The Horror, the Horror

Posted on Feb 28, 2014

The Horror, the Horror 

A review of The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair, a book by Michael Deibert

By Nomi Prins  

Truthdig

(Please read the original article here)

“The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair” by Michael Deibert is a grim and difficult book to read, despite the author’s masterful reporting. It is painful because of the visceral attention and emotion his work demands. The tragic and depressing tale of Congo is steeped in the gruesome brutality and avarice of elite leaders-cum-plunderers. It is a story we must know.

Deibert spares readers no detail of the horrors inflicted on a population whose only crime is one of location. It is agonizing material to absorb. After yet another killing, another raid and another rape, you want the book to end. Only there is no end. Not for the Congolese. That Deibert can so compassionately balance their predicament against the voracity of their leaders and pillagers speaks volumes about his skill as an on-the-ground journalist.

He expertly untangles the myriad political and ethnic factions, their acronyms (for which he helpfully provides a glossary), and the leaders who dwell in Congo and the surrounding countries of Rwanda, Zaire, Uganda, Angola and the Central African Republic.

Today, Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, Congo’s Joseph Kabila and Rwanda’s Paul Kagame flit between competing and collaborating on a long-standing mission: gaining control over Congo’s abundant natural resources. Meanwhile, the world does precious little, beyond lip service, to defend Congo’s inhabitants. Indeed, world political and economic powers are not only complicit through passive acquiescence, but also actively encourage and facilitate the monstrous pillage of Congo.

Deibert begins with his exploration of the remote Eastern part of Congo, which he traverses with a driver and a translator. He ushers us “over windswept green hills from the dusty, dilapidated provincial capital of Bunia” to Ituri, “a patchwork of ethnic groups and subgroups”—broadly, the “Hema” and “Lendu.” Stemming from these divisions are “a panoply of other armed groups, each with its own competing, overlapping and colliding agendas, and a civilian population, including a substantial number of Mbuti pygmies, made to suffer the consequences of the mad scramble for power and riches.” He explains how slaughters in Ituri, as for Congo, trace back to Uganda and Rwanda. Such is the entwinement of Africa’s power elite.

Deibert examines U.S. support for the colonization of Congo, how American President Chester Arthur came “to recognize [Belgium King] Leopold’s claim to Congo in early 1884,” and the Berlin Conference that “entrusted an expanse the size of Western Europe to the whims of a king who had never set foot there.”

Echoing Adam Hochschild’s “King Leopold’s Ghost,” Deibert writes, “the 1885 to 1908 existence of the Congo Free State was and remains one of history’s great crimes, but at the time the rape and pillage of the prostrate land continued with much approbation from the world at large.” At the time, plundering another country’s resources did not raise eyebrows among the powerful. Sadly, the only change has been the perpetrators, as Deibert elucidates throughout the book.

After decades of struggle, Congo declared itself independent on June 30, 1960. Seven months later, foreshadowing the corruption and violence that would escalate for decades, “[Patrice] Lumumba, the figure that more than any other single person symbolized Congo’s independence and its refutation of foreign domination,” was killed.

Deibert then depicts the rise of Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, who after launching two coups, declared himself president in November 1965. Ruling for 32 years, he infused Congo with a “cult of personality to rival anything Africa had seen before or since.” He despotically centralized state control over Congo’s provinces, reducing their number from 21 to eight within eight months in 1966, instigating massacres along the way.

Deibert broadens the story of Congo’s ongoing conflict with its neighbors, bluntly recounting their genocidal actions. “The opening shot in the Rwandan genocide was fired,” Deibert explains, “around 8 p.m. on the evening of 6 April 1994.” Hutu military and militia went on to kill nearly 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus within 100 days.

As Deibert fumes, based on voluminous evidence, “It is hard to overstate the immorality that characterized the response of Western governments during the crisis. … In the case of US President Bill Clinton, it meant a policy of feckless, narcissistic self-interest, as the administration … spearheaded efforts to remove UNAMIR troops from Rwanda, refused to use US technological know-how to block genocidaire radio transmissions and avoided any public use of the word ‘genocide’ for fear that it somehow might be compelled to act.”

After further violence through the 1990s, Deibert presents Congo’s young current leader, Kabila, taking the helm of a nation crippled by decades of corruption and half a decade of war. Sworn in as president on Jan. 25, 2001, Kabila sought international favor through a whirlwind tour of world capitals, including visits with French President Jacques Chirac, a prayer breakfast with President George W. Bush and Rwanda leader Kagame, and a meeting with Belgium Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt. Deibert illuminates the swath of atrocities since Kabila’s reign began, as factions within and beyond Congo fought Kabila’s power and he fought theirs. The civilian populations were the casualties.

In stark contrast to these embattled, impoverished and powerless citizens are Congo’s vast resources. Their pillaging is an “armed robbery of epic proportions,” in which “Congolese officials, their neighbors in Africa and the international community were all complicit.”
It is these resources—and the host of ethnic groups vying for control over them—that lie at the crux of the violence. Congo contains more than 1,100 mineral substances, including 25 percent of the total known diamond reserves in the world in terms of carats, and 64 percent of the world’s known reserve of coltan, a metallic ore used in electronics. The province of Orientale is “studded with vast deposits of gold.” Those resources represent large, tantalizing profits to its leaders, neighbors and mining speculators from Europe, the U.S., Canada, Australia and China.

None of the spoils from these resources make it to the average Congolese citizen. As Deibert points out, “Congo should stride across the continent as an economic and political powerhouse; however, for the first half of the twentieth century the country was little more than an open cupboard of baubles to be looted by the Belgiums, and for the second half as a personal, seemingly bottomless bank account for its kleptocratic rulers.”

Indeed, official estimates from 2006 (the last ones available) cite 71 percent of the country living in poverty, and the 2012 per capita GDP at $400 per year. Congo ranks lowest on the International Human Development Indicators at 186, tied with Niger.

There exists no great plan to alter these abysmal statistics. Much as government officials in the U.S. cycle through the private sector and vice versa, Congo appoints “some of the country’s worst human rights abusers into senior positions” in the government. Meanwhile, as Deibert bemoans, “the international community’s refusal to hold the Kabila government to account for its more flagrant human rights abuses” (and there are many) only emboldens Congo’s government “in its belief that the path it had chosen was the correct one, and one that would bear very few negative consequences.” This attitude also allows regional and international predators to keep circling their prey.

“The Democratic Republic of Congo” will captivate readers already familiar with the blood-soaked, resource-intense country, as well as those being introduced to the struggles facing the Congolese. Deibert provides a relentless list of brutality; women are raped; children are killed; young men are dismembered; and political party leaders, supporters and journalists are routinely murdered. There seems to be no reason for optimism about the country’s future.

