July 14 issue — Joseph, a 28-year-old communications student in Denmark, hadn’t heard from his father in eight years. Then came a letter, smuggled out of the forests of eastern Congo in April.

“WE RECENTLY LEARNED that you are still alive,” wrote Joseph’s father in a handwritten message that had been carried by a traveling merchant over hundreds of miles. “Praise the Lord. But as for me, your mother and two small brothers, we are the living dead. Your big brother and sister, with her daughter, were killed five years ago. We move according to the security conditions—the war hasn’t stopped since 1996 ... We’re without food, clothes, medicine, with only the hope that God will come to our aid.”
No son could resist such a plea. Joseph begged family friends in Rwanda to try to smuggle a message back to his father, and to formulate a plan to help him escape the area where he is trapped—living “in slavery,” the letter said. A Congolese militia known as the Mai-Mai, whose members sometimes wear charms made of their enemies’ body parts, controls that pocket of territory. A close friend of Joseph’s parents offered to send her 29-year-old daughter, Ange, to the fringe of the war zone. Last week Ange wrote a final English exam at her college in Rwanda, sang in her choir’s year-end concert, and prepared to set out by bush taxi. For her, reuniting Joseph’s family is a vital bit of unfinished business. “I remember things they did for me when I was small,” she says.
President George W. Bush will steer clear of the Democratic Republic of the Congo when he tours five African countries this week. This mineral-rich nation, the size of Western Europe, is the world’s largest failed state. Its president leads a shaky interim government, and much of the country is under the sway of competing militias—following a five-year grab by Congo’s neighbors for riches and influence. More than 3 million people are said to have died in the conflict, mainly of disease.

It’s easy to imagine why the Bush visit will focus instead on countries that are politically stable, with growing economies. The billions that the Bush administration has newly appropriated to fight AIDS and other scourges can effectively showcase American benevolence. And it makes sense to help those Africans who are trying most to help themselves. Man-made African disasters such as Congo and the civil war in Liberia, to which the U.N. Security Council last week talked of sending a peacekeeping force, are far more complex. They can’t be solved, or even ameliorated, with money or aid alone.

But the worse they get, the greater the demands for intervention. Liberia last week was a case in point. The American-educated Charles Taylor came to power in 1997 elections—after leading a brutal rebellion that turned into a six-year civil war—largely because the world did not want to commit sufficient resources to properly disarm militias ahead of the vote. Once in power, Taylor’s militiamen and their allies turned elsewhere for loot—to Sierre Leone, then Cote d’Ivoire. Taylor was indicted as a war criminal this year. And now rebels are closing in on him. Bush last week demanded that Taylor leave the country, as pressure mounted on Washington to lead a peacekeeping force.

The Congo crisis is unfinished business for Washington, too. Americans have been involved—directly or indirectly—at nearly every stage of the country’s disintegration. The story begins with the country’s longtime dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, an American cold-war ally. He came under pressure to liberalize his country’s political system only after the Berlin wall fell. Then the 1994 genocide in neighboring Rwanda sent another shock through the region. Washington blocked efforts to send in a peacekeeping force that might have limited the killing. As if to atone for its lapse, Washington then rushed to support the new Rwandan government dominated by Tutsis, primary targets of the genocide.

Suddenly, central Africa was touted as the starting point for a new “African renaissance.” But for that to happen, Mobutu had to go. The new government in Rwanda, backed by diplomatic and covert aid from the United States and Britain, led a coalition of African countries to topple Mobutu. The leaders of these countries—Rwanda, Uganda, Ethiopia and Eritrea—were seen as a new generation of more democratic, honest African patriots.

But Tutsi-led Rwandahas morphed into one of Africa’s most repressive regimes. Assassination squads liquidated dissidents from the ruling party who dared to speak out from exile—in at least one case they skinned the victim alive. Nearly a decade after the genocide, more than 80,000 suspects swelter in overcrowded jails. The government just approved laws providing for the first post-genocide national voting. It also disqualified the country’s oldest political party from participating, because of alleged “divisionism.” That party’s leading spokesman, a member of Parliament, disappeared from his home on April 7.
For years, Rwanda mercilessly pursued Hutu refugees on the run in Congo. This campaign, still ongoing in some areas, amounted to a counter-genocide, but the world was unwilling or unable to stop it. During the overthrow of Mobutu in 1996, Rwandan troops systematically went to Congolese villages killing all the Hutus they could find. They massacred as many as 350,000 Hutu refugees, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Herman Cohen estimates.

