At War’s End: Building Peace after Civil Conflict

I’m beginning to get the feeling that Roland Paris’s At War’s End is the definitive book on post-conflict peace-building operations. I’ve read a few recent books and articles which pull heavily from Paris, and having read it, and re-read many sections, I can see why. After a short introduction to the history of peace-keeping and the post-Cold War development of peace-building, Paris gives us eleven cogent evaluations of UN peacebuilding operations from 1990-1999, examining the varying levels of failure and success in each. He does this to build up to his primary criticism of peacebuilding – a rush to elections in postconflict countries – and propose his own theory on institution building.

Rather than summarize each of the operations he presents, I’ll divide them categorically as he does, as some of them have similar results:

The Perils of Political Liberalization: Using peacebuilding operations in Angola and Rwanda, Paris gives us a horror story of what can go wrong and why both elections and free speech can completely backfire. In both cases fighting resumed and the Rwandan conflict turned into genocide.

Democracy Diverted: Cambodia and Liberia are good examples of democratic elections giving power over to those unwilling to continue a democracy. Replacing a dictator with a future dictator cannot be considered a victory for democracy.

Reinforcing Ethnic Divisions: Paris uses Bosnia and Croatia as good examples of the ways democratic elections can strengthen ethnic divisions.  In each case, political parties were based on ethnic lines. In Croatia the minority had become so small they had no real choice but to leave the country, whereas in Bosnia power-sharing agreements meant that there was no need to promote actual peace and understanding between the ethnic groups.

Reproducing Sources of the Conflict: Using El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, Paris shows how political liberalization can put those responsible for the conflict back into power with the ability to achieve their objectives through peaceful means. Even though the countries are out of war, they can’t really be viewed as a victory of democracy and elections.

Success Stories in Southern Africa? Just about the only good news Paris provides is the success of Namibia and Mozambique at achieving political and economic liberalization. Two out of eleven isn’t bad….

Rather than break down any of these further, particularly since I highly recommend reading this book if you’re at all interested in postconflict work or any sort of political policy dealing with wars, I’d rather talk a bit about his recommendations. As he says early on in the books, in each of the eleven cases a rush to democratic elections was the primary goal of the peacebuilders. Often, as soon as the elections were completed, the peacebuilders considered the operation a success and left the country. The problem is that most of these countries have only recently emerged from a war, they have no idea what a democracy entails, and they have little to no bureaucratic institutions to support the fledgling democracy. Rarely is there a competent police force, let alone a legal and judicial system, and just about every section of the government is operated by people who have never done the job before, so they’re almost destined to fail.

Because of this, Paris recommends holding off on elections. In most cases, elections only tend to cause more violence and rarely help resolve anything, so the delay would be a good thing. He suggests that instead of elections, peacebuilders should focus on building up those institutions which are lacking. He even goes as far as to say the country’s institutions should be operated by international workers who will train locals to take over the positions over time. And once the prerequisite institutions are in place to support democratic elections, the country can begin preparations for them.

He has a lot more to this, as he deals with ethnic violence, limitations on free speech to make hate speech illegal (the sort of thing which helped fuel the Rwandan genocide), and incentives to promote moderate cross-ethnic political parties. But overall his main focus is that all this must be done through institutionalization of the country.

The biggest problem with this approach is that it would be massively expensive and take significantly longer. But, if you take for example the peacebuilding operations in the Congo, had there been a focus on institutionalization before the elections, much of the work being done now may have been avoided. The UN had actually believed that after the 2006 elections they would be able to leave the country in success, but instead heavy fighting resumed, mostly because of election tension, and the UN was forced to increase its operation in Congo and assist in the development of government institutions.

More people who deal with policy should read At War’s End. Since I constantly see it cited in other works, at least I know the academics have recognized it as a superior work, but little has changed on the international postconflict landscape. In Iraq and Afghanistan the race to elections seemed to be the most important thing, and it usually resulted in more fighting and many people contesting the results. To simplify the book down to its theme, Paris is telling us that it’s cheaper to do something right the first time than to fix it over and over again.


Wagenia Fishermen: The Last Days of their Culture

The Small Fishing Village of Wagenia

This is the scaffolding over the rapids.