And yet, the book ends with a ray of hope emanating from the people themselves. “Despite what might seem like overwhelming odds,” Deibert writes, “the Congolese continue. They persevere.” I was amazed by this sentiment, so I decided to ask Deibert what he really thought:

“Michael, you penned the book ‘Notes From the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti’ and now, this one. You’ve spent years living in, and reporting on, torn countries as the bodies pile up. What keeps you going?” I asked him. “Telling these stories? Are you hopeful about the future? Or is Congo much closer to despair than hope?”

He responded, “Given the role that is often played by politically and economically powerful countries in the difficulties experienced by less powerful ones, I think that it is important that journalists bring back to readers in places such as the United States and Europe the impact that the measures being enacted in their name—by their politicians, their private sector actors and their institutions—have on the lives of people who are often so removed from the levers of that power. Hopefully, by doing so, by afflicting the conscience of the privileged, this will help affect a move towards less wantonly destructive, more humane policies.”

And it is for this very reason that everyone should read “The Democratic Republic of Congo.” If the Congolese can maintain their hope in such horrific circumstances, and journalists like Michael Deibert can literally risk their lives to bring us the stories of the voiceless, then it is our moral and human obligation to read them.

Africa Today discussion on crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo's Katanga

I spoke on Press TV's Africa Today along with Save the Congo's Vava Tampa and the LSE's Gabi Hesselbien about the crisis in the province of Katanga in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A good wide-ranging discussion on issues of governance, security and economy in DRC. The show's intro makes me terribly nostalgic for Africa.

Three Graces

Photo © Michael Deibert

Book Review: The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair

17 January 2014  

Book Review: The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despai 
  
LSE’s Jonathan Silver calls Michael Deibert’s book an “essential read” for those interested in wider postcolonial worlds.
 
(Read the original review here)

Early in 2003 when the world’s attention was focused on the unfolding calamity of the Iraq invasion, another deadly conflict was occurring in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). I was in south west Uganda watching with trepidation as a constant flow of Ugandan army vehicles streamed across the border from Ituri province after the strategically important town of Bunia had been captured a few months earlier by the Uganda’s People’s Defense Force. Along with the ubiquitous UN white trucks of the UN’s MONUSCO, the amounts of transportation of men, goods and weaponry gave just an inkling of the epic scale of conflict and resource extraction that was taking place at the time in eastern DRC and I was somewhat ashamed about how little I knew about such a devastating episode in Africa’s history. That feeling stayed with me through the last months of the Second Congo War (1998-2003) and the subsequent low-intensity series of ongoing conflicts, disputes, peace deals and oscillating tensions culminating in the recent emergence of the Mouvement du 23 Mars (M23) militia. Anyone who, like me, is looking to gain a better understanding of this part of central Africa would do well to read journalist Michael Deibert’s passionate dissection of the geographies of war and peace in the DRC.

The book is divided into ten chapters which provide a contemporary account of the country anchored in historical detail, following the country from pre-colonial times through to the postcolonial era and the rule of Mobutu as the country fragmented, revealing in excruciating detail the suppression and all-out civil conflict that have characterised the country. Deibert begins the book with a prologue that takes the reader directly into Ituri province and what he describes as the “killing fields” as he walks through the “chest-high grass” of this region, documenting the terrorisation of ordinary Congolese in Bogoro in February 2003. This opening is both haunting and moving, as he chooses not to begin with the assorted political actors in the country but rather with the harrowing experiences of farmers such as Mathieu Nyakufa, as over 200 civilians were murdered by the Forces de Resistance Patriotique d’Ituri (FRPI).

The main part of the book opens with a short but interesting snapshot of pre-colonial society, particularly the Kingdom of Kongo where Mwene Kongo ruled a highly centralised state and many other “state-like entities” that extended across the vast territory now known as the DRC. So often the history of this huge country and its many grand and noble traditions (as well as African states more generally) begins with the arrival of Europeans, as if hundreds of years of civilisation meant nothing until the missionaries, slave traders and imperial explorers landed on the shore. Although Deibert provides this brief introduction, the book soon moves to the moment the Portuguese explorer Diogo Cao arrived in 1482 and as such seems to reflect these wider traditions of writing Africa.

Familiar history is covered in the form of explorer Henry Morton Stanley as he finds a European King in Leopold of Belgium, desperate to create his own empire (and the plunder that would go with it). Deibert shows how Stanley set about the brutal suppression of the Congo and establishing natural resource extraction on a scale that continues to the present day in various forms. As the author notes, this “remains one of history’s great crimes” (page 14).  Interestingly he hints at the pathological nature of Leopold through him being “the product of an ice-cold relationship with his mother and father” Such horrors would not only draw denunciations by Victorian reformers (Doyle, 1909) but, as the author makes clear, Leopold’s rule would set a precedent that would continue far into the future. His way of governing would certainly be mirrored in the 32-year rule of Congo by Joseph-Desire Mobutu after his 1965 coup. His attempts to draw in both Communist and Western backers, his divide and rule governance and “a cult of personality to rival anything Africa had seen before or since” are brought to the attention of the reader as further causes of the contemporary conflicts that have divided the country and its people.

After the brief (at under 50 pages) but comprehensive history of the country up to the beginning of the Rwandan genocide in 1994, the remaining chapters of the book focus on the recent history of DRC, the Great Congo Wars and the echoes that continue to reverberate across the region from these momentous events. It is these seven chapters that perhaps offer the greatest contribution to understanding the country. In these pages the author provides a tour de force of detailed journalistic analysis, revealing the multiple causes of the conflicts that began with the fleeing genocidaires and subsequent actions of the Rwandan leader Paul Kagame in destroying Hutu camps and undertaking an invasion. Setting in train a brutal war that would draw in not just Rwanda but neighbouring Uganda (and later various African states) newly formed militias were supported to fight proxy conflicts and steal the abundant resources of the area to fund these escapades. It is during this time that the author reveals the acquiescence of the West through figures such as Madeline Albright (Clinton’s Secretary of State at the time) who praised “Africa’s best new leaders” and thus condemning eastern Congo to continued foreign and catastrophic influence. The author shows how DRC has been cynically used by its neighbours. The authoritarian leaderships of neighbouring countries such as Rwanda and Uganda are clearly implicated in Deibert’s dissection of competing powers. As the author shows, this has been central to the problems of the eastern DRC over the last 20 years during which  the country has been plundered by several surrounding countries, using vast territories as a space to project expansionist inclinations, make a corrupt set of autocratic governments rich and hinder any chance of lasting peace. The role of older powers such as France and Belgium together with new international actors such as China reveals that huge reserves of diamonds, gold, timber continue to draw the attention of foreign governments near and far who are prepared to ignore the human rights of the Congolese people in order to secure these natural resources.

