The toll from Typhoon Morakot continues to rise as huge mudslides bury a rural village in south-central Taiwan and seven apartment buildings in coastal China, leaving hundreds of people unaccounted for.

Afghan authorities hire 10,000 tribesmen to Afghanistan’s protect insurgency-hit provinces during the election on August 10. Since Monday, several more NATO troops and civilians have been killed, including three U.S. troops, a Polish NATO soldier, two Afghan soldiers, at least nine civilians and 22 Taliban insurgents.

Kuwaiti officials say they have arrested six members of a “terrorist network” linked to al Qaeda who were planning to attack a U.S. military base that is a logistics hub for U.S. troops in Iraq. An interior ministry statement says that all six Kuwaitis had confessed to the crimes after they were arrested.

Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, presses for an end to violence against women in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Aid workers estimate that as many as 400 women are raped every month in Eastern Congo — a region that has seen two wars and a variety of militia since the end of the 1994 genocide in neighboring Rwanda.

Below are the stories of nine refugees. They’ve fled the war in Iraq, genocide in Rwanda, and religious persecution in Tibet. They’ve disguised themselves as bus drivers and fishermen, hiked through the Himalayas, and lived in the jungle. Click on a face to hear that person recall their journey.

If you are a refugee, we want to hear the story of your journey. Tell your story in the comments section below or email WideAngle@thirteen.org to learn how to contribute a video.

Taliban militants, occupying Buner in northwestern Pakistan, are withdrawing to their stronghold in the Swat Valley.

Over sixty people are killed in a suicide bomb attack at a shrine in western Baghdad.

Five children are killed and hundreds of homes burned by Hutu rebels in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has estimated that the forestry sector now accounts for about 17% of greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere. The REDD pilot participants hope to reduce greenhouse gas emissions both by using forest vegetation as a “carbon sink” to absorb excess amounts of carbon dioxide and by avoiding pollutants released during “slash and burn” clearing fires used to create fields for agriculture or livestock. The countries plan to employ local residents to monitor the forests’ health, thus providing economic benefits to the communities involved. Once an accounting method is agreed upon to determine how much carbon is being saved, REDD projects may be able to sell carbon credits to polluting nations to offset their emissions.

In 2008, WIDE ANGLE’s Burning Season reported on the attempts of carbon entrepreneur, Dorjee Sun, to protect Indonesia’s rainforests while making a profit for his investors.

Ten years after the Rome Treaty was signed to establish the International Criminal Court, the ICC brought its first case to trial in The Hague. Thomas Lubanga faces six charges of recruiting and using hundreds of child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo between 2002 and 2003.

The case is a litmus test for the competence and focus of the ICC. “It will demonstrate that the Court can do what it says it is going to do,” said John L. Washburn of the American Non-Governmental Organizations Coalition for the International Criminal Court (AMICC), a group that is committed to full U.S. support for the ICC.

Despite 108 countries ratifying the ICC, the United States has refused to do so. The Bush administration withdrew President Clinton’s signature of the Rome Treaty, and subsequently cut off aid to 35 countries because they refused to promise American citizens immunity from the court. Washburn and others hope that the new Obama Administration will change U.S. policy toward the ICC.

“The U.S. military has long has had deep concerns about the court, that it would be used to harass U.S. military officials and soldiers,” said Washburn. “The Obama administration is sensitive to that.” But Washburn is hoping for a “cautious openness” to the ICC by the Obama Administration.

In a written questionnaire in October 2007, Obama said, “The Court has pursued charges only in cases of the most serious and systemic crimes and it is in America’s interests that these most heinous of criminals, like the perpetrators of the genocide in Darfur, are held accountable.” The international court is expected to issue an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir early this year.

In the film Media by Milosevic, WIDE ANGLE speaks with Ambassador Pierre-Richard Prosper of the Office of War Crimes Issues about U.S. opposition to the International Criminal Court. WIDE ANGLE visits the Democratic Republic of Congo in Democracy in the Rough, and explores the issue of child soldiers in Lord’s Children.

War-ravaged Congo has the globe’s highest incidence of rape, with recorded victims ranging from as young as two months to as old as 83 years. Major General Patrick Cammaert, former deputy UN force commander in the D.R.C., has said that “It has probably become more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in armed conflict.” Rape victims are frequently infected with HIV by the rapist, and their reproductive organs are often completely destroyed. The psychological scars are profound, to say the least. As for the social repercussions, rape survivors in Congo are considered outcasts, often rejected as “dirtied” and thrown out of their homes by their shamed fathers or husbands.

Rape has become so dangerous in conflict zones around the world that a special session of the U.N. Security Council last June passed Resolution 1820 to demand “the immediate and complete cessation by all parties to armed conflict of all acts of sexual violence against civilians,” noting that “women and girls are particularly targeted by the use of sexual violence, including as a tactic of war to humiliate, dominate, instill fear in, disperse and/or forcibly relocate civilian members of a community or ethnic group.”

Dr. Mukwege, who appeared with Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes in August 2008, attempts to not only heal his victims, but also advocate for their rights on the global stage. This February, he will pair up with “Vagina Monologues” creator Eve Ensler on a five city tour across the United States to raise awareness about violence against women and girls in the D.R.C. and to fund raise for a new safe house for rape victims at his hospital.

WIDE ANGLE reported from Congo in the 2006 film Democracy in the Rough.

But over the weekend LRA spokesman David Matsanga delivered a letter to U.N. mediator Joachim Chissano calling for a truce.

