In August 2009, I landed in Kinshasa, the DRC’s sprawling capital on the Congo River. The NBA star Dikembe Mutombo, towering over me, led me on a tour of the pediatric ward of the Biamba Marie Mutombo Hospital, which he had built and named in his late mother’s honor.
At a town hall meeting at St. Joseph’s School, I encountered an air of sullen resignation among the young people of Kinshasa. They had reason to feel hopeless. The government was feckless and corrupt, roads were nonexistent or barely passable, hospitals and schools were woefully inadequate. For generations their country’s rich resources had been plundered, first by the Belgians, then by the notorious dictator Mobutu (who, I am sorry to say, profited extensively from his manipulation of U.S. aid), and then by the rulers who succeeded him.
It was hot and stuffy in the auditorium, adding to the sour mood. A young man stood up and asked a question about a controversial Chinese loan to the government. He was nervous and stumbled a bit, but the translation I was hearing came through as, “What does Mr. Clinton think through the mouth of Mrs. Clinton?” It sounded like he wanted me to share my husband’s thoughts rather than my own. In a country where too many women were abused and marginalized, the question infuriated me. “Wait, you want me to tell you what my husband thinks?” I snapped. “My husband is not the Secretary of State. I am. So you ask my opinion, I will tell you my opinion. I’m not going to be channeling my husband.” The moderator quickly turned to another question.
After the event the young man came over and apologized. He said he had meant to ask about President Obama, not President Clinton, and that the translation had been garbled. I was sorry I had snapped at him, not least because the moment dominated the headlines and overshadowed the message I wanted to send about improving governance and protecting women in the Congo.
The next day I left Kinshasa on a UN transport plane and flew more than three hours east to Goma. My first stop was to meet President Kabila in a tent behind the governor’s house on the shore of Lake Kivu.
Kabila was distracted and unfocused, seemingly overwhelmed by the many challenges plaguing his country. One crucial issue was figuring out how to pay the government’s soldiers. Undisciplined and unpaid, they had become as much a threat to the people of the region as the rebels who attacked from the jungle. It wasn’t enough to allocate money in Kinshasa. By the time it filtered down through the ranks, nearly all of it would be pocketed by corrupt senior officers, leaving nothing for the enlisted men. I offered to help his government set up a mobile banking system to make it easier to transfer money directly into accounts for each soldier. Kabila was amazed at the potential of this technology and agreed. By 2013 the system was being hailed as “just short of a miracle,” although corruption remained endemic.
After seeing Kabila, I headed to the Mugunga camp for internally displaced people, refugees in their own country. More than a decade of war had devastated towns and villages, forcing families to abandon their homes and belongings in search of any shelter that offered relative security. But as is so often the case in refugee crises, this and other camps were plagued by problems. Access to clean water, sanitation, and other basic services was a continuing challenge. The security personnel hadn’t been paid in months. Disease and malnutrition ran rampant.
I began by meeting with aid workers to learn more about their experiences in the camp. Then a Congolese man and woman, introduced as the “elected leaders” of the camp, gave me a tour through the long rows of tents, small market, and health clinic. It reminded me of why I had become impatient about many refugee camps. While I appreciate the need to give people temporary shelter during a conflict or after a disaster, too often camps turn into semi-permanent de facto detention centers, awash with disease, poverty, and hopelessness.
I asked the woman leading the tour what the people there needed most. “Well, we’d like our children to go to school,” she said. “What?” I asked, appalled. “There is no school? How long have you been here?” “Nearly a year,” she said. That drove me crazy. The more I learned, the more questions I had: Why were women being raped when they went out to get firewood and water? Why couldn’t the camp organize patrols of the men to protect the women coming and going? Why were babies dying from diarrhea when medical supplies were available? Why couldn’t we donors do a better job of learning and applying lessons from our experiences in helping refugees and internally displaced people in other places?
In brightly colored clothing and with exuberant, undaunted energy, the people of the camp crowded around everywhere I went, waving and smiling and shouting out comments. It was inspiring to feel the force of their spirited endurance in the face of so much pain and destruction. The NGO workers, doctors, counselors, and UN officials were all doing what they could under extremely difficult circumstances. They worked every day to repair the broken bodies and spirits of women who had been raped, often by gangs, and often in such brutal fashion that they could no longer bear children, work, or even walk. Despite my criticism of conditions in the camp, I admired the resilience I saw.
From the camp I headed to HEAL Africa, a hospital built to treat victims of rape and sexual attacks. In a small room there I had heartrending conversations with two women who had survived brutal sexual attacks that had left each suffering from horrible physical and mental wounds.
If I had seen the worst of humanity on this visit, I had also seen the best, especially those women who, after they had recovered from being raped and beaten, went back into the forest to rescue other women left to die. During my trip to the DRC, I heard an old African proverb: “No matter how long the night, the day is sure to come.” These people were doing their best to make that day come faster, and I wanted to do all I could to help.