The analysis of the role of the then young president Joseph Kabila, who took power in 2001 is another key contribution of the book. The author offers a balanced and comprehensive analysis of Kabila’s role in both struggling to contain, yet also contributing to the continuing fracturing of eastern DRC into a diverse geography of various bands of foreign and domestically funded armed forces that he terms in chapter 10 ‘rebellion after rebellion’. Deibert’s forensic investigation reveals Kabila’s increasingly authoritarian rule since coming to power. Such an analysis shows the problems posed by governing such a huge geographic space and the competing interests that criss-cross the country. As later chapters reveal, these areas have often been governed or taken over by leaders indicted by the ICC, such as Bosco Ntaganda and Jean-Pierre Bembawho have been prepared to use brutal strategies of force to challenge Kabila’s grip on the country and its resources. Indeed the list of abbreviations of different groups at the beginning of the book reflect this staggering mosaic of actors and groups across the country.

The book does well in steering clear of the Conradian echoes of travels into the heart of darkness which characterise many contemporary and not so contemporary Western accounts (Burton, 1961, Stanley 1878, 1890) of the country that have perpetuated representations of the Congo, drawing rightful scorn from postcolonial scholars (Mbembe, 1978, Mudimbe, 1988). As Jarosz (1992:106) argues, “the metaphor of the Dark Continent has shown remarkable tenacity in a variety of Western idioms spanning the last hundred years of human geography in the Western tradition”. Heroic accounts of Euro-American travels into these spaces, seemingly off the map of civilisation, offer little for readers seeking to learn more about the DRC without being able to speak French and therefore unable to read the Congolese view of their own history. As a result, Deibert’s exhaustive documentation of the complex and shifting relationships between politicians, warlords, donors, vulnerable communities, neighbouring states and a plethora of shifting actors provide an important and timely contribution in which to understand the political geography of DRC. Yet the reader would do well to note that even such an impressive account is open to Chatterjee’s (1994: 216) insistence that, ‘‘Europe and the Americas, the only true subjects of history, have thought out on our behalf not only the script of colonial enlightenment and exploitation, but also our anti-colonial resistance and post-colonial misery”. While this reflection should not stop readers opening the pages to this fantastic text, it should be something to consider as the reader progresses through the book.

This is not just a book about the DRC or even contemporary Africa as the cover purports. Instead it is an essential read for those of us interested in wider postcolonial worlds and the historical fragments of local, regional and global contexts that intersect and link huge parts of the planet together. The book makes clear the role of the West in cynically using the country, the exploitation of the almost unparalleled natural resources by fellow African countries, global corporations and conniving governments. Such analysis should not prompt us to recoil in horror or paralysis about the scale of crimes that continue to take place across eastern DRC, or brush aside as another episode in the seemingly chaotic and cruel post-independence period of many former colonies. Instead as he travels across DRC, Deibert’s work brings to light the often disabling hangover of colonialism and the issues of governance, war and peace that unfold in countries such as DRC as a result. Mbembe (2001:102) argues for the need to reflect on “the political, cultural and economic realities of societies living with the legacies and in the aftermath of colonialism” and the book can certainly be praised for such a task, showing us how we can follow the threads of colonial rule into contemporary accounts.
Deibert succeeds in documenting the travails of the ordinary people of the DRC and the impact that these conflicts have had on them, not just through numbers of dead, displaced or raped but through the stories of individuals, allowing the voices of those most affected to speak directly to the reader. Such writing should be a reminder to those of us who write about postcolonial worlds to focus beyond the dominant characters and the big men (and it is nearly always men) of history to uncover how these wider political forces unfold across the everyday lives of populations. Considering the subtitle of the book, ‘Between hope and despair’ I found the book to be a little disappointing in Deibert’s treatment of hope and the ways the Congolese people have managed to not just get by but get on, navigate the shifting complexities of life and dream of a better future in the face of often almost insurmountable odds. Given the complexity of the DRC’s political geography and the extraordinary achievement in mapping these endless and shifting configurations, perhaps this was not the book in which to explore these everyday tales with which I have become familiar through urban accounts of Kinshasa by Frank De Boeck (2004, 2011). Still, as Deibert suggests, these ordinary Congolese “carry within themselves the idea of a nation, a nation stitched together out of a patchwork of tribal kingdoms that was never meant to be one but that has persisted” and which offers a vestige of hope in the future of the nation.

The book makes clear that describing contemporary DRC merely as nothing more than a modern heart of darkness is inadequate and anchored in colonial representations of Africa. It therefore joins a number of important recent texts such as Hochschilds (2012), Prunier (2011) and Stearns (2011) that help us better understand this colossal country without recourse to crude representations, instead relying on extensive research, understanding and empathy. This powerful account forces scholars and other readers to stare sombrely into the postcolonial mirror and reflect not just on the role of our countries in such tragedy but our own ways of writing, knowing and representing the continent that can inform research far beyond the borders of the DRC.

Over the course of early December the M23 was militarily defeated with the leaders and 1500 soldiers crossing over the Ugandan border to surrender after the Congolese army, and crucially a change in the rules of engagement for the MONUSCO intervention force shifted the military balance. Yet with the far from magnanimous Kinshasa government and the M23 agreeing a shaky peace agreement, signed on 12 December, together with reports of activities by other militias, including the M-18, there is still much caution about whether this can be a comprehensive peace for which many in the region are now hoping. Given the history of eastern DRC dissected so well in this book I, like the author and the millions of people in Ituri, the Kivus and the wider DRC can only draw hope for the future.

References

Burton R.E (1860): The Lake Regions of Central Africa. Kindle file

De Boeck, F., and Plissart, M-F. (2004) Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City. Antwerp:Ludon

De Boeck, F (2011) Spectral Kinshasa: building the city through an architecture of words 311- 128 in

Edsenor, T and Jayne, M (eds) (2011) Urban theory beyond the West: A world of cities. Routlegde. London

Doyle, A (1909) The Crime of the Congo. Kindle file

Hochschild, A (2012) King Leopold’s Ghost: A stroy of greed, terror and heroism in colonial Africa. Mariner Books, New York,

Jarosz, L (1992) Constructing the Dark Continent: Metaphor as Geographic Representation of Africa. Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography, Vol. 74, No. 2 (1992), pp. 105-115

Mbembe, C (1978) Research in African Literatures, Vol. 9, No. 1, Special Issue on Literary Criticism. (Spring, 1978), pp. 1-15.