After 20 years of conflict during which time the people of Northern Uganda were brutally terrorized by the LRA, the rebel group was finally pushed out of Uganda but continues to operate in Congo, Sudan, and the Central African Republic. Peace talks were initiated in Juba, Southern Sudan in 2006, but have failed and been restarted repeatedly because LRA leader Joseph Kony consistently refuses to sign a peace agreement until a 2005 indictment against him from the International Criminal Court is lifted.

The most recent breakdown in talks, this past December, prompted the creation of a joint campaign among the Southern Sudanese, Congolese, and Ugandan forces–Operation Lightning Thunder–whose aim was to defeat and dismantle the LRA. In response, the LRA launched its recent campaign of violence–including targeting churches on Christmas day, killing 254 people in nine villages. But Kony escaped capture and is reportedly headed to the Central African Republic. Operation Lightening Thunder’s forces have already obtained permission to follow him.

After two years of obstructing the peace talks it would seem that Kony is finally willing to cooperate. However, Julia Spiegel, a policy analyst with The Enough Project who works and lives in Uganda, doesn’t hold much stock in the LRA’s call for a ceasefire.

“It’s relatively meaningless. Matsanga’s just trying to turn down the heat on the LRA,” Spiegel said.

And the LRA’s actions seem to confirm this theory. While Matsanga was seeking a truce on behalf of the LRA, 100 members of the LRA raided two towns in northeastern Congo killing twenty-two people.

It’s estimated that there are about 600 members of the LRA roaming around Eastern Congo and Southern Sudan many of whom were abducted as children and haven’t known anything else.

“What needs to happen now is that they need to apprehend the key members of the LRA,” Spiegel said, referring to the rebel leader Joseph Kony and two of his cohorts Okot Odhiambo and Dominic Ongwen who have also been indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court.

An estimated 25,000 children were abducted and taken into the LRA’s ranks during 20 years of conflict in Uganda. In Lord’s Children, WIDE ANGLE meets former child soldiers from the LRA who are trying to put their lives back together.

In late September this year The New York Times reported positive news from Eastern Congo, a volcanic region of great natural beauty, where ethnic violence has been commonplace for over a decade: tourists were trickling back to the area. But a little over a month later, the rebel leader Laurent Nkunda advanced on the city of Goma on the Congolese/Rwandan border, leading to a mass exodus of refugees from the city.

Nkunda, a renegade general of the Congolese Army, formed a brutal rebel group in Eastern Congo in the aftermath of the Rwandan Genocide in 1994. His stated raison d‘etre was to protect the minority Congolese-Tutsi population. Many ethnic Hutus also fled from Rwanda into Eastern Congo and formed their own militias, thus exacerbating existing ethnic tensions along the border.

This week, in an interview with the BBC, Nkunda said that he would overthrow the Congolese government unless they agree to talks with him.

In early October this year the UN peacekeeping mission in the Congo, MONUC, asked the Security Council for an additional 3,000 troops to help resolve the escalating crisis in Eastern Congo. Alain Le Roy, the head of UN peacekeeping, said yesterday that it was unlikely the Security Council would come to a decision about more troops before the end of the month.

WIDE ANGLE spoke with Anthony W. Gambino author of a recent Council on Foreign Relations report, Congo: Securing Peace, Sustaining Progress, about the crisis in Congo.

WIDE ANGLE: In your report, you talk about the strategic interests for the United States in Eastern Congo. What are these interests?

GAMBINO: I’ll start with one that is not regularly talked about, but now that we’re moving into an Obama Administration I suspect it will be talked about more.

The issue I want to start with is Climate Change. Congo has the second most important forest in the world after the Amazon. There is a forest called the Congo Basin Forest that stretches from the Congo all the way across Western Africa to Gabon. It’s a huge forest but about half of it is in the Democratic Republic of Congo. That forest is relatively unspoiled so in terms of all the benefits that this amazing stretch of trees brings, in terms functioning as a carbon sink, in terms of biodiversity, etc. we still have that as a global resource. If we would loose that, the impact on not just the Congo, not just Africa, but on the world would be enormous. This resources really needs to be preserved.

Second, the broader war that broke out in 1998 in the Congo, ultimately involving armies from Angola to Zimbabwe, destabilized most of sub-Saharan Africa. I think it’s pretty clear that that is something the United States absolutely doesn’t want. When you have countries that we are friendly toward like Angola and Rwanda on opposite sides fighting in the Congo that’s bad for Africa but it’s also bad for the United States. So a return to that kind of fighting is so clearly not in our interests that working to prevent it is very, very important.

WIDE ANGLE: How do you think U.S. policy toward the Congo will change with the new administration?

GAMBINO: The Security Council for reasons I don’t comprehend has not acted on the Secretary General’s request for 3000 additional forces, and it is not clear to me what exactly is happening. But I am very worried that our own government is not supporting this. I’ve certainly seen no positive signs by our government saying they wanted to see this happen. And I’m worried that we’re actually opposing it in the Security Council. And, in my view, if that were the case that would be unconscionable. I dearly hope, and various statements that we have seen during the campaign suggest, that an Obama Administration would be much more forward leaning in giving the United Nations the authority and tools it needs.

WIDE ANGLE: What power does MONUC — the UN Peacekeeping Mission in the Congo — have?

GAMBINO: MONUC’s capabilities have changed in the Congo. Since it was introduced to patrol ceasefire lines it has seen its mandate expanded as circumstances have changed in the Congo so that its mandate today is to, within its capabilities, protect the civilian population, including using deadly force if necessary, and to try to maintain the peace.