In Liberia and Sierra Leone, crazed militiamen have fought and mutilated enemies and civilians alike to get the loot from diamond mines. Vengeance and greed also converged in a grab for Congo’s mineral wealth. While Uganda seized rich gold fields west of its border, Rwanda hit pay dirt in territory controlled by its proxy, Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD). The riverbeds in North and South Kivu provinces are rich in coltan, an ingredient vital for making capacitors that go into cell phones and computers. Demand quintupled the price of the black sand in the late ’90s. The Rwandan Army took in $250 million from Congo in 1999 and 2000 alone, according to a U.N. study. Hutu prisoners under heavy guard dug and purified the mud. Beyond the world’s view, some of those denounced as “genocidaires” were executed. Escaped prisoners from one mining camp told NEWSWEEK that prior to execution such victims were placed naked in a cell whose floor had been covered in rock salt. The salt prevented them from lying down. After several days, their legs swelled grotesquely and they became delirious. The rest of the workers were then assembled to watch the finale—a blow to the head with a hoe.
Some exile families turn to smugglers to buy their relatives’ freedom from Congolese militias. In distant Nairobi, people-smugglers get $3,000 a head for a freed Hutu, delivered. Joseph, who has been supported by American missionaries since an overland flight from Rwanda in 1994, doesn’t have that kind of money. And he’s at risk—he says he was nearly arrested in the Rwandan-held mining town of Rubaya a few years ago, when he returned to find a smuggler to get a message to his parents.
Sending Ange this time seemed a safer bet. To get ready, she visited one of Joseph’s brothers, 24-year-old Alphonse. He told her that during the height of the coltan boom he was forced to mine with a shovel and carry supplies for the Mai-Mai, fleeing when Rwandan forces came too close. When the price of coltan crashed two years ago, he was given a rifle and ordered to take part in an offensive on the Rwandan-backed militia’s headquarters in Goma. “They take the young by force—to mine, make palm oil or fight,” he said.
Alphonse finally fled when his military unit deployed for combat. He pretended to go into the bush to relieve himself, then ran until he stumbled on an enemy position. After he spent two days with those troops, they put him on a truck back to Rwanda, where he underwent a six-month reorientation program, and was cleared of complicity in the genocide. He left Ange with a hand-drawn map of the area where he last saw his parents, in a village a day’s walk from Rubaya. Like Joseph, she hoped to find a trader there to take word upcountry.
That mission seems bound to fail. Joseph’s parents and younger brothers may no longer be anywhere near Rubaya, if indeed they’re still alive. But there now is an alternative to such freelancing in the war zone. In Goma, the U.N. force established to monitor the 2002 peace agreement has begun a tiny resettlement program, aimed at the estimated 50,000 Rwandan soldiers and civilians still trapped in the Congo hinterlands. Local volunteers lead the scared refugees out in small groups, sometimes walking for two or three weeks at a time. In six months, about 600 people have made it out of the war zone to safety.
The fate of Joseph’s family also hinges on less tangible factors, such as the price of coltan. With the industry in recession, fighting among forces backed by Rwanda, Uganda and the Kinshasa-based government has flared in areas that are vital to the smuggling of gold and diamonds. “It’s grab all you can around here,” says one U.N. official in Goma. The contested South Kivu capital of Bukavu is an especially well-established smuggling route. A Congolese source last week displayed photocopies of what were purported to be official documents, intended to back up an offer in Bukavu of nine kilograms of “superior quality” uranium.
For the moment, a French-led peacekeeping force has tamped down fighting in the gold-smuggling hub of Bunia. And Kinshasa last week announced progress toward putting together a unity government to administer Congo until elections can be held in two years. In reality, as a Human Rights Watch report to be released this week concludes, Congo’s torment reflects “an ongoing struggle for power” by both Congolese and foreign forces. It’s anybody’s guess when people like Joseph’s parents will really be safe, if ever they can be.