Intervention as indirect rule: civil war and statebuilding in the Democratic Republic of Congo, by Alex Veit, Frankfurt and New York, Campus Verlag, 2010, 300 pp., £31.50, ISBN 978-3593393117
In recent years, several new books have sought to explain armed conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. While these books have provided great insight into the complex international and internal conflicts in Congo, they have tended to focus on Congo's Kivu provinces and to neglect war in other areas of the country, such as the Ituri District of Orientale Province. Alex Veit's book on war and intervention in Ituri is a good first step in filling this gap.
The story of war and peace in Ituri provides an interesting case for examining ‘the relationships between armed groups and international interventions, as well as … externally steered statebuilding projects after civil war’ (p. 23). Veit uses the term ‘Congo wars’ (p. 110) to refer to the polywar of international and internal conflicts that have taken place in Congo since 1996. In Ituri, these conflicts were Uganda's interstate war against the Congolese government, intercommunal conflicts, conflicts among non-state armed groups, and civil wars pitting the Congolese state against regional and Iturian armed groups. The international intervention – which included deploying 4800 UN troops to bring peace to a rugged area more than double the size of Belgium – faced numerous obstacles and was not without scandal, but succeeded by late 2007 in producing a fragile peace in most parts of Ituri, which continues in late 2011.
Veit is one of the few academics to have ventured into Ituri during the war (he conducted three trips totaling five months between late 2005 and mid 2008), and is the only one who has produced a book exclusively on Ituri. The book covers considerable historical ground, but focuses on the nature of international intervention after 2003. Veit's main argument is that intervention sought to create direct rule in Ituri, but instead reinforced historical patterns of indirect rule. Through a central theoretical framework of figurational sociology, Veit explores relationships and power differentials among three actor groups: non-state armed groups; intervention organisations, especially the United Nations Organisation Mission in Congo (MONUC); and Congolese groups including governments and non-governmental organisations. Veit addresses the fourth major actor group in Ituri – the Ugandan and Rwandan governments – only superficially.
Veit's book has several strengths that make it relevant to those interested in peacekeeping, post-conflict development, and politics in Congo and Ituri. In addition to its theoretical exploration of the structure and effects of international intervention, it provides a useful account of Ituri's history, the strongest part of which is the description of precolonial ethnic relations (pp. 58–67). It includes interesting biographies of Ituri's main armed group leaders (pp. 126–134), and tells the little-known story of the emergence and failure of a veterans' organisation following demobilisation (pp. 163–169). Veit also sheds light on the abuses and shortcomings of the Congolese army (Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo – FARDC) in Ituri, particularly during the critical period of 2005–06, when MONUC worked closely with FARDC to defeat Ituri's armed groups and pacify the district (pp. 220–235).
Overall, Veit is very critical of the international intervention in Ituri, which he claims ‘has reconstructed, strengthened and modified patterns of indirect rule’ (p. 239). While acknowledging that intervention ended the brutal war in Ituri, he asserts ‘those societal groups in need of a more just, equitable and calculable political structure may well have been done a disservice by the international statebuilding project’ (p. 239). Veit has a valid point, but places too much blame on international staff within Ituri, and does not analyse how national politics and geopolitics affected statebuilding in Congo and Ituri. Decisions taken by President Kabila in Kinshasa – namely to postpone local elections, to forego making Ituri a province, and to appoint Kabila loyalists to ‘run’ Ituri and Orientale Province – arguably have more to do with the deplorable state of rule in Ituri than the statebuilding efforts of MONUC and other international actors.
Empirical lapses undermine other arguments about the shortcomings of intervention in Ituri. For example, in discussing factors that negatively affected peacebuilding, Veit accuses MONUC staff of having a ‘fear of local society’ because staff drove cars and stayed in secured compounds (p. 199); however, he does not adequately discuss just how dangerous Ituri was between 2003 and 2007 (particularly after dusk), or otherwise evaluate whether heightened security measures were justified. Veit is critical of international distrust of local actors due to perceived corruption (pp. 217–220), but he never addresses the extent to which local actors were – or were not – corrupt; i.e. whether this distrust was grounded in reality.
Other problems relate to Veit's account of war in Ituri. His description of the first and second Congo wars lacks depth (pp. 111–116), and he unfortunately repeats a flawed but popular narrative about the start of the intercommunal war in 1999, i.e. that greedy Hema businessmen hired the Ugandan army to evict Lendu villagers from their land (pp. 123, 127). The start of the war was in fact much more complex, including provocations orchestrated by both Hema and Lendu elites. Veit had a self-acknowledged ‘urban bias’ in his fieldwork (p. 34), and did not travel to northern Djugu territory to investigate the war's origins.
While Veit is mainly concerned with exploring the theoretical aspects of international intervention, he also states: ‘The key policy lesson of this study… [is] to strengthen and create mutual dependencies between interventionists, local representatives, and society’ (p. 255). Regardless of the book's shortcomings, this is a sound prescription.