However, there’s a huge problem in the way their rules of engagement are presently constructed. They are supposed to do all this in support of the Congolese Army. However if you’ve been following the news reports out of the Congo, it’s clear as can be that the Congolese army is part of the problem. Number one they can’t fight, and number two they’re abusive.

They murder, they rape, so how can any force restore peace in Eastern Congo if their real role is to be working in support of this murderous group of thugs? So MONUC is hamstrung for that reason.

The theory is fine, the Congo is a sovereign state. Sovereign states have their own own army. We introduce an international force. The international force should be there to support that army and help it accomplish what it needs to accomplish which is to guarantee the territorial integrity of the states. The theory is fine. The practice is impossible when you have probably the worst army in the world.

WIDE ANGLE: How much of the conflict is about the mineral wealth in the region?

GAMBINO: There is no question that the existence of minerals that are very valuable fuels this conflict. But it is a mistake to say that the conflict is only about that. Those ethnic tensions are not about control of minerals. These parts of eastern Congo are lawless. There is no effective projection of control of territory by any legitimate group. That means that you have right now dozens of groups running around, and all they really need to do is control some gold mining, some tin pan mining, some diamond mining — all that stuff is all over the place. And how do you mine this stuff? You mine it with your hands or a shovel, that’s all you need. If you can control that, you can make plenty of money, and all the money you need to buy Kalashnikovs, maybe a machine gun or two, and if you can get some rocket propelled grenades, so much the better.

The Congo is one of the poorest countries in the world, so if you’re a young man and you’re thinking about what your opportunities are, unfortunately, it could look to you that becoming brutal and exercising control over some of these mining areas, that can look like a pretty good deal to you. And so we see that all over these conflict areas in Eastern Congo.

WIDE ANGLE: Has there been a resurgence in the use of child soldiers?

GAMBINO: That’s a hugely important point, because the unfortunate fact about Central Africa is that our concept and the international concept about child soldiers that it is illegitimate to use young boys as fighters is completely not accepted. All sides all throughout this conflict regularly use boys as young as ten or eleven years old. Why? They’re the best fighters around. Most of Nkunda’s fighters are kids. Everybody is using them, including the Congolese Army. They just don’t accept our international view of the illegitimacy of using children under the age of 18 as combatants.

This didn’t solve the problem of existing waste however, and in July the Peruvian government issued a state of emergency in the area, ordering the company to relocate the processing plant and tailing ponds. Gold Hawk now says the new facilities are ready for business, but is still waiting for a permit from the government before it can proceed. Storm clouds rumble in over the Andes and while the fate of the mine hangs in the balance, both shareholders and citizens of Lima are nervous about the outcome.

A variation on a theme, this scenario has been playing out from Congo to the Philippines: mining operations from the developed world move into ore-rich, but impoverished areas of developing countries. The issue is never as cut-and-dry as many environmentalists or corporate quarterly reports would have it seem. According to the UNDP, over half of Peru’s population lives under the national poverty line. When an international mining company sets up shop in such an area, they know they’re sure to be monitored by watchdog groups and accordingly draw up community relations plans. Promises of medical centers and literacy programs, as well as steady wages are no doubt attractive to residents whose local infrastructure may be lacking.

But when approving large-scale mining projects, nations must weigh jobs and community benefits against the potentially far-reaching costs of clean-up, should an environmental disaster occur. In 2000, a contractor working for Newmont Mining Corporation accidentally spilled 330 pounds of mercury near the small Peruvian town of Choropampa. The company’s resulting multi-million dollar mitigation efforts included health care for villagers who reported symptoms of mercury poisoning. The controversy over that mining operation leaves many Peruvians skeptical of new mining endeavors.

In the film Gold Futures, WIDE ANGLE visits a mining village in Romania where mineral wealth and badly-needed jobs compete with time-honored rural traditions and concerns about poisoning the environment.

IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF MR. KURTZ
Michela Wrong
Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins ©2000

The feeling struck home within seconds of disembarking.

When the motor-launch deposited me in the cacophony of the quayside, engine churning mats of water hyacinth as it turned to head back across the brown expanse of oily water that was the River Zaire, I was hit by the sensation that so unnerves first-time visitors to Africa. It is that revelatory moment when white, middle-class Westerners finally understand what the rest of humanity has always known — that there are places in this world where the safety net they have spent so much of their lives erecting is suddenly whipped away, where the right accent, right education, health insurance and a foreign passport — all the trappings of “It Can’t Happen to Me” — no longer apply, and their well-being depends on the condescension of strangers.

A Zairian rebel puts a poster of President Mobutu Sese Seko into a fire on main street in Goma, an eastern provincial capital, November 8, 1996. At that time Zairian rebels had taken over most of the Lake Kivu region of eastern Zaire with the intention of overthrowing Mobutu’s regime. Credit: AP/David Guttenfelder

The pulse of apprehension drummed as I stuffed my clothes back into the ageing suitcase that had chosen the river crossing between Brazzaville and Kinshasa as the moment to split at the seams, transforming me into a truly African traveler. It quickened as a sweating young British diplomat signally failed to talk our way through the red tape and a chain of hostile policemen picked through the intimacies of my luggage, deciding which bits to keep. It subsided as we emerged from our three-hour ordeal, a little the lighter, finally crossing the magic line separating the customs area from the city.