Mbembe, A. (2001) On the Postcolony. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Mudimbe, V. Y.  (1988) The invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. James Currey, London

Prunier, G (2011) Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan genocide and the making of a continental catastrophe. Oxford University Press, Oxford

Stanley, H,M. (1878): Through the Dark Continent or The Sources of the Nile Around the Great Lakes of Down the Livingstone River to the Atlantic Ocean. Kindle file

Stanley, H,M. (1890): In Darkest Africa, or the Quest, Rescue and Retreat of Emin, Governor of Equatoria. Kindle file

Stearns, J (2011) Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The collapse of the Congo and the great war of Africa. Public Affairs, New York

Wonderful postcard from Cuba

La isla del encanto

Photo © Michael Deibert

The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair by Michael Deibert – review

The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair by Michael Deibert – review 

Rory Carroll on a valuable, angry account of Congo's difficulties

The Guardian, Thursday 2 January 2014 07.00 EST 

(Please read the original article here)

The cover of Michael Deibert's examination of Congo bears a striking image of a young woman in flip-flops playing the cello in a bleak, grubby yard surrounded by a bleak, grubby city. She focuses on the notes on a sheet music stand, seemingly oblivious to the potholes and grime and rain-bellied clouds overhead.

It is an apt illustration for a book subtitled "Between Hope and Despair", and invites us to wonder if harmony will finally prevail in a country eviscerated by two decades of conflict and chaos.
This ought to be one of the great, burning questions of international diplomacy. The carnage has caused 5.4m deaths, by some estimates, and the toll continues to climb. Fighting in the east last year spilled into Rwanda.

Yet central Africa seldom commands outside attention. Its torments play second fiddle to Afghanistan and the Middle East. This is understandable – there are no Islamist or nuclear perils here to frighten the west – but still shameful. Europe and the US bear partial responsibility for Congo's plight, a legacy of enslavement, looting and meddling dating back centuries.

Deibert's book is a scrupulously researched reminder of how this corner of the world became so wretched, and of the multiple actors responsible: Congolese politicians and warlords, predatory neighbours, hypocritical western governments and a hapless UN. "Though far from a paradise before the advent of Europe's colonial adventure there," he writes, "Congo became a place as deeply scarred and deformed by colonialism as any in Africa, and the bloodshed that has befallen the country since then is not the result of some sort of indigenous, irresistible, immemorial bloodlust on the part of the Congolese, but rather has been a tool used by individuals and governments to advance their own political and economic goals."

A vast land stretching from the Atlantic across jungles and savannah to Lake Tanganyika, touching nine countries, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (as opposed to the smaller Congo-Brazzaville to the west) abounds in timber, minerals and precious stones. These riches have been a curse, drawing parasitic interlopers who ravaged and impoverished Congo under various names: the Congo Free State, Belgian Congo, Zaire, DRC.

The depredations have long inspired and appalled chroniclers. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Roger Casement's diaries exposed King Leopold's vampiric tyranny. More recently Adam Hochschild (King Leopold's Ghost), Michela Wrong (In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz) and Tim Butcher (Blood River) have delved into the moral murk and returned with literary gems. Mario Vargas Llosa visited Congo to research The Dream of the Celt, a fictionalised account of Casement's life published in 2012.

Deibert's book eschews literary pretensions. A globetrotting American freelancer who specialises in development issues in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, he has written a solid, journalistic account detailing Congo's tailspin since 1994. Early chapters briskly dispatch the history – Portuguese slavers, Belgian hand-cutters, Mobutu Sese Seko's decaying rule – leaving the book to focus on what happened after Rwanda's vengeful Tutsi forces pursued Hutu genocidaires across the border of its giant neighbour.

Drawing on reports from Global Witness and Human Rights Watch, among others, Deibert details how Rwanda's proxy warlord, Laurent Kabila, swept aside Mobutu's ramshackle regime and installed himself in the presidential palace in Kinshasa.

Bill Clinton, shamed by his inaction during Rwanda's genocide, compensated by turning a blind eye to atrocities committed by forces loyal to Kabila and his Rwandan puppet-master Paul Kagame. That set a trend for western coddling of Kagame that lasted two decades despite repression in Rwanda and catastrophic tampering in Congo.

As the Guardian's Africa correspondent from 2002 until 2006 I would interview massacre survivors in Goma and Bukavu, then interview western diplomats in Kigali and Kinshasa who would nod and sigh and mumble excuses. A complex situation. Multiple variables. Powder keg. Better Kagame's iron fist than anarchy.

But it was anarchy. After Kabila turned against his patron, Rwanda invaded again. A metastasising conflict drew in Angola, Burundi, Uganda and Zimbabwe, all chasing plunder, and spawned dozens of proxy local militias and rebel groups, unleashing rape, pillage and slaughter on civilians.

Deibert makes a few fleeting appearances in the text such as when he encounters "bones still bleaching in the sun" in Bogoro, five years after a massacre, or visits the assassinated Kabila's tomb, built by his son and successor, Joseph Kabila. Mostly the author keeps himself out of it, a restraint alien to the I-swam-the-crocodile-river school of Congo reportage, and sticks to the facts, layering the narrative with details about which group or sub-group committed which killings.

The cumulative effect is numbing. Here is the RCD-N killing and raping this ethnic group. Now it's the UPC killing and raping that ethnic group. Then it's the turn of the APC. Then the FRPI, the FNI, the RCD-G. Even with footnotes it can become bewildering. Which lot are they again?

Congo's horrors have arguably inspired too much lyrical prose at the expense of factual accounts giving you straight analysis, and here lies the value of this book, an up to date synopsis which should adorn the shelf of policymakers and analysts. But as acronym bleeds into acronym the general reader will yearn for some storytelling, for some characters to humanise the statistics and give a flash of Congolese culture, humour and music. Too bad, too, that we are left guessing the motivations and personalities of players such as Kagame, a PR-savvy manipulator, or Joseph Kabila, the callow princeling turned smooth, ruthless autocrat.

These are surprising omissions as this is, quite rightly, an angry book. From his writings elsewhere Deibert is in the mould of James Cameron. Compassion impels his curiosity.

He castigates Clinton ("feckless, narcissistic self-interest") and the UN's peacekeeping force Monusco ("ludicrously understaffed … at times more interested in the perpetuation of the mission itself than the protection of the near-defenceless Congolese people"), not to make partisan points but because he has seen, first-hand, the tragic consequences.

The US and some European countries have belatedly recognised Kagame's duplicity but Deibert offers scant reason for the hope in his book's title. He doubts the international criminal court's prosecution of a few warlords at the Hague will deter others. For kleptocrats and meddlers, Congo, alas, remains open for business.

Obama mural, Little Haiti, Miami

Obama mural Little Haiti, Miami. Inside, where a car struck it, someone has scrawled the words "Empty Promises."

Photo © Michael Deibert

2013: A Reporter's Notebook of the Year Gone By

Busy as I was working on two books this year, my output in terms of articles was minimal. Nevertheless, I did manage to address some issue confronting Miami, the city that I live in, as well as Mexico, Haiti and a few other locales. I was also fortunate enough to have my book on the Democratic Republic of Congo reviewed by Kris Berwouts, an always-perceptive veteran analyst of that country.

