abroad is. I think we can have a global market of specialization without creating (or rather, maintaining) a small sphere of peace, stability, and wealth and increasingly large spheres of increased instability, poverty, disease, and conflict. I also hope that profit is not inherently harmful, not because I greatly desire to give you something at a greater cost than you can make it yourself, but because so many people do. So much of this world is fed on getting ahead and having more, but it's never just having more than we had before, it's having more than our neighbors. It isn't consumerism or stuff that requires that for some to have more others have to have less. We really are reaching a time and a world in which the old laws of scarcity have little relevance on what can actually be attained. Partly because of international development and increasing specialization (instead of trying to grow food everywhere, we can grow it only where it grows best and then ship it everywhere else, etc) and partly because of rapidly improving technology, the old ideas of what can be achieved and where the ceiling lies have all been shattered. While there were many causes of the American Great Depression, the last straw of the market crash is the most cited. But, it was two days (day-before-yesterday-and-the-day-before-that in 1929) of a less than 13% drop of around 30 points each (Dow, the S&P drops were 29.94%). 30 points. Over the last month, that same Dow has lost 15% and 1,699 points (S&P 27.2%).
The phenomenal differences of money and cost and resources and agency and opportunity between then and now are nothing short of world-changing. And, oh how our world has changed. There was a first world then, too, but it really didn't include the whole of any nation. There was a clear ruling elite, regardless of political efforts to the contrary. The distance between the exceptionally rich and the everyday (not to mention the exceptionally poor) was smaller then in figures, but larger by degree. While our modern American middle class seems to be slowly disappearing (or at least losing its middle), it really didn't exist at all before. The elite of yesteryear and the elite of today are not the same group of people. The elite of yesteryear were frozen and inherited and have, frankly, disappeared themselves... at least globally. Regionally is a different matter.
But, I've gotten quite sidetracked. What I'm getting at is this. It's not any scarcity of resources that mandates that only a very few can have everything they desire and the rest will have to fight for what they need. I really think that idea has passed into obsolescence. Today, we have the capacity to ensure that everyone is capable of having the skills to work for what they need and then working that extra bit for what they desire. There may always be "richer" and "poorer," but that truly driven by presence or lack of desire for "more." There is no longer a need or a place for "rich" and "poor" driven by an impossible lack of sufficient necessities.
As such, the only thing that continues to result in starvation and poverty and resource wars is greed and greed alone. But it's not just the greed of "local warlords." It's the greed of the rest of us too. The unfortunate reality of globalization, and the powerful magic of it, is that we can no longer blame the problems of "others" on themselves alone. When China buys mineral rights in DRC at a loss to those citizens in order to sell it to Americans at a low enough price that everyone who wants one can have that 85" television they don't need (let's leave it at 'a 35" TV would really be sufficient') and still make the multinational holding company CEOs rich enough to buy that 20th property they will never actually use and enough coke to build enough drama to replace the effort that life used to require, all while leaving citizens in the DRC unable to grow food on their land now polluted by mining refuse and blood spilt and crowded with war by those angered at the whole trade (and their inability to grow food and raise their children safely), it's no longer the fault of those who fail to grow food.
What we have missed and what we continue to ignore is that globalization and specialization are magic. They can lift all of us. But they are limited. They can only lift those who have enough resources (either primary or manufactured) enough to trade and an initial capital of skilled and educated citizens; infrastructure capable of managing resources, trade, and social services; and sufficient financial resources to participate in the trade of resources and goods. With all the raw materials in the world, you can't begin to profit and grow without enough money to buy in to the system. Workers need pay and food and safety and tools and traders need vehicles and roads and offices before you can bring your goods to market. But, many of these nations are so bereft of finances, that those in power sell their rights and potential for instant subsistence leaving their people with no future and no way out. In those situations, there is no recourse but a violent search for immediate power so that you and yours can benefit from the immediate subsistence pay-off instead of the last guy. They're not fighting over the future; they're fighting over the present. They need a present to build the future, and they need to stop blaming it on the past. Their present is very much caused by our present. Yes, the cycle is continuous, but it is not causative. It is only fuel for a fire started far away.
There is hope. And there is already a solution. We have already seen the power of free public education to create and build economic and social stability and birth political agency. We are beginning to see the seemingly miraculous power of micro-credit investment. We already know the potential of infrastructure building and what clearly happens when we fail to ensure it. What we don't seem to know yet is how to begin to reassure and placate a population at war long enough to institute these measures. It's not because they are base and immoral people, it's because they've been fighting for what they need so long that they cannot believe there is another way to achieve their ends.
But there has to be a way, and I know for certain that the secret is sufficient political will. You and I have to care enough to demand that we do something about it. You and I need to realize that going without that $5 cup of coffee every single day in order to pay just a little more taxes to stabilize our spending and permit increased humanitarian investment is not stealing our precious livelihood. You and I got to where we are and the desks we sit at and the clothes we wear and the coffee we drink and the computers and cell phones we use to push air around for our living because we've been purchasing goods made affordable through the exploitation of these people.
The people in the DRC are dying because of you and me. Globalization has made it our problem. It's not fun to read. It's not fun to think about it. It doesn't give us warm fuzzies like the movies that show us a single evil native warlord who kills people and can be defeated. But, the truth is that we have to defeat our own boundless grasping selfishness in order to correct the wrongs of the past. No, it isn't my fault that royal-controlled Belgian colonists began a crusade of theft and pillaging and human exploitation. But I have benefited from it, and it is my responsibility to correct the suffering that is happening now. And, it is most certainly my fault that I purchased a cell phone because it was cheaper and more convenient than a land phone and that said cell phone has materials that came from the bloody hands of this process. Somewhere, there is a miner who got a meal because I bought my cell phone. But somewhere else there is a family starving and a child kidnapped into a militia and another family murdered by that militia because the company that mined that material for my cell phone isn't owned by or for the benefit of the people in that country.
The solution isn't to not buy cell phones. The solution is to demand change and to demand effort and to actually be willing to fight for it and pay for it yourself. Our government in this great nation of the United States is ours to run and ours to control, like so many other fortunate developed nations. Their policies will reflect what we demand, if we care enough to demand it. We must vote for people who care enough. We must call them every day until they build enough Federal will to do something. We must work and strive toward an academic community directed at solving our problems and a policy structure hungry to implement those solutions. And then, we need to build and develop international consensus and cooperation instead of fighting for still more 'me first' filth. Then and only then will we repay the debt that our success has brought upon us and create a truly free market in which everyone has the agency and the potential for participation.