But in truth, the quiet thud of fear would be there throughout my time in Zaire, whether I was drinking a cold Primus beer in the bustling Cité or taking tea in the green calm of a notable’s patio. This ominous awareness of a world of infinite, sinister possibilities has become one of the dominant characteristics of the nation led by the man who started life as plain Joseph Désiré Mobutu, cook’s son, but reinvented himself as Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, “the all-powerful warrior who goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake.”

By the end of the mid-1990s, Mobutu had become more noticeable by his absence than by his presence, a tall, gravel-voiced figure glimpsed occasionally at official ceremonies and airport walkabouts in Kinshasa, or fielding hostile questions at a rare press conference in France with a sardonic politeness that hinted at huge world-weariness. Rattled by the army riots that had twice devastated his cities, belatedly registering the extent to which he was hated, he had withdrawn from a resentful capital to the safety of Gbadolite, his palace in the depths of the equatorial forest, to nurse his paranoia.

His impassive portrait, decked in comic-opera uniform, kept watch on his behalf, glowering from banks, shops and reception halls. “Big Man” rule had been encapsulated in one timeless brand: leopardskin toque, Buddy Holly glasses and the carved cane so imbued with presidential force mere mortals, it was said, could never hope to lift it. He liked to be known as the Leopard, and the face of a roaring big cat was printed on banknotes, ashtrays and official letter-heads. But to a population that had once hailed him as “Papa,” he was now known as “the dinosaur,” a tribute to how sclerotic his regime had become. Certainly, on a continent of dinosaur leaders, of Biya and Bongo, Mugabe and Moi, he rated as a Tryrannosaurus Rex of the breed, setting an example not to be followed. No other African autocrat had proved such a wily survivor. No other president had been presented with a country of such potential, yet achieved so little. No other leader had plundered his economy so effectively or lived the high life to such excess.

Preyed on by young men with Kalashnikovs, its administration corroded by corruption, a nation the size of Western Europe had fallen off the map of acceptable destinations. My battered copy of the Belgian Guide Nagel, picked up in a Paris bookshop, described Kinshasa as a modern capital “boasting all the usual attributes of Europe’s great cities” and encouraged the tourist to explore its museums, monuments and “indigenous quarters.” But that had been in 1959, when the world was a white man’s oyster. Kinshasa was now a stop bypassed by hardened travelers, where airlines avoided leaving their planes overnight for fear of what the darkness would bring. A hardship posting for diplomats, boycotted by the World Bank and IMF, it was a country every resident seemed determined to abandon, if only they could lay their hands on the necessary visa.

I would be there for the end, and for the beginning of the end.

Less than three years after my arrival, the tables were turned and I was the one to experience the curious intimacy the looter shares with his victim, rifling through Mobutu’s wardrobes, touring his bathroom and making rude remarks about the taste of his furniture (”African dictator” kitsch of the worst kind). Somewhere at the back of one of my drawers, there is a stolen fishknife that was once part of the presidential dining set. My companions in crime were more ambitious — they took monogrammed pillow cases, bottles of fine French wine, even a presidential oil portrait. But looters were being shot on the streets the day we paid our unannounced visit on Marshal Mobutu’s villa in Goma, and I wasn’t going to risk execution for a souvenir.

It was November 1996 and the new rebel movement that had suddenly risen from nowhere in the far east of Zaire had seized control of the area bordering Rwanda. For weeks the frontier crossings leading into this breathtakingly beautiful region of brooding volcanoes and misty green valleys, all rolling down to the blue waters of Lake Kivu, had been closed while the fighting went on. Then suddenly the victorious rebels opened the frontier, and a small flood of journalists who had been kicking their heels on the other side poured across.

When the tour agencies were still brave enough to include Rwanda and Zaire in their African itineraries, Goma was a favorite destination for tourists visiting some of the world’s last mountain gorillas. A pretty little town on the black lava foothills, it had now been torn apart by its own inhabitants, who had taken the army’s exodus as the cue for some frenzied self-enrichment. Shops had been eviscerated, the main street was a mess of phone directories, glass and unused condoms, shattered toilet bowls and broken shutters. “They’ve attacked me four or five times, but they just won’t believe I don’t have anything left to take,” gasped a ruined Lebanese trader, waiting at the border post for permission to leave. His eyes were swimming with tears.

The atmosphere was prickly. Starting what was to prove a seven-month looting and raping retreat across the country, Zairean forces had lashed out indiscriminately before pulling out, leaving corpses scattered for kilometers. No one was too sure of the identity of the rebel movement, the new bosses in town. And then there were the roaming Rwandans, whose intervention in Zaire was being denied by the government next door but was too prominent to ignore. Speaking from the corner of his mouth, a resident confirmed the outsiders’ presence: “We recognize them by their morphology.” Then he hurried away as a baby-faced Rwandan soldier — high on something and all the more sinister for the bright pink lipstick he was wearing — swaggered up to silence the blabbermouth.

Somehow, Mobutu’s villa seemed the natural place to go. The road ran along the lake, snaking past walls draped in bougainvillaea, with the odd glimpse of blue water behind. We surprised a lone looter who had decided, enterprisingly, to focus on the isolated villas of the local dignitaries, rather than the overworked town center. Thinking we were rebels, he stopped pushing a wheelbarrow on which a deep freeze was precariously balanced and ran for cover. As we drove harmlessly by, he was already returning to his task. A stolen photocopier and computer were still waiting to be taken to what, almost certainly, was a shack without electricity.