One of the more unique cultural standouts in the Congo is the strange methods employed by the Wagenia Fishermen to catch their fish. These fishermen, located in a small village at the edge of Kisangani by the first (or last depending on which way you’re going) of the rapids that collectively make up Stanley Falls. For over two hundred years, these fishermen have been fishing the rapids by building scaffolding over the rapids out of bamboo and using that scaffolding to lower wooden nets into the water along the rapids. The nets have a wide mouth and then taper down to a very long, thin neck. The fish swim down the rapids and end up going into the nets and getting trapped in the neck, unable to turn around and escape. Once a day, the men climb up on the scaffolding and use vines to hoist these nets up and then climb down to check for their catch.

The Wagenia village still operates on a tribal system virtually disconnected from the city it closely neighbors. They have a village Chief who manages the ownership of each of the nets. The

The Fishermen on the Scaffolding Raising up a Net.

way it works is that each family in the village has their own net, and, at the end of the day, that family will get to keep the fish that end up in the net. There are more lucrative positions on the rapids, so village politics and shifting positions of power determines a family’s location in the system.

If you visit the town of Wagenia, you must pay for the opportunity to see and photograph the nets and the fishermen. Part of the reason for this is because of the fishermen’s cultural disdain for photography (we were yelled at when we pointed our cameras towards some children), and the other part is simply because they aren’t catching much fish anymore and need to support themselves. For an additional fee, they’ll take you out to the island where the Chief lives on a dugout canoe, and the Chief will greet you and give you his blessing.

As I mentioned, there are fewer and fewer fish being caught in the nets. The Congo River, as a whole, has been massively overfished, and each year fewer and fewer fish are caught. The fishermen told us that the nets are now failing to feed the families they are supposed to support, let alone provide them with an income. This is one of the reasons they’ve turned to tourism as a means of support.

Master Net Weaver Climbing down to the Net

And their approach to tourism is rather well thought out. They offer decent services: A guide who speaks French only of course, the boat trip to meet the Chief, and for the extra cost of a few beers the fishermen will demonstrate hoisting one of the nets out of the water. The basic cost is $20 per person plus an additional $10 to go see the Chief. This is rather high, but since Kisangani doesn’t exactly have a high tourist population they have to exploit those they do get. They also sell incredibly original souvenirs crafted out of simple rocks, wood, twine, bamboo, and even black plastic bags to make the figures, they create miniatures of the scaffolding and nets or fishermen on their boats. I get the feeling that some NGO worked with them to create these because they seem a bit more complex than any of the other trinkets in town. They’re very reasonably priced as well. My boat cost me just $5 and the other one my friend got cost $20. Both of them were initially priced at about double that but we talked them down.

Overall, going to see these fishermen is like looking into the past. There aren’t many places along the Congo River where you can still find people unchanged by the Belgiums or the wars, but in Wagenia you’re given a rare treat of looking at a tribe which was fishing the same way long before Henry Morton Stanley ‘discovered’ them, and hopefully they’ll be able to continue into the future.

Review / Response to Calestous Juma’s book: The New Harvest









Catching Malaria

You can’t truly be considered a full-fledged International Aid Worker until you’ve contracted one of the local illnesses. In most parts of Africa, malaria is so common that if you come down with the flu the locals almost always assume it’s malaria. The reason that malaria is so common is that it is caused by a parasite that is transmitted via mosquitos, and mosquitos are everywhere!

The Malaria Parasite Up Close and Personal

Up until a few days ago I’d been rather lucky when it comes to illnesses in the Congo. I only had some minor stomach problems once, and I think that was caused by eating a bad egg rather than some local cuisine, and the occasional physical injury due to my own clumsiness. Sadly, my tendency to not sleep under a mosquito net finally outmatched my anti-malaria pills, and a few nights ago after an evening run my body began to seriously ache.

What I thought was dehydration from running in this hot, humid air, turned out to be the beginning of the most horrible night I can remember. (Note: There were times in my childhood when I ended up in hospitals due to severe asthma attacks, but, thankfully, I have only a vague recollection of an oxygen chamber.) What I experienced that night turned out to be the textbook order of symptoms for malaria:

  1. Body Aches: The whole body starts to hurt! It was somewhere between the muscle pain from dehydration and doing a full week of P90X in one day having not exercised in a year. Basically, every muscle in my body hurt.
  2. Cold Sweats: This came on right after I got into bed. Your body starts to chill but sweats at the same time. This has been persistent through the whole thing and three days in this hasn’t really gone away. It’s quite annoying and I’m running out of clean shirts.
  3. Chills: Ok, so about an hour into trying to sleep I began getting incredibly cold. I turned off the AC and the fan, opened the door to let in the hot air, but none of that helped. I was instantly teleported back to the winter of 2005-6 in Ukraine when all the heating in the city was out and it was well below Zero. Nothing I did would help and even though it was incredibly hot in my room I ended up wrapping myself in multiple thick fur blankets to try and stay warm.
  4. Insomnia: As you can imagine, shivering, sweating, and body aches don’t make it easy to sleep.
  5. Fever: It was about 4-5 hours into my hellaciously freezing night when I realized I was burning up. I felt like I was going to have to get up and fill the tub with coldish water and sit in it (can’t really get ice in Congo at 4am). I couldn’t find the thermometer until the next morning but I’m pretty sure it was around 103 from past experiences, but I was also pretty delusional at this point.
  6. Lethargy: By the time I got up in the morning the fever seemed to have gone, but I was left in a state of malaise with a sever feeling of lethargy. I was tired, weak, and didn’t want to do anything.

So, even though I didn’t really want to do anything, I knew I needed to Google the symptoms. There’s a cholera outbreak in Kisangani right now so I needed to make sure it wasn’t that. Also, typhoid fever is common here, and even though I’ve been vaccinated I’d heard it’s nowhere near 100%, so that had to be checked. But I had a feeling it was malaria.

A Home Malaria Test Kit

The diagnosis wasn’t confirmed until 4:00pm that afternoon. It took visits to a military base doc, a self-diagnosis kit which failed because I take anti-malarial medication, a hospital and doctor there, a laboratory to test my blood, return to the lab to get the results, return to the hospital to have them interpreted but the doctor was gone, visit to another doctor in the city to have him interpret the results, and finally someone saying – Yeah, you have malaria.

Blood Test Results Verifying that I Indeed had Malaria

Apparently I had a really mild case. Some people feel like they’re dying until soon after they start taking the medication which kills off the parasites. The meds actually work rather quickly and even the first dose can lead to major improvements. I still have two of my six doses left to go, but I’m already feeling much better.

I’ve now hung a mosquito net in my bedroom.

Norman Borlaug Institute Agricultural Project in Kisangani, DRC

Sorry for the long delay in posting about the project I’m actually working on. Because of its connection to the government there were some hoops I needed to jump through before I could write anything. But now I’m ready to start a series of posts on the Borlaug Institute Agricultural Initiative in Kisangani, DRC.

As I’ve written on here before, the Congo doesn’t exactly have a happy history. In 1885 King Leopold II of Belgium created the Force Publique, a group of military regulars and mercenaries, to bring his personal colony, the Congo Free State, under strict control. Unable to feed the soldiers, Leopold ordered his men to live off the land and thereby started a tradition of pillaging villages for food in the Congo. This tradition was continued after Congo’s independence in 1960, particularly under the dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko, and still exists to this day in parts of Eastern Congo. This practice lead to a military force virtually indistinguishable from rebel factions, as the military will often liberate a town only to subsequently steal all of the food and mass rape the women.

The theory behind the Borlaug Institute project is that when the soldiers aren’t paid, they still continue to be soldiers because they don’t have better opportunities, but when the soldiers aren’t fed they will do anything they need to in order to obtain food. Therefore, if the soldiers were able to be provided with a steady food source, it will help to prevent them from pillaging nearby villages.

The project is broken into two phases:

Phase 1: Construction of the farm and training of the Agricultural Company to become farmers.

Phase 2: Expansion of the farm using local construction methods and training the Agricultural Company to become training for future soldiers.

Mostly I’m going to focus on Phase 1 here. This involved the physical construction of a farm and two fish ponds at the military base in Kisangani. This included about 12 acres of cassava (a staple food in the Congo and provides both flour from the ground up root and some sauces from the leaves), 2 acres of other vegetables like amaranth (like spinach), and two large ponds. The majority of the construction was done using bulldozers and other mechanized methods. This allowed all of the initial construction to be completed during the short dry season from January to March.

Mechanized construction presented a problem of making replication of the project impossible without huge financial investment, so when I get to Phase 2 I’ll explain the goal of replicating the construction using human labor.