In hopes for a more gentle 2014, and with much love,

MD


Letter From Miami for the Huffington Post (9 August 2013)

Why Arrest of Zetas Leader Does Not Mean End to Mexico's Drug War for the Huffington Post (16 July 2013)

CAR rebel victory throws resource deals into doubt for FDI Magazine (12 June 2013)

What Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez left behind: A Review of Rory Carroll's Comandante: Hugo Chavez's Venezuela for the Miami Herald (24 March 2013)

Michael Deibert's Haiti Bookshelf for the Huffington Post (18 March 2013)


A journalist ventures back to a troubled, seductive Haiti: A Review of Amy Wilentz's Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti for the Huffington Post (18 January 2013)

Reporter depicts events surrounding Haiti earthquake: A Review of Jonathan M. Katz's The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster for the Miami Herald (14 January 2013)

Reviews of my work

The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair reviewed by Kris Berwouts for African Arguments (10 December 2013)
 

Books in 2013: A Personal Selection

During a year in which I published one book, The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair (Zed Books), and finished another, the forthcoming In the Shadow of Saint Death: The Gulf Cartel and the Price of America's Drug War in Mexico (Lyons Press), I also got a fair amount of reading done. As has become something of a yearly tradition, here are the books that made the biggest impression on me in 2013.

Oblivion: A Memoir by Héctor Abad

This work of non-fiction by one of Colombia’s best-known novelists is the moving and painful story of his father, Héctor Abad Gómez, an idealistic physician who was slain by right-wing paramilitaries in 1987 for his work on behalf of the country’s poor and disenfranchised. In the story of his family and of his father, Abad manages to evoke the as-yet-unresolved struggles of an entire country.

Book of Clouds by Chloe Aridjis

A dreamlike and often eerie depiction of a young woman adrift in Berlin, this first novel by the Mexican writer Chloe Aridjis bodes for great things in the future.

The Corpse Had a Familiar Face by Edna Buchanan

An essential bit of Miami noir, this memoir was first published in 1987, the world this book by a former Miami Herald crime reporter depicts was wistful and vanishing (and quite dark) even then. It was a world where much of Miami Beach was still populated by retirees rather than club kids and where journalism was made up largely of regular working stiffs like everybody else and the idea of a journalism “school” was letting someone getting their hands dirty on a tough beat rather than further lining the coffers of  elite universities. “Once a sleepy resort that shut down during the off season,” Buchanan writes, “Miami now copes year-round with concentrations of everything corrupt, bizarre or dangerous from everywhere in the world.”

The Accidental President of Brazil: A Memoir by Fernando Henrique Cardoso

A presidential memoir that is actually more engaging before the subject becomes president, this book by Brazil’s 34th president is most interesting in its depiction of the long, arduous struggle that often diffuse democratic forces there waged against a durable military dictatorship. An interesting portrait of statecraft and democratization. 

Comandante: Hugo Chavez's Venezuela by Rory Carroll

A penetrating and tragicomic look inside the country that Hugo Chávez ran from 1999 until his death this year, this book by the Guardian’s former Caracas correspondent, examines how Chávez created something unique in the country, “an authoritarian democracy...a hybrid system of personality cult and one-man rule.” Examining how, after a failed 2002 coup attempt, Chávez fell ever-more under the spell of Cuban leader Fidel Castro (“The Cubans took us over” states a former ally glumly), Carroll examines how the Cubans supplied revolutionary manpower in exchange for cheap Venezuelan oil, with Cuban doctors pouring into the country to provide their services in the slums , but soon enough returning to Cuba, moving on to work in Bolivia or defection to Colombia or the United States. Their clinics were abandoned, as government officials sought care from elite private hospitals. Roads, bridges and factories all crumbled due to mismanagement and lack of maintenance. And as Chávez’s revolution went along, Venezuelans killed one another in ever greater numbers, with Carroll finally concluding that “the revolution inherited grave social problems and made them worse.” Required reading for anyone interested in modern Latin America. You can read my review in the Miami Herald here.

The Mind of the South by W.J. Cash

A curious amalgam of history, sociology and journalism, this pioneering 1941 work by South Carolina native W.J. Cash lays bare some of the attributes and many of the deficits of his native region, including an exaggerated (and easily offended) sense of honor, a florid religiosity and a maudlin sentimentality focused on a mythology of a past that had never in fact existed. Cash witheringly analyzes “the cult of the Great Southern Heart” that ceaselessly attempted to recast the pre-Civil War era south as “the happy country,” and asserts that the south’s view of itself and the outside world was a “tribal complex” which he compared to fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. As with the writing of the great historian John Hope Franklin, the book also serves as a reminder of how, for decades after the Civil War, the Democratic Party was the party of white supremacy, built on white poverty, a commitment that only began to change under Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman during the 1940s. Essential reading.

Midnight in Mexico: A Reporter's Journey Through a Country's Descent into Darkness by Alfredo Corchado

An immigrant’s memoir as much as a drug war thriller, this book is the heartfelt and affecting story of a Mexican native son who crossed to El Norte with his family’s dreams and then returned to Mexico as a reporter, only to watch a long hoped-for democratic transition descend into a mire of drug-related violence.



Walking Ghosts: Murder and Guerrilla Politics in Colombia by Steven Dudley

As peace talks between the government of Colombia’s president Juan Manuel Santos and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) rebel group dragged on throughout much of 2013, perhaps few observers watching them, hoping for a breakthrough and a political opening, realize that the FARC already had a political opening. The Unión Patriótica, a political party founded by the FARC in 1985 in the midst of negotiations with the government of then-president Belisario Betancur, in fact contested elections around the country for several years. That is, before they were all but wiped out by a savage extermination campaign launched by right-wing death squads collaborating with the Colombian military, and undermined by the wild-eyed paranoia and authoritarianism of FARC leader Jacobo Arenas (who died in 1990). The story of of the UP’s creation and extermination forms the crux of this book by veteran Latin American journalist Steven Dudley (who co-founded InSight Crime, a joint initiative of American University in Washington DC, and the Foundation InSight Crime and currently serves as its co-director). The book’s style can at times be distractingly repetitive, but there are still sobering lessons here about the difficulty for Latin America’s oldest and largest rebel group to “come in from the cold” and why Colombia’s long war may not be over yet.

In Evil Hour By Gabriel Garcia Marquez

For a writer who had such such progressive, even utopian, dreams in the political realm, Colombia’s most famous author could certainly have a rather misanthropic view of human beings themselves, and nowhere more so than in this 1962 novel originally titled Este pueblo de mierda (This Town of Shit) but finally published as La mala hora and translated into English as In Evil Hour. Centering around the intrigues of a small Colombian town and a series of poison pen letters posted in public places, the book is a fascinating insight into the beginnings of one of the 20th century's most important writers.

Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost by Paul Hendrickson

Overlong and sometimes given to trying to copy its subject’s distinctive prose style, this book by journalist Paul Hendrickson focusing on events connected to Ernest Hemingway's 38-foot fishing boat named Pilar is still moving and troubling, particularly when looking at Hemingway's slide into instability, mental illness and eventually suicide and the wreckage this left for his family. Often moored in Key West or near Havana (where she now rests), the Pilar was the vessel that shuttled one of America’s greatest writers through some of his most pivotal, and often happiest, moments, and Hendrickson has found a compelling new angle to cut through the Papa myth and see the troubled and acutely sensitive man behind it.

Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal: 1932-1940 by William E. Leuchtenburg

A fascinating depiction of the extraordinary political skills and accomplishments of one of our greatest presidents, who took the helm of the ship of state at one of its moments of greatest need.


The Death of a President: November 20–November 25 by William Manchester

Key scenes that have faded away in the mists of history - the political infighting that brought John F. Kennedy to Dallas, the chaos at Parkland Hospital following the shooting, the vigil at the airport in Washington as the plane bearing the president’s body landed that cool, damp November night - are brought vividly to life in this excellent book by William Manchester on Kennedy's November 1963 assassination. Other aspects of the story, such as the poisonous right-wing hatred of the president that found Dallas at its epicentre and the pivotal role Ethiopia's Haile Selassie played during Kennedy's funeral and after are also presented to great impact.

The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail  by Óscar Martínez

This book by a reporter for El Salvador’s El Faro website is a terrific example of what fearless enterprising reporting can accomplish, tracing the grinding and danger-filled journey of Central American migrants from the Guatemalan border all the way through Mexico and to the border with the United States, the promised El Norte so close and yet so far behind a border wall and across scoring desert and treacherous rivers Martínez does a stellar job of humanizing the immigration debate in the stories of the men and women willing to risk everything for the chance at a better life and the predators that dog them every step of the way.

The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair by Michael Deibert – Reviewed by Kris Berwouts

The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair by Michael Deibert

Reviewed by Kris Berwouts 

Posted on December 10, 2013 by AfricanArgumentsEditor

(Please read the original review here)

Joséphine Mpongo Nsimba has a difficult life but despite this, she tries to enjoy it. She wakes up before dawn and leaves the house to sell omelets at Kinshasa’s main market. Her income is hardly enough to make a living for herself and her children – prices have fallen recently because cheap eggs coming from outside the continent spoiled the market.  After work, she rehearses.

Josephine plays cello in a symphonic orchestra of gifted amateur musicians, determined and passionate to perform music together in one of the most chaotic cities in the world.  The Film ‘Kinshasa Symphony’ shows how a group of Congolese citizens has managed to forge a system as complex as a symphonic orchestra in a town as complicated as Congo’s capital. The movie is deeply human, intensely real, it paints scenes of extreme grimness as well as portraits of people determined to follow their dreams. Ther are people who continue to believe that, one day, the future will be better despite current indications to the contrary.

Josephine is also pictured on the cover of Michael Deibert new African Arguments book ‘The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair’, a groundbreaking examination of one of Africa’s most iconic and tragic countries and  a must-read for people interested in contemporary African politics in general and the Great Lakes Region in particular. Deibert is a journalist and author who has written for the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian and Le Monde Diplomatique. He has also been a featured commentator on international affairs for the BBC, Channel 4, Al Jazeera, WNYC New York Public Radio and many others. He is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (2005).

Congo and Central Africa have been shaped by complex regional dynamics, through which local cleavages and national conflicts have spilled over national borders. Each country in the region has a complex internal situation and a violent recent history, where local contradictions have become polarized and entangled with those of neighbouring countries. Following the end of the Cold War and throughout the 1990s these regional dynamics developed into an avalanche of killing and destruction. During the two wars in the DRC (1996-1997 and 1998-2002) which followed the genocide in Rwanda, the Congo and particularly its eastern provinces became the battlefield of “Africa’s First World War”.

In the book, Michael Deibert has connected thousands of threads to weave into a variegated and subtle tapestry which paints Congo’s history from the dark days of Belgian conquest and tyranny to the modern day atrocities carried out by warring militias and their legions of child soldiers.

Between Hope and Despair closely examines the Congolese state – the result of half a century of post-colonial history and a country that faced its first threat of implosion only days after it achieved independence, became a major pawn on the chess board of the cold war and developed under Mobutu a system for which the word ‘kleptocracy’ had to be invented. Deibert describes how this state was shaped by the long-term involvement of the United States and Europe in supporting and arming many of the belligerents in Congo’s conflicts, the ongoing murky role played by foreign interests in exporting mineral resources linked to the country’s  continuing instability and Congo’s own tortuous political and ethnic legacies.

His judgment is hard: “Drifting and myopic policies drawn up by a succession of international leaders were most often forged in the context of imagined grand geo-politics rather than the realities on the ground, allowing both Kabila and Congo’s neighbor to operate with brutality and impunity. Predatory and unscrupulous foreign business practitioners stepped into the void left by corruption and nepotism and continue to bleed the country dry of its mineral riches.”

Michael Deibert takes us with him on his journey down Congo’s muddy roads from the war-torn hills in the Kivus to the chaotic, pulsing capital of Kinshasa, presenting us the  Congolese polyphony  from impoverished gold prospectors and market women to government officials. His heart is with the communities and his book blames the world leaders who’ve either turned a blind eye to or directly fomented the misery of the Congolese people.

“… the bloodshed that has befallen the country (…) is not the result of some sort of indigenous, irresistible, immemorial blood lust on the part of the Congolese, but rather has been a tool used by individuals and governments  to advance their own political and economic goals throughout the territory Congo occupies, a state of affairs that has been true for the last 140 years.”

I don’t think I will put Deibert’s work back on the bookshelf. I will keep it within reach on my desk. Apart from an empathic narrative of hope and despair and a solid holistic analysis grounded in history, it is also a very practical mini-encyclopedia on Congo’s devastating conflicts and the many attempts to end them. If something happens tomorrow – the death of a key player of the last two decades, the outbreak of new violence in Ituri or the province of Bas-Congo, a new arrest warrant issued by the ICC -  it would only take me a few minutes to freshen up with the necessary background knowledge from Deibert’s book, allowing me to fully understand any new development.

Kris Berwouts has, over the last 25 years, worked for a number of different Belgian and international NGOs focused on building peace, reconciliation, security and democratic processes. Until recently, he was the Director of EurAc, the network of European NGOs working for advocacy on Central Africa. He now works as an independent expert on Central Africa.