In the old days, the villa complex had been strictly off limits behind staunch metal gates manned by members of the presidential guard. Now the gates were wide open and the Zairean flag — a black fist clenching a flaming torch — lay crumpled on the ground. There had been no fight for this most symbolic of targets. No one, it was clear from the boxes of unused ammunition, the anti-tank rockets and mortar bombs carelessly stacked in the guards’ quarters, had had the heart for a real showdown.

In the garage were five black Mercedes, in pristine condition, two ambulances, in case the president fell sick and a Land Rover with a podium attachment to follow him, Pope-like, to address the public. A generous allocation for a man whose visits had become increasingly rare. But like a Renaissance monarch who expected a bedroom to be provided in any of his baron’s castles, Mobutu kept a dozen such mansions constantly at the ready across the country, on the off-chance of a visit that usually never came.

South African President Nelson Mandela leads peace talks between Zairian President Mobutu Sese Seko, left, and rebel leader Laurent-Désiré Kabila, right, aboard the SAS Outeniqua in Pointe Noire harbour, Congo, May 4, 1997. Credit: AP/Walter Dhladhla

It was on the verge of venturing inside — could the property possibly be tripwired? — that we really began to feel like naughty children sneaking a look in their parents’ bedroom, only to emerge with their illusions shattered. From outside the villa had looked the height of ostentatious luxury; all chandeliers, Ming vases, antique furniture and marble floors. Close up, almost everything proved to be fake. The vases were modern imitations, they came with price labels still attached. The Romanesque plinths were in molded plastic, the malachite inlay painted on.

With an “aha!” of excitement, a colleague whipped out a black and white cravat, of the type worn with the collarless “abacost” jacket that constituted Mobutu’s eccentric contribution to the world of fashion. From a distance, the cravats had always appeared complex arrangements of material, folded with meticulous care. Now I saw they were little more than nylon bibs, held in place with tabs of Velcro. This emperor did have some clothes. But like his regime itself, they were all show and no substance.

Most poignant of all, perhaps, was the pink and burgundy suite prepared for the presidential spouse, although it was impossible to say whether this was the first lady Bobi Ladawa, or the twin sister Mobutu had, bizarrely, also taken to his bed. An outsize bottle of the perfume Je Reviens, which had probably turned rancid years ago in the African heat, stood on the mantelpiece. With their man ravaged by prostate cancer, his shambolic army collapsing like a house of cards, neither woman would ever be returning to Goma. This irreverent plundering was the only proof required of how rapidly the power established over three decades was unraveling.

Rebel uprisings, bodies rotting in the sun, a sickening megalomaniac. In newsrooms across the globe, shaking their heads over yet another unfathomable African crisis, producers and sub-editors dusted off memories of school literature courses and reached for the clichés. Zaire was Joseph Conrad’s original “Heart of Darkness,” they reminded the public. How prophetic the cry of despair voiced by the dying Mr. Kurtz at Africa’s seemingly boundless capacity for bedlam and brutality had proved yet again. “The horror, the horror.” Was nothing more promising to ever to emerge from the benighted continent?

Yet when Conrad wrote HEART OF DARKNESS and penned some of the most famous last words in literary history, this was very far from his intended message. The “Heart of Darkness” itself and the phrase “the horror, the horror” uttered by Mr. Kurtz as he expires on a steam boat chugging down the giant Congo river, probably constitute one of the great misquotations of all time.

For Conrad, the Polish seaman who was to become one of Britain’s greatest novelists, HEART OF DARKNESS was a book based on some very painful personal experiences. In 1890 he had set out for the Congo Free State, the African colony then owned by Belgium’s King Leopold II, to fill in for a steamship captain slain by tribesmen. The posting, which was originally meant to last three years but was curtailed after less than six months, was to be the most traumatic of his life. It took him nine years to digest and turn into print. Bouts of fever and dysentery nearly killed him; his health never subsequently recovered. Always melancholic, he spent much of the time plunged into deep depression, so disgusted by his fellow whites he avoided almost all human contact. His vision of humanity was to be permanently colored by what he found in the Congo, where declarations of philanthropy camouflaged a colonial system of unparalleled cruelty. Before the Congo, Conrad once said, “I was a perfect animal”; afterwards, “I see everything with such despondency — all in black.”

Mr. Kurtz, whose personality haunts the book although he says almost nothing, is first presented as the best station manager of the Congo, a man of refinement and education, who can thrill crowds with his idealism and is destined for great things inside the anonymous Company “developing” the region. Stationed 200 miles in the interior, he has now fallen sick, and a band of colleagues sets out to rescue him.

Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Republic of Congo, on July 3, 1960. Lumumba was later assassinated in January 1961. Credit: AP/David Guttenfelder

When they find him, they discover that the respected Mr. Kurtz has “gone native.” In fact, he has gone worse than native. Cut off from the Western world, inventing his own moral code and rendered almost insane by the solitude of the primeval forest, he has indulged in “abominable satisfactions,” presided “at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites” says Conrad, hinting that Kurtz has become a cannibal.

His palisade is decorated by rows of severed black heads; he has been adopted as honorary chief by a tribe whose warriors he leads on bloody village raids in search of ivory. The man who once wrote lofty reports calling for enlightenment of the native now has a simpler recommendation: “Exterminate all the brutes!” When he expires before the steamer reaches civilization, corroded by fever and knowledge of his own evil, his colleagues are relieved rather than sorry — a potential embarrassment has been avoided.