Since I wasn’t around for this part of the project, I’ve only heard about it from those who took part in it, but here’s what I’ve learned:

A group of 60 soldiers were selected to form Ag Company (AGCO). They have their own Captain, a strong dedicated leader who is a major asset to the project, and a few other minor officers to keep the chain of command working.

AGCO was taught methods of creating and maintaining a farm but agricultural trainer who spoke Lingala, the local language, as well as French. Many of the men had already farmed before but they were taught about crop rotation, common agricultural diseases, and other things which would improve crop yield.

The initial farm which was cleared using bulldozers consisted of twelve acres of cassava, the main staple crop of the area, and about four acres of other vegetables. The cassava would take a year to ripen, but then it would be able to feed 1000 men for a year. The other vegetables, mostly amaranth, a spinach-like plant, would be harvested on almost a weekly basis.

Two large fish ponds were also constructed, with feed and drainage canals used to cycle in fresh water, and they were stocked with 40,000 baby tilapia. The goal was to be able to provide fish as a good source of protein to the soldiers on a semi-regular basis after 4-6 months of growth.

A livestock breeding program was also instituted. Cows and pigs were chosen to be raised by the soldiers mostly for training purposes and for occasional special events when the meat could be given to the soldiers.

In my next update on the project I’ll get into Phase II, and then I’ll write another post on some of the problems and unexpected changes we’ve encountered along the way. 

Waiting for the Barbarians

For two weeks now, J.M. Coetzee’sWaiting for the Barbarians” has weighted me down like the mariner’s albatross. Once in a long while I come across a book that seems to perfectly encapsulate the realities, both joyous and painful, of the human condition. The last such book was Denis Johnson‘s Jesus’ Son, and maybe it’s no coincidence the both were short, mostly allegorical novels, which allow the reader to fell more a part of the central character than other novels. The fact that Coetzee has presented a novel which can be read in a single sitting does not pass unnoticed – I’ve always been a believer in Poe’s philosophy that a great novel must be readable in a single sitting in order for a person to fully appreciate the experience.

Waiting for the Barbarians follows an aging magistrate who for the past few decades has been managing one of the furthest outposts of an unnamed Empire during a period of peace. He comes from a prominent family though he doesn’t seem to aspire to any greatness of his own and is content living out his life on the frontier. He is slightly obsessed with history and in his spare time excavates an ancient barbarian village on the shore of a lake. From this hobby, he has obtained one of his prized possessions, a sack stuffed with old wooden tablets covered in barbarian writing he has no ability to decipher. History is possibly the most common theme in the book, and, in particular, the recognition of the existence of history and one’s place in it is a lesson the magistrate must grow to understand himself as well as how it applies to the Empire’s actions towards the barbarians.

The main plot centers on the visit of Colonel Jol, a dedicated servant of the Empire, who will unquestioningly follow orders to root out any perceived threats, and the response of the magistrate to the colonel’s torturous actions perpetrated on the barbarians. After a short reconnaissance of the barbarian lands by the colonel, and the capture of fisher folk, he begins to question the prisoners about barbarian plans for an attack on the Empire. The magistrate knows that he must not interfere with the colonel, but he opens Pandora’s Box by looking in on the victims after a day of the Colonel’s work.

The images of the tortured barbarians haunts him throughout the rest of the novel, and it directly leads to him taking in a blind barbarian girl who has had her ankles broken during the questioning. This central action is truly the crux of the story and Coetzee brilliantly gives the reader three different interpretations to draw from it.

First is the Magistrate who constantly questions himself as to why he’s taking in the girl who is broken and disfigured. He spends his time meticulously washing her feet and then her body, a great metaphor for the cleansing of his own soul he hopes to obtain by helping this girl. Then there is the confusion of the girl, who herself cannot understand the actions of the magistrate, particularly that he doesn’t seek her for sexual pleasure. In no way does his cleaning her and taking care of her make her see him any differently than a Magistrate of the Empire, and in the end she is dumbfounded when he asks her to stay with him rather than go back to her people – she would never have even considered staying. Finally there is Colonel Jol, who, rightly so from his perspective, views the Magistrate’s actions as going native and conspiring against the empire.