One of the greatest

Ai Weiwei at the Pérez Art Museum Miami

Ai Weiwei's commentary on the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, which killed nearly 70,000 people, a death toll blamed largely on government corruption and shoddy contruction. On the ground, rebar recovered from the rubble of collapsed schoolhouses and then painstakingly straightened again. On the wall to the left, a list of names of Chinese students who died in the earthquake. On the far wall, photos of the construction of the Beijing National Stadium, constructed for the 2008 Olympic Games.

Miami Art Basel 2013

Photo © Michael Deibert

RIP, Madiba

 

"I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal, which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."

Miami Book Fair

Former United Nations official Mukesh Kapila, author of Against a Tide of Evil: How One Man Became the Whistleblower to the First Mass Murder of the Twenty-First Century, and I holding one another's books at the Miami Book Fair. We spoke about Sudan's Darfur region and the Democratic Republic of Congo, respectively.

Photo © Michael Deibert

In the Shadow of Saint Death: The Gulf Cartel and the Price of America's Drug War in Mexico

 

(I guess the cat is out of the bag, now. Look for it from Lyons Press in Spring 2014. MD)

Thank you, Busboys and Poets

Matamoros Sunset

Photos © Michael Deibert

Nice job, Tulane

SOAS Book Launch for The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair

The good people at the School of Oriental and African Studeis (SOAS) in London, along with Zed Books and the Royal African Society, earlier this week held a launch event for my new book, The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair. I was honored to be part of a panel discussion with both former Coordinator of the United Nations Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of Congo Fred Robarts and Coordinator of the UK Voices of African Women Campaign Marie-Claire Faray-Kele. The spirited and well-informed discourse both among the panelists and the audience gave me great hope that perhaps the world is finally becoming aware of what has been going on in Congo over the last 15 years and that, perhaps, things may even begin to change. My sincere thanks to all the thoughtful, committed people who showed up on Monday night.

Photos © Michael Deibert

London

"I love this place. It's just like home, filthy and full of strangers."

Doesn't get old

A note on the debt ceiling debate and the government shutdown

Just so everyone is clear: The debt ceiling vote involves paying for spending that the congress already voted to authorize, not future spending. In other words, the same Republican-controlled House of Representatives that signed off on future spending last year is now refusing to pay for it when the bill comes due. A lot of people seem to think it means future spending, but it does not. In exchange for paying debts they have already incurred, the House Republicans are demanding that president jettison the Affordable Care Act, his signature piece of legislation, which was passed by both houses, signed into law, found constitutional by the Supreme Cort and reinforced by the 2012 election. He's not going to reverse his own greatest legislative victory, Tea Party, no matter how many Civil War reenactments you stage.

New report by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on the Democratic Republic of Congo

The new report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights on the Democratic Republic of the Congo in important, if troubling, reading. It says, in part:

The High Commissioner notes that the situation of human rights had significantly deteriorated since her previous report to the Council, especially in the eastern part of the country, where...an important increase in the number of human rights violations and serious violations of international humanitarian law that could amount to war crimes, committed by national security and defence forces, as well as by foreign and national armed groups. The increase in gross human rights violations during the period under review can be attributed to various armed groups, including Mouvement du 23 mars (M23), and to the security and defence forces, in relation to M23 activities. M23 combatants were indeed responsible for gross human rights violations and serious violations of international humanitarian law, including summary executions, rape and child recruitment. Other armed groups, which took advantage of the security vacuum that followed the redeployment of FARDC units to combat M23, since May 2012, were also responsible for gross human rights violations and serious violations of international humanitarian law. Such groups have sought to extend their influence and control over areas rich in natural resources in the eastern part of the country, committing attacks against civilians, often on ethnic grounds. In addition, in the context of operations against M23, members of the Congolese defence and security forces allegedly committed gross human rights violations and serious violations of international humanitarian law...

The full report can be read here.

The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair events

The autumn book tour schedule thus far for my new book, The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair, published by Zed Books in cooperation with the Royal African Society, the International African Institute and the World Peace Foundation, will be as follows. One or two other events are in the works, as well, and the schedule will be updated in due course.

October 14 

Books & Books in Coral Gables, Miami, Florida, at 8pm.

October 21 

The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, at 6pm. Book launch and panel discussion with Coordinator of the UK WILPF Voices of African Women Campaign Marie-Claire Faray-Kele. Event held in partnership with ZED Books and the Centre of African Studies.

October 30 

Tulane University in New Orleans, Room 201 of the Lavin-Bernick Center for University Life from 4pm to 6pm. Event sponsored by Department of Political Science

November 7 

The University of South Carolina in Columbia, Gambrell 431at 4pm. Event sponsored by the African Studies Program.

November 11

Busboys & Poets (5th and K Street Branch) in Washington, DC. Time 6:30-8:00pm. Events co-sponsored by Friends of the Congo.

November 15 

Bluestockings in New York City. Time TBA.

November 23 & 24 

The Miami Book Fair in Miami, time and location TBA.

Letter to The New York Times' Public Editor Margaret Sullivan on photos of the Westgate Mall shootings in Kenya

Greeting, Ms. Sullivan,

My name is Michael Deibert and I am an author and journalist who has reported from Africa off and on since 2007, having most extensively worked in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

I am writing to you in your role as Public Editor to express my concern at the photos of dead bodies from the Westgate Mall shootings in Kenya - their faces fully visible - that were published on the New York Times website yesterday. The URL can be found here: [not linking to photos here]

Quite honestly, as a journalist who has reported on conflict for going on quite a number of years, I was shocked and dismayed by this. Would the New York Times run photos of blood-soaked dead white Americans after one of the many mass shootings that occur in the United States? I doubt it. That they did so after the mass killings in Nairobi yesterday is very troubling, not just to me, but also to many other journalists, academics and analysts who focus on Africa.

There are ways to depict violence so that people are not immediately recognizable to their loved ones, friends, and so on, and everyone, American, African, or whatever their nationality, deserves some dignity in death. One can show dead bodies without showing their faces, leaving people confronted for the rest of their lives with images of their family members and other loved ones soaked in blood and torn asunder. I've seen plenty of bodies dead through violence over the years, so I am not asking that the end result be sanitized, but rather wondering why some slight restraint was not used in allowing the bodies to be so immediately recognizable.

I would also stress that I am not at all taking the photographer to task for shooting as many images as he could in such chaotic circumstances - and showing great personal bravery in the process - but rather why the editors would chose to run some of them.

So, I ask, why this apparent double-standard when it comes to the sensitivities of people in Africa as opposed to people in the United States?

If you choose to reproduce this message, please reproduce it only in its entirety.

I appreciate any light you may be able to shed on this matter.

Sincerely,

MD

Why, look what the postman brought...