Despite its slimness, the novella is one of those multilayered works whose meaning seems to shift with each new reading. By the time HEART OF DARKNESS was published in 1902, the atrocities being committed by Leopold’s agents in the Congo were already familiar to the public, thanks to the campaigns being waged by human rights activists of the day. So while HEART OF DARKNESS is in part a psychological thriller about what makes man human, it had enough topical detail in order to carry another message with it to its readers. Notwithstanding the jarringly racist observations by the narrator Marlow, the way HEART OF DARKNESS dwells on the sense of utter alienation felt by the white man in the gloom of central Africa, the book was intended primarily as a withering attack on the hypocrisy of contemporary colonial behavior. “The criminality of inefficiency and pure selfishness when tackling the civilizing work in Africa is a justifiable idea,” the writer told his publisher.

So, when Kurtz raves against “the horror, the horror,” he is, Marlow makes clear, registering in a final lucid moment just how far he has fallen from grace. The “darkness” of the book’s title refers to the monstrous passions at the core of the human soul, lying ready to emerge when man’s better instincts are suspended, rather than a continent’s supposed predisposition to violence. Conrad was more preoccupied with rotten Western values, the white man’s inhumanity to the black man, than, as it is almost always assumed today, black savagery.

Why then, nearly a century on, has the phrase, and the title, become so misunderstood, so twisted?

The shift reflects, perhaps, the level of Western unease over Africa, a continent that has never disappointed in its capacity to disappoint: Hutu mothers killing their children by Tutsi fathers in Rwanda; the self-styled Emperor Bokassa ordering the cook to serve up his victims’ bodies in Central African Republic; Liberia’s rebels gleefully videotaping the torture of a former president — the terrible scenes swamp the thin trickle of good news, challenging the very notion of progress.

On a disturbing continent, no country, appropriately enough, remains more unsettling than the very birthplace of Conrad’s masterpiece: the nation that was once called the Congo Free State, later metamorphosed into Zaire and has now been rebaptized the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In Mobutu’s hands, the country had become a paradigm of all that was wrong with post-colonial Africa. A vacuum at the heart of the continent delineated by the national frontiers of nine neighboring countries, it was a parody of a functioning state. Here, the anarchy and absurdity that simmered in so many other sub-Saharan nations were taken to their logical extremes. For those, like myself, curious to know what transpired when the normal rules of society were suspended, the purity appealed almost as much as it appalled. Why bother with pale imitations, diluted versions, after all, when you could drench yourself in the essence, the original?

The longer I stayed, the more fascinated I became with the man hailed as the inventor of the modern kleptocracy, or government by theft. His personal fortune was said to be so immense, he could personally wipe out the country’s foreign debt. He chose not to, preferring to banquet in his palaces and jet off to properties in Europe, while his citizens’ average annual income had fallen below $120, leaving them dependent on their own wits to survive. What could be the rationale behind such callous greed?

Zaireans had demonized him, seeing his malevolent hand behind every misfortune. From mass murder to torture, poisoning to rape — there were few crimes not attributed to him. But if Mobutu has approached near-Satanic proportions in the popular conception, he remained the lodestar towards which every diplomat and foreign expert, opposition politician and prime ministerial candidate, turned for orientation.

Rail as it might, the population, it seemed, simply could not imagine a world without Mobutu. “We are a peaceful people,” Zaireans would say in self-exculpation, when asked why no frenzied assailant had ever burst from the crowd during one of Mobutu’s motorcades, brandishing a pistol. It was to take a foreign-backed uprising, dubbed “an invasion” by Zaireans themselves and coordinated by men who did not speak the local Lingala, to rid them of the man they claimed to loathe. The passivity infuriated, eventually blurring into contempt. Every people, expatriates would shrug, deserves the leader it gets.

My attempt to understand the puzzle kept returning me to HEART OF DARKNESS — not to the clichés of the headline writers, with their inverted, modernistic interpretations, but back to Conrad’s original meaning.

No man is a caricature, no individual can alone bear responsibility for a nation’s collapse. The disaster Zaire became, the dull political acquiescence of its people, had its roots in a history of extraordinary outside interference, as basic in motivation as it was elevated in rhetoric. The momentum behind Zaire’s free-fall was generated not by one man but thousands of compliant collaborators, at home and abroad.

Exploring the Alice-in-Wonderland universe they created I would belatedly learn respect. Stumbling upon the surreal alternative systems invented by ordinary Zaireans to cope with the anarchy, exasperation would be tempered by admiration. Above all, there would be anger at what Conrad’s Marlow, surveying the damage wrought by colonial conquerors who claimed to have Congo’s interests at heart, described as a “flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiful folly.”

Michela Wrong spent six years covering the African continent for Reuters, the BBC, and the FINANCIAL TIMES. Her first book, IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF MR. KURTZ, won a PEN award for nonfiction. She lives in London and travels regularly to Africa. To read more and find her book, visit HARPERCOLLINS (©2000).

Jason Stearns is a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group. He offers this analysis of the election and the challenges facing the incoming government. This article is based on the authors’ previous commentary in the FINANCIAL TIMES. Michela Wrong spent six years covering the African continent for Reuters, the BBC, and the FINANCIAL TIMES. Her first book, IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF MR. KURTZ, won a PEN award for nonfiction. She lives in London and travels regularly to Africa.

Ruling through peace after years of relying on violence doesn’t come easy. This point was proved by three days of fighting that broke after the first round results of the presidential elections in the Congo were announced on 20 August. No candidate was able to win an absolute majority and the two front-runners — current President Joseph Kabila and Vice-President Jean Pierre Bemba — will face each other in a run-off at the end of October. As the results were announced, the bodyguards of these two figures unleashed a firefight in the center of town that killed over thirty people. The violence serves as a reminder that elections, far from ushering in peace, could actually trigger more violence as the losers re-arm and launch another rebellion.