There is a line early in the book where the Magistrate thinks to himself, “I believe in peace, perhaps even peace at any price.” Coetzee give us that price, but, unlike the brutality of the Empire which we expect, it is the peace the Magistrate must gain through his downfall, torture, and final poverty which permeate the later pages of the book. In a way, I was reminded of Kafka’s The Trial in how it almost seemed as if I were the one being punished, as if I were the one who, though guilty in the eyes of the Empire, must cleanse myself and prove my innocence the through suffering.

The Magistrate later understands that the truly awful thing the Empire has done to the Barbarians is not to go off and kill them and take their land, but to impose history upon them:


By forcing the barbarians to recognize and live in a world with history, the Empire has taken from them their normal cycle of existence, taken their culture and way of life. The Empire has given them an unrecognizable future, past, and present. And this crime against the barbarians haunts the Magistrate even more than the tortures of Colonel Jol, more than the broken girl who he gave back to the barbarians, and more than his own torture by the agents of the Empire.

Understanding all of this, the Magistrate can once again take up his leadership position, but only because he steps out of history and simply begins to exist in the now, to live to see what comes in the future. Finally cleansed, the Magistrate can wait for the barbarians to come.

I can’t imagine an existence where I wasn’t aware of history, but the idea of existing to exist without our other preoccupations, which invariably lead to more stress than they’re worth, is definitely attractive. But because we live in such a world, history has demonstrated that most people lack the cultural sensitivity to approach a completely different society and not think themselves superior. Over and over we’ve seen that cycle, and now our planet is left with so few uncorrupted cultures that a book like this may never be written again.


Building a Home Gym in the DRC

There are a lot of things I can live without in this world, but there are a few things that if I don’t have them I start to get irritated and even a bit depressed. While Peanut Butter withdrawals only really cause the irritation (Thankfully Africa is on the ball when it comes to Peanut Butter, unlike Ukraine and Russia), not having access to weights, and in particular a bench press, really gets me down.

Now I did plan ahead and purchased a nice set of exercise bands, which I will say are very awesome and if you’re looking for a set I will go out and say that the BodyLastics bands are the best around, but as an everyday device they just don’t match the feeling of lifting a heavy barbell.

The wood for the Bench Press

So, about a week ago I was inspired and decided to go out and buy some wood and make myself a bench press and barbell. Didier helped out with the project, particularly when I told him that he could have all of the excess wood for whatever project he’d like.

First I sketched out a basic design and guessed at a few lengths (I used the ledge on our front porch to estimate how wide I wanted the bench to be). Then I took a completely random guess at the amount of wood I’d need. I wasn’t able to go along because if they saw a white man the price would quadruple, so I just gave good instructions to Didier and talked to him a bunch on the phone. In the end, we got most of the things we needed, and they were cut to the relative size necessary.

DRC Transportation at its Finest!

Getting them to the house was pretty humorous as Didier paid a guy with a bicycle $3 to stack 60 pounds of lumber on the back of his bike and ride it down the street to the house.

We then had to cut out the handles to place the barbell, and have the bench sanded down, but that wasn’t too big of a problem with a carpenter right down the street who could do it for five bucks.

Still had a few support nails to go, but this is it.

Next came the assembly. This was a pain in the ass. Hammering nail after nail in the hot sun was not an easy job. I’m sure anyone at the house would have done it for me, but I was determined to do the work myself and ignore the confused stares of the security guards and the handyman, Raphael, as I did the work. After a while it all came together and I had a completed bench press. Then Raphael immediately understood what I was building and said, in his limited English, “For Sport! Arnold!”

This is a solid iron barbell!

The barbell was actually a bit more work. I had a plan in place to have one made by my friends at a construction company using a pipe and concrete, but I was skeptical it would be heavy enough, and it would take time. Instead, we found an old guy who had a pipe the right length and two metal gears (very heavy) which he could weld together. In the end, I had my 80-90 pound barbell for $25.

For the past two days, Raphael and I have been out in the back yard lifting weights. I’ve taught him how to use the bands and also a bunch of other exercises. While I can’t do everything with only the bench and barbell, I can do a lot more and I at least get the feeling of lifting something heavy rather than an elastic band.

Pumping Iron: DRC Edition

In the future, when I live overseas again, this will be the first thing I do upon arriving – unless I can just find a gym like in Ukraine. But it does give me a bit of joy having made it myself basically out of scrap. It feels like Rocky in part 4 when he has to train using whatever he has around off in Russia. It’s a great feeling.

It's a bit light. I can do 50 reps easily, but the locals are only doing 8-10.