Mexico City

Photo © Michael Deibert

Justice for Israel

Photo © Michael Deibert

Letter From Miami

 Letter From Miami

By Michael Deibert

The Huffington Post

Posted: 08/09/2013 11:44 am

 

(This article originally appeared here) 

At about the time Miami Beach Police Department officers were fatally tasing 18-year-old artist and skateboarder Israel Hernandez-Llach, I was rising for the day in my apartment a few blocks away. Morning is generally the most sedate and appealing of time in the tropics, and as one side of my building faces east towards the sea, watching the sunlight cut blazing and orange through the gossamer clouds at dawn while drinking a coffee is one of the great pleasures of living here. In the midst of writing a particularly dark book about Mexican drug cartels, the moment also serves as a kind of respite, as well.

As I was sipping my coffee, Hernandez-Llach, a lithe fellow who had moved to Miami with his family from Colombia a few years ago, was confronted by police as he began tagging his graffiti name -- Reefa -- on a building at the corner of Collins Avenue and 71st Street. He only had time to write the "R" before police started chasing him. The building -- an abandoned shell that used to be a McDonald's whose windows are now covered in newspaper -- was hardly an architectural gem, and a number of other residents and I had actually commented how the look of the place had been improved by the graffiti that had started appearing there.

The police -- by most accounts almost half a dozen -- chased Hernandez-Llach throughout the neighborhood before cornering him, tasering him and reportedly high-fiving one another as he lay on the ground. Hernández was taken to the hospital where was pronounced dead. The official cause of death is still pending.

The news that authorities in Miami place a higher value on real estate -- however derelict -- than human life will come as little surprise to anyone who has been living here for the last several years, nor will the fact that the various police forces operating in Miami-Dade County (as the wider conglomeration of which Miami Beach is a part of is known) are largely out of control.

Just last month, a U.S. Department Of Justice report on the City of Miami Police Department, just across the glittering waters of Biscayne Bay from Miami Beach, found that the department "has engaged in a pattern or practice of excessive use of force through officer-involved shootings in violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution" and that the Department was also tainted by "deficient tactics, improper actions by specialized units, as well as egregious delays and substantive deficiencies in deadly force investigations."

Back here on the beach, one often gets the impression that many police feel they they're on Spring Break, rather than policing those who are, such as when a uniformed cop took a woman on a drunken pre-dawn joy ride on his department-issued ATV and ran over -- and then left -- two tourists waiting to see the sunrise. In another incident, the city had to pay out a $75,000 settlement after two officers were accused of beating a handcuffed gay man, attacking a witness and spewing anti-gay epithets. One officer was fired, then reinstated. The circumstances of the 2011 fatal shooting of Raymond Herisse during the largely African-American Urban Beach Weekend have yet to be fully explained. Meanwhile, in tony Bal Harbour, the police force there treated itself to $3,200 golf outings, trips to Puerto Rico and shopping sprees at the exclusive Bal Harbour Shoppes mall with millions of dollars the department had seized from drug dealers.

The death of Hernandez caps a summer during which a kind of malaise has settled over the city that even a second consecutive Miami Heat NBA championship can't quite dissipate.

Miami-Dade County is governed by a convoluted system whereby the mayor and the Board of County Commissioners run the county as a whole, but within the county there are innumerable little quasi-independent "cities" (some only stretching a few blocks) that have their own police forces, zoning ordinances and so on. One county commissioner, Javier D. Souto, said at a recent special session of the commission that I attended that the system was so complex that even some of the commissioners themselves didn't fully understand it.

Carlos A. Giménez, a retired Cuban-American firefighter, was elected Miami-Dade County mayor in June 2011 following the recall of Mayor Carlos Alvarez (largely bankrolled by former Philadelphia Eagles owner Norman Braman). Promising reform and clean governance, Giménez has thus far seemed to have forgotten that governing a city is about more than lining the pockets of its already fabulously wealthy real estate developers.

Miami's skyline is dotted with construction cranes servicing a luxury apartment boom (a 2011 UBS study ranked Miami as the richest city in the country by pure domestic purchasing power), but the city also has the second-highest income inequality rate in the United States.

Miami-Dade County borrowed about $400 million to pay for a new stadium for the Miami Marlins baseball team by selling bonds on Wall Street, and one set of stadium bonds - worth about $90 million - will now cost the county more than $1 billion to pay back.

After proposing a small property tax rate hike to enable to county to maintain basic services such as fire rescue, libraries and no-kill animal shelters, Giménez reversed course and supported the country commission's 8-4 vote to cut services, later declaring "the age of the library is probably ending" when people questioned the wisdom of the county closing nearly half its branches. This no doubt came as music to the ears of Commissioner Juan C. Zapata, who voted to defund the libraries and whose "non-profit" Read2Succeed! "actively promotes the importance of literacy and unites our community through the power of reading." Or, in other words, does what libraries do but less efficiently and on a far smaller scale.

One must also wonder, given the role of libraries as internet centers, where Miami-Dade's 10 percent unemployed will now apply for unemployment online, as Florida Governor Rick Scott recently required they do (such measures are taken when Scott is not busy trying to purge voters from state rolls) or where they will find free internet to find a new job online.

It seems as if not a single week passes without some elected official being lead away in handcuffs. This week it was Sweetwater Mayor Manuel Maroño and Miami Lakes Mayor Michael Pizzi hauled in by FBI agents for conspiring to commit extortion. A few weeks before that it was Former Hialeah Mayor Julio Robaina (who finished second in the 2011 Miami-Dade County mayoral race behind Gimenez) for tax evasion. Who it will be next week is anybody's guess.

The charms of the city remain considerable. The lavender twilights, the musical lilt of Spanish, Portuguese and Haitian Creole one hears on the streets, the festiveness with which the city explodes into a street party at the drop of a hat. And what other municipality in the United States would declare 3:05 p.m. an official coffee break time, when all should pause and reflect on the magnificence of the cafecito?

Nevertheless, in the needless death of Israel Hernandez-Llach, who was just starting his life, one can briefly glimpse a city whose values seem increasingly awry, putting the almighty dollar reflected in that famous skyline above the citizens who live beneath it and, now, above human life itself.

This evening, just as the rain clouds were getting ready to roll onto the beach from the ocean, I went and looked at the makeshift memorial that had sprung up outside the derelict building that Israel Hernandez-Llach had been spray painting when Miami Beach police set upon him. "I'll see you around" read one note. "Rest in Paradise" read another. And "I'll miss you so much, brother." As I stood there, a young man with a ponytail and a goatee, probably also about 18, pulled up on his bike and gently placed two spray paint cans above the doorway where someone had place a bouquet of flowers.

"I didn't know him personally," the youth said to me. "But you've got to give mad respect to him. As a street artist."

And then he got on his bike and peddled away just as it began to rain.

RIP Israel Hernandez

Photo © Michael Deibert