I announced that the United States would provide more than $17 million to combat sexual violence in the DRC. The money would fund medical care, counseling, economic assistance, and legal support for survivors. Nearly $3 million would be used to recruit and train police officers to protect women and girls, to investigate sexual violence, and to dispatch technology experts to help women and frontline workers use cell phones to document and report abuses.
Back home we also supported legislation targeting the extraction and sale of “conflict minerals” that helped fund the militias that kept the conflict going. Some of these minerals eventually found their way into high-tech consumer goods, including mobile phones.
A little more than a month after my trip to Goma, in late September 2009, I presided over a meeting of the United Nations Security Council focused on women, peace, and security, where I proposed making the protection of women and children from the kinds of rampant sexual violence I witnessed in the Congo a priority for UN peacekeeping missions around the world. All fifteen Council members agreed. It wasn’t going to solve the problem overnight, but it was a start.
* * *
* * *
One country that embodied hopes for the future but seemed weighted down by its troubled past and present was South Sudan. It was the newest country in the world, having gained its independence from Sudan in July 2011, after decades of struggle and conflict. But when I visited in August 2012, South Sudan and Sudan were once again locked in a deadly dispute.
Sudan had been riven by religious, ethnic, and political divisions since the mid-20th century. Since 2000, genocide in the Darfur region and intense fighting over land and resources between the Arab north and the Christian south had claimed more than 2.5 million lives, subjected civilians to unspeakable atrocities, and sent refugees fleeing into neighboring countries. A Comprehensive Peace Agreement was finally signed in 2005, and it included a promise that the South could eventually hold a referendum on independence. But in 2010, talks broke down, and preparations for the referendum stalled. The peace agreement appeared close to collapse, and a return to open conflict seemed likely. With lots of encouragement from the United States, the African Union, and other members of the international community, the two sides pulled back from the brink. The i
ndependence vote was held at last, in January 2011, and in July, South Sudan became Africa’s fifty-fourth nation.
Unfortunately the 2005 peace agreement left some important issues unresolved. Both sides claimed certain border regions and were ready to occupy them by force. Even more crucial was the issue of oil. By a quirk of geography, South Sudan was blessed with extensive reserves, while Sudan itself was not; however, the South was landlocked and lacked refining and shipping facilities, which the North did have. That meant the two bitter rivals needed each other, stuck in a symbiotic but dysfunctional partnership.
The Sudanese government in Khartoum, still smarting over the loss of their southern dominions, began demanding exorbitant prices to process and transport the South’s oil, and it confiscated crude when the South refused payment. In January 2012, South Sudan retaliated by shutting down production altogether. For months the two sides stuck to their guns. Both economies, already fragile, began to crumble. Inflation soared. Millions of families faced food shortages. Soldiers readied for renewed fighting and clashes broke out in oil-rich border areas. It seemed like the definition of a lose-lose scenario.
So in August I flew to Juba, the new capital of South Sudan, to try to broker a deal. It had taken years of patient diplomacy to end the civil war and midwife the birth of a new nation, and we couldn’t let that achievement fall apart now. What’s more, with intense efforts under way around the world to convince energy-hungry nations to reduce consumption of Iranian oil and shift to new suppliers, we could ill afford to see Sudanese oil go off the market.
But the new President of South Sudan, Salva Kiir, wouldn’t budge. I listened to him explain all the reasons why South Sudan couldn’t compromise with the North on an oil deal. Behind all the arguments about pricing and refining was a simple human reality: these battle-scarred freedom fighters couldn’t bring themselves to move beyond the horrors of the past, even if it meant starving their new nation of the resources it needed to thrive. When the President paused, I decided to try a different tack. I took out a copy of an op-ed that had run in the New York Times just a few days before and slid it across the table. “Before we go any further, I would appreciate you reading this,” I told him. President Kiir was curious; this was unusual behavior in a high-level diplomatic meeting. As he began to read, his eyes widened. Pointing to the byline, he said, “He was a soldier with me.” “Yes,” I replied, “but now he’s a man of peace. And he remembers that you fought together for freedom and dignity, not for oil.”
Bishop Elias Taban is one of the most remarkable people I’ve ever met. He was born in 1955 in the city of Yei in South Sudan, when it was still under British colonial rule. That same day forces from the North massacred dozens of people in town, and Elias’s mother fled into the jungle with her screaming infant. His umbilical cord was freshly cut, and his mother used crushed leaves to stop the bleeding. For three days they hid, before finally returning home. As he grew, Elias was caught up in the country’s endless civil war. He became a child soldier at age twelve, alongside his father. Eventually the elder Taban managed to get Elias to the Ugandan border and told him to flee. He was found on the other side by UN relief workers.
