BOUNDLESS IMMORALITY

The brazen assassination this week of Floribert Chebeya Bahizire, known to friends as Chebeya, a leading light in DRC’s beleaguered human rights movement is deplorable. All signs point to a state-sponsored action, and this, on the eve of the country’s 50th anniversary celebration.

But this begs the question. What on Earth is there to celebrate – 50 years of either dictatorship or mafia-torship? The latter is proving to be even more crippling than the former. As another leading democracy activist shared with me in his office today, even under Mobutu, an active Chebeya was left unharmed!

The logic of those in charge of this country leaves me in continued amazement, scratching my head on a regular basis. There is a hotel and apartment construction boom fueled mainly by the “private” funds of senior government officials and their families. But if the country produces only sensational headlines of regional conflict with attendant atrocities such as rape and murder, assassination of democracy activists, rampant corruption and dire poverty, why would anyone WANT to come here, either to visit or to live. Aren’t they shooting themselves in the foot? It’s an image that comes to mind constantly when I contemplate the logic of Congolese leaders.

The country has boundless potential and boundless immorality in equal measure. One trumps the other, time and time again!

Where is the real sense of nationalism that we should be seeing on the occasion of the country’s 50th birthday? It’s my 50th birth year too. But when I celebrate the day in September, I will celebrate a life dedicated to constructive action, respect and love for all those with whom I share this planet.

Where is the love in the DRC? Africans want respect, but who will respect you when you don’t respect yourself. While there are many wonderful people in this country, they too must shutter at the level of disrespect, even disdain that this country shows its people and in many daily scenes that the people show each other. For the locals these scenes are so familiar that it may be harder to summon the outrage that they inspire in me – men riding precariously on the backs of trucks; men AND women sitting atop bags of maize piled high on tops of open trucks; men shoving women out of the way to enter a mini-bus taxi, etc.

I often think of the crime reduction strategy employed by William Bratton who served as New York Police Chief in the mid-1990’s. The strategy, widely known as the “broken windows” theory is based on the notion that when you start with the little things, the big things will get better. These “little things” in the aggregate form the cultural basis of any society.

So applied to the DRC, a major campaign to transform the culture of respect could hopefully, eventually lead to a weeding out or isolation of the worst perpetrators of flagrant human rights violations – the big things – since the cultural context would have changed and would become far less tolerant of these bad actors.

So while I mourn Chebeya and send my deepest sympathies to his family, I also mourn the death of the promise of a brighter future for the DRC. I pray for the sake of all its citizens that my mourning in the latter case is premature.