A candidate greets voters at a rally. Candidates increase rally turnout with offers of free T-shirts or food. Credits: Nikki See, Fred de Sam Lazaro, Serge Musasa

To prevent this, the international community must invest more in creating a national army and police force that are apolitical and not available to the machinations of political leaders. Equally important is for politicians to realize that they can effect change — and have a career — through the political system rather than through warfare. For this, the Congo needs all the trappings of a legitimate democracy: a strong parliament with an effective opposition, independent courts and a genuine sense of government accountability.

These are not abstract needs: corruption is one of the biggest killers in this country. A brief encounter in the hills of eastern Congo illustrates the point. Three women were walking in front of us on a dirt trail recently, each weighed down by a 100-pound sack of flour. Sitting on the path was a soldier with his AK-47 between his knees. The women dumped their bags on the ground and, without being asked, handed over the equivalent of 20 cents — almost half their daily wages. As they lifted their bags, the soldier grinned at us and said: “Chai yangu – my tea.”

Multiply this one incident by tens of millions of Congolese who face the same petty yet devastating corruption every day and you understand why people here see their state primarily as a predator. It is not there to serve its citizens but to run a massive extortion racket. The government provides next to no healthcare, education or even security for its citizens. In a recent survey carried out by the World Bank, Congolese were asked how they would treat the state if it was a person. “Kill him” was a frequent reply.

Predation and the failure of state institutions help explain the “Congolese paradox”: a country that remains one of the poorest in the world in spite of its enormous mineral wealth. Congo contains some of the largest deposits of copper, cobalt, diamonds and gold but 80 per cent of the population makes less than a dollar a day. Almost a third of the population only eats once a day.

The challenge is to transform a predatory government into one that actually delivers services. The international approach has focused on “setting up systems”. This means establishing payroll mechanisms, retiring redundant staff and providing the infrastructure for officials to do their work. These investments have been crucial but, as a World Bank official explained, their shortcomings are clear: “Systems are good — but if the people in the systems are corrupt, you haven’t got very far.”

This past year, between 60 and 80 per cent of customs revenues were estimated to have been embezzled, a quarter of the national budget was not properly accounted for and more than $3 million were stolen from the army payroll. In spite of this, not a single Congolese official has been convicted on corruption charges during the past three years of transitional rule.

Participants show their enthusiasm for the democratic process at a rally as the Wide Angle team covers election campaigns in the province of Kasai Oriental. Credits: Nikki See, Fred de Sam Lazaro, Serge Musasa

There are concrete steps that can be taken to remedy this situation. First, life must be breathed into the different branches of government. The parliament has launched some good initiatives, including an audit of state companies and a review of mining contracts, but it has not been able to push through any of its recommendations. The incoming government will provide a new opportunity to strengthen the legislature’s impact at the national and local level. Twenty-six new provincial assemblies will be set up that could, if endowed with the necessary resources and checks and balances, make local administration more accountable.

Similarly, the courts, which act as more of an appendix to the executive branch than a check on power, must be given the salaries, infrastructure and resources necessary to do their job and resist corruption. Without international aid, this will be impossible.

Second, the Congo’s resources must be made to benefit the whole population. Much of the country’s mineral wealth has been signed away in the past few years to international companies. The terms of many of these contracts barely benefit the Congolese state or people. The parliament and the World Bank, which has invested millions in reforming the mining sector, must pressure the Congolese government to review these contracts and amend them if necessary.

More than 1,200 people continue to die every day in the Congo from the humanitarian consequences of the conflict. Elections alone will not bring an end to this tragedy but creating a functioning state just might.

It was against this backdrop that field producer Nikki See, photographer Tom Adair and I went looking for characters for this film in the teeming free-for-all mining areas near Mbuji Mayi. Our visits became more frequent once we did meet Sophie Musawu and “McCoy” Kajanda who became two of our film’s main characters.

With each visit we expected the toiling crowd would grow used to our presence and pay us less attention. Instead, we only seemed to antagonize more.

“Please tell these people who have come to film that we think they are thieves, they are distracting us,” a young man named Mbiya conveyed through our translator.

What right do they have to take our pictures, others asked? What do we get from this?

We struggled for intelligent answers but could find few. There was no denying that (even at PBS) we were being paid an unimaginable amount of money to tell their story.

In the end, I think two strokes of good fortune made it possible to shoot the gripping images of miners in this film. The first was our decision, made as much to defuse the palpable tension as anything else, to invite the angriest miners to vent their grievances on camera. Out came a litany of the historical sorrows that fuels their rage, some of which made the film’s final cut. From Belgian plunder and slavery to America’s support of Mobutu’s kleptocracy, they had no reasons to trust foreigners. This country’s only freely elected prime minister was assassinated with what is widely believed to be CIA and Belgian support. A sympathetic ear has impressive power to console.

Secondly, we hired a young local journalist and invited him to try his hand at our second camera. As a local with a charming, diplomatic manner and most of all a very keen eye, Serge Mukendi Musasa was able to film candid footage no foreigner ever could of the daily routine of miners like McCoy and the hubbub around Sophie’s food stall nearby.

Sophie and McCoy share many of their fellow miners’ ambivalence about the historic elections. But they pose the obvious question: what choice does this country have? Even as Congolese have historical justification to suspect the motives of the international community, they must rely on foreigners to keep the peace, to help them take the first step in rebuilding the country.