By 1978 Elias was back in southern Sudan, living in Juba. He met a group of evangelists from Kenya and felt called to become a man of faith. He earned degrees in civil engineering and theology and learned to speak English, Lingala, Arabic, Bari, and Swahili. When war broke out again in the 1980s, Bishop Taban and his wife, Anngrace, both joined the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement and fought for southern Sudan’s independence. After the peace agreement in 2005, he devoted himself to promoting reconciliation and sustainable development. He and his followers build schools, orphanages, hospitals, and clean water wells.
In July 2012, dismayed by the continuing conflict between North and South, Bishop Taban published a plea for peace. His op-ed made a significant impression on me. “There must always come a point,” he wrote, “where we look forward and recognize the need to stop fighting over past wrongs so we can build toward a new future.” That is one of the hardest lessons for people to learn on any level, personal or political, but it is profoundly important in a world where so many societies are still held back by old enmities and conflicts.
I watched President Kiir read his old comrade’s words, and his defiance seemed to soften. Perhaps now we could get down to business. I kept emphasizing that “a percentage of something is better than a percentage of nothing.” Finally President Kiir agreed to reopen negotiations with the North to try to find a compromise on oil pricing. At 2:45 A.M. the next day, after a marathon negotiation in Ethiopia, the two sides reached a deal so that the oil could begin flowing again.
It was a step in the right direction, but hardly the end of the story. Tensions continued to simmer between the neighbors and within South Sudan itself. In late 2013, tribal divisions and personal feuds erupted in a spasm of violence that threatens to tear the country apart. As of 2014, the future of Africa’s youngest nation is full of uncertainty.
Before leaving Juba that August, I asked to meet Bishop Taban so I could thank him in person for his powerful words. When he and his wife came to the U.S. Embassy, they proved to be even more dynamic and inspiring than I had expected, and they got a big kick out of hearing my story about distributing his op-ed in the Presidential Palace.
In September 2013, I was honored to invite Bishop Taban to the Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York and present him with a Global Citizen Award for his peacemaking efforts. He told the audience that American engagement in the oil dispute had been “an answer for prayers” and that, while many challenges remained for his country, the fragile peace was holding. Then he pointed to an eight-month-old baby sitting on his wife’s lap. The boy had been discovered in the jungle near Yei in February. The police had called Bishop Taban and Anngrace for help. After some soul-searching, Anngrace said, “If it is a call of God in our life, we have no choice. Let them bring the child.” The police were relieved, but then they said, “Bishop, wait a minute. The cord is not cut. We want to rush to the hospital and make sure that it’s cut.” The Bishop and his wife took this echo of his own birth as a sign, and they brought Little John home to live with their four other adopted children in a country still struggling to grow beyond its own difficult birth.
* * *
* * *
For decades Somalia has been one of the poorest, most war-torn nations in the world, a classic failed state. Persistent conflict between rival warlords and extremists, prolonged drought, widespread hunger, and periodic disease outbreaks left roughly 40 percent of the population in need of emergency humanitarian aid. For Americans, the name Somalia conjures up painful memories of the troubled UN humanitarian mission launched by President George H. W. Bush in late 1992 to ensure that food aid reached starving Somalis without interference by clashing warlords. My husband continued the mission when he became President. The tragic “Black Hawk Down” incident, in which eighteen American soldiers were killed in Mogadishu, became a lasting symbol of the dangers of American involvement in messy global hotspots. Bill pulled our troops out of Somalia, and for the next fifteen years the United States remained reluctant to commit military resources to Africa, although we remained active with political and humanitarian efforts.
Yet, by 2009, Somalia’s problems were too great for the United States to ignore. The violent extremist group Al Shabaab, which has links to al Qaeda, represented a growing threat to the entire region. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 had driven home the lesson that failed states could become staging grounds for strikes far beyond their borders. Pirates based in Somalia were also posing an increasing threat to international shipping in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, highlighted by the April 2009 hijacking of the Maersk Alabama, dramatized in the 2013 movie Captain Phillips. So the United States and the international community had a compelling interest in arresting Somalia’s slide into oblivion and helping bring some semblance of order and stability t
o the Horn of Africa. Here was a guns-or-growth question with major implications for our own national security.
In the spring and summer of 2009 Al Shabaab was on the offensive, overwhelming the forces of Somalia’s weak transitional government in the capital of Mogadishu and the African Union troops deployed to protect it. The extremists reached within a few city blocks of the Presidential Palace. I told Johnnie Carson, “We can’t let the Somali government fail and we can’t let Al Shabaab win.” Johnnie later told me that he lay awake that night racking his brain for ideas of how we could act quickly and effectively enough to prevent a terrorist victory. The most urgent need was to get the government cash to pay its troops and purchase ammunition to fight off the extremists. I encouraged Johnnie to be creative in providing what the beleaguered Somali troops needed. Over that summer, Johnnie arranged to deliver the needed funds and hired accountants to track the money. The State Department also arranged for a contractor to fly in a few planeloads of small arms and ammunition from Uganda. It wasn’t much, but it provided the beleaguered Somali troops the support they needed to take a stand and begin to push Al Shabaab back.
Hard Choices Page 36