It was fascinating to go behind the colorful retail façade of an election where there’s no real need for campaign platforms. “Everything is broken and everything needs to be fixed,” says William Swing, the U.N. Special Representative.

So what explains the large, seemingly enthusiastic crowds we filmed?

For people who must survive on one meal a day campaign rallies provided a second. A meal or drink can guarantee a large crowd. In a place where so many make do with one change of clothing, a free T-shirt is a significant bonus. We met numerous Congolese wearing the visage of candidates they either didn’t know or weren’t going to vote for.

In the end, Sophie and McCoy went not with the T-shirt or drinks-bearing candidates but with one who seemed more trustworthy to them. Also, like them, Oscar Kashala is from the Luba people. Kashala, a Harvard-educated oncologist turned politician polled less than four percent nationally but he was Mbuji Mayi’s first choice for president…a native son phenomenon this crew can relate to living as we do in Walter Mondale’s home state. Minnesota alone chose Mondale for president in 1984.

Elections may finally give the Democratic Republic of Congo an honest claim to that name but to every visitor reminders of the huge building task ahead are present to the end. As I waited in Mbuji Mayi’s airport, staring at the hive of antique airplanes, I wondered about the Boeing 727 that would take me back to the capital, Kinshasa, a plane older than my producer. But as Sophie would ask: what other choice is there? The 90 minute flight would take seven days by road.

Finally, for those wondering how Makoyi Kajanda became “McCoy.”

“I was watching an American movie with Chuck Norris in it. He was named McCoy and I thought it sounded good,” he says.

CIA World Factbook — Democratic Republic of the Congo
https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/cg.html
The current assessment of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s geography, economy, politics and culture from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

MONUC — U.N. Mission in DRC
http://www.monuc.org/Home.aspx?lang=en
Established in 1999 to facilitate the implementation of the Lusaka Accord, MONUC is the largest mission in the U.N.’s Department of Peace Keeping Operations. The Web site features extensive news updates and archives, related U.N. documents, photos and videos, and a country profile of the DRC.

Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN)
http://www.irinnews.org/frontpage.asp?
IRIN is the editorially independent news service of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. It provides news and analysis about sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia for the humanitarian community.

African Elections Database — Congo-Kinshasa
http://africanelections.tripod.com/cd.html
Detailed data about every election held in the DRC since 1960, including the 2006 elections.

Global Policy Forum (GPF) — The Dark Side of Natural Resources
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/docs/minindx.htm
GPF, a non-profit organization with consultative status at the U.N., works to monitor U.N. policy and educate and mobilize populations for global citizen participation. Their Web site contains, in part, extensive information about the ways in which the prevalence of natural resources such as diamonds, oil, natural gas and water have presaged war and civil strife in the DRC and elsewhere. Includes links to key U.N. documents as well as to other related media sources and articles.

International Crisis Group (ICG)
http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=1174&l;=1
ICG is an NGO that conducts field research and advocates to resolve conflict around the world. The Web site contains a history of the DRC, video images of the country, and an archive of IRC reports and recommendations regarding political and human rights developments in the DRC.

Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) — Backgrounder on DRC Elections
http://www.cfr.org/publication/11167/congos_elections.html
CFR’s guide to the 2006 DRC elections.

Human Rights Watch — “Elections in Sight — ‘Don’t Rock the Boat’?”
http://hrw.org/backgrounder/africa/drc1205/
A special HRW report prepared in December 2005, as the DRC readied for elections.

Amnesty International — Congo (Dem. Rep. of)
http://www.amnestyusa.org/countries/dr_congo/summary.do
Amnesty International’s archive of reports about human rights in the DRC.

The European Commission — E.U. relations with Congo (Kinshasa)

http://ec.europa.eu/comm/development/body/country/country_home_en.cfm?CID=cd&lng;=en
The Web site of the European Commission (the executive body of the European Union) includes an assessment of the political and economic situation in the DRC, as well as financial data regarding E.U. member states’ aid to and development projects within the country.

International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies
http://www.ifrc.org/where/country/cn6.asp?countryid=187
An archive of Red Cross documents related to the DRC — includes annual reports, news bulletins, and program updates.

ReliefWeb
http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/dbc.nsf/doc104?OpenForm&rc;=1&cc;=cod
ReliefWeb, which is is administered by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), provides information on humanitarian emergencies and disasters. The Web site includes recent reports and updates from the ground in the DRC.

U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) — Democratic Republic of the Congo
http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/index.asp?iso3=COD〈=en
Includes press releases about FAO projects and developments in the DRC, as well as statistics related to the DRC’s economy and its agriculture, forestry, and fishing sectors.

USAID — DR Congo
http://www.usaid.gov/locations/sub-saharan_africa/countries/drcongo/
USAID is the principal federal agency extending assistance to countries recovering from disaster, trying to escape poverty, and engaging in democratic reforms. The Web site contains information about USAID’s strategy and programs in the DRC.

International Monetary Fund — DRC
http://www.imf.org/external/country/COD/index.htm
Findings, evaluations, reports and working papers from the IMF regarding its work in the DRC.

All Africa
http://allafrica.com/congo_kinshasa/
A compendium of news articles about the DRC from African media sources.

U.S. Holocaust Musuem — Ripples of Genocide
http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/congojournal/
“Ripples of Genocide — Journey Through Eastern Congo” is a special exhibit of the U.S. Holocaust Museum.