Bloody and forgotten: Conflict in eastern Congo

Hey, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. You know, one of the perks about having four kids that you know about is actually getting a direct line to the big man up north. And this year, he wants you to know the best gift that you can give someone is the gift of Mint Mobile's unlimited wireless for $15 a month. Now, you don't even need to wrap it. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment.

Of $45 for a three month plan equivalent to $15 per month. Required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes. If network's busy, taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com.

Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. In London, I'm Jason Palmer.

And in New York, I'm John Fassman. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Aches and pains afflict us all at one time or another. For some, it's a lifelong curse. The available remedies do work, but the most effective come with the most risks. We examine the pipeline of new drugs aiming to dull pain without creating different problems.

And of all the weird sentences made possible by the Internet, the following may be one of the strangest. Every October, bears in a national park in southern Alaska compete online to see who's gained the most weight. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Fat Bear Week. But first, On Monday, an explosion tore through a cinema in eastern Congo. The homemade bomb wounded 10 people, including children and teenagers, marking yet another day of mourning in the city of Butembo. Last month, another blast in the same city wounded two Congolese intelligence agents. Violence in the broader region is intensifying. Some 5.5 million people in the Democratic Republic of Congo have been forced from their homes, a number second only to Syria. But international attention has been elsewhere, making the war in the DRC perhaps the world's most neglected major conflict.

Eastern Congo has been on fire on and off for three decades.

John McDermott is the Economist Africa Correspondent.

The 1990s and 2000s, you have this incredible war in eastern Congo. And then in 2003, when that war ends, there isn't really permanent peace.

John, I wonder if I could ask you to zoom out for a bit and just give us the view from 30,000ft. Why is this region so violent?

The bloodshed has incredibly deep historical roots, but let's just start in the 1990s. That was when the dictatorship of Joseph Mobutu was disintegrating. And what hold the government in Kinshasa had on the east was Weakening at a rapid pace. Then added to that, you have the turmoil in the neighboring country of Rwanda. The genocide of 1994 and subsequent reprisals caused conflict there to spread ripples of violence into the east of Congo. A few years later, Rwandan backed rebels ultimately decided to topple Mobuto. And then between 1998 and 2003, you have what's come to be known as the Second Congo War, in which perhaps 5 million people died and at least eight other African countries and multiple militia groups are essentially competing for the carcass that was left by the previous violence. So today what you have is perhaps 120 different militia groups that are competing over land, resources and protection in an ultimately anarchic situation where there's no authority of the state.

And is anything being done about this?

Last year, Congo's president, Felix Tishikedi said he was finally going to do something about it. He declared martial law in the two worst affected provinces. Those are North Kivu and Ituri. And that meant replacing the politicians with suits, with generals wearing uniforms. Now, the soldiers claim that this has brought some peace and security to the region.

And has it?

Well, I was keen to find out for myself. So a few weeks ago, I flew to eastern Congo. I went to various places, including Bunya, the tourist capital. And from there I took a trip with the Congolese military to Arumu, which is a small town 60km away. When I got to Arumu, I was told by local officials as well as the soldiers that this place had previously been besieged by militia, but was now safe. So dozens of armed guys with sunglasses and AK47s dismounted. I got out of my 4x4 and we all proceeded to walk through the town. And this was supposed to show just how safe the town was, but it all felt a bit staged, kind of half Potemkin, half pantomime to me. So what I did was sneak off from this procession and went to speak to some locals. She says, up to now, still fighting against government troops. The conversations we had hinted at a more nuanced story than the one the army was telling. Kivo Security Tracker, which is a conflict monitoring organization, it found that there were more attacks by various armed groups in the east in 2021 than at any time since we began monitoring in 2017. So despite what the military is saying, there is very little evidence to suggest that eastern Congo is getting any safer.

Earlier you mentioned 120 militias. Who are they and what do they want?

Let's just focus. Perhaps three of the most deadly one is Called the Cooperative for the Development of Congo, which everyone calls Kadeko. Now it may sound like a charity or an agricultural cooperative, but in fact is a murderous militia with cult like rituals that the UN has accused of committing crimes against humanity. I won't go into some of the awful atrocities, but many include rape, beheadings, dismemberments, a real gratuitous violence. Kideko is mostly from a particular ethnicity, the Lendu group, and it is ultimately fighting for control of land or other resources. So if the first group is Kadeco, the second is arguably the most high profile, which is M23. Now this group had been dormant since 2013, but in November it re emerged and has since killed civilians. It's attacked army bases and captured towns. And in June it seemed to be poised to march on Goma, which is the main city in the east. But the most murderous group is the Allied Democratic Forces, which is called the ADF.

And what makes the ADF so troubling?

ADF has broader jihadist links which worry the Americans. In 2021, the United States designated the ADF an affiliate of Islamic State. To try and understand a bit more about the group and its impact, I flew into Beni in North Kivu and took a drive with Emmanuel de Merode, who's the director of Virunga National Park. So where are we entering now?

So this is the, what we call the economic park.

Around 5 million people live within a day's walk of the park, which is roughly two and a half times the size of Yosemite. It's one of the most dangerous national parks in Africa. And that is primarily because it contains a lot of resources which are able to bankroll these militia groups.

The key here is cocoa, coffee, palm oil. Those are the key resources the that draw militias in. What happens is very simple really. The militias take over agricultural land, they use false labor, they intimidate the population through these atrocities, and they acquire, often free, they steal, those agricultural resources that are very high value.

The day before I visited, there were five people killed in the nearby village of Belongo, where women and children had also been abducted by the jihadis. And that is just part of daily life for the people in the region.

Is the government doing enough to stop these armed groups?

It's not doing remotely enough. The very least that Congo's government could be doing is to have some semblance of a strategy. And so far it has been incredibly ad hoc and overly reliant on the military to solve the problem, Even though the military is part of the problem. We know that the fardc, as Congo's army is known, has killed plenty of people in its own right. It's a lawless organization that runs vast patronage and corruption networks. And as long as that security force remains unreformed, it's not going to be able to stop the anarchy that fuels these groups. Now, one thing that Felix Tsusakedi has done, which deserves some credit, is that he has sought help from the wider East African region, in particular Kenya, to try and bring some stability to the region. But we know from eastern Congo's long and turbulent history that outsiders often meddle in the region, making things worse. And even those with pure intentions, such as the un, which has this vast peacekeeping force, are unable to do anything sustainably to improve the situation so long as the Congolese army itself remains so abject and so corrupt.

And so, John, based on your research and based on your time on the ground, what do you think needs to happen?

Ultimately, the Congolese elites who are holed up in Kinshasa, more than a thousand miles away, at the very least, have to show that they care about what is going on with within their own borders. And they have to have a basic plan that involves reforming the security services, bringing in neighboring countries in a transparent way, and trying to increase the legitimacy of the state presence in that part of the country. And the thing about eastern Congo is that the region has huge potential. Many people know about it, natural resources, whether that's minerals or agricultural. But it also has a potentially burgeoning tourist industry. And when I was in Goma, the main city in the east, I took a boat out to Chigera, which is a kind of absurdly idyllic island in the middle of a war zone. You can go kayaking, and the little waves lap the black volcanic sand, and it gives you a glimpse of how Congo could become richer and attract international tourists if it were a little bit more peaceful. Sadly, Chigera is the only part of Virunga that's currently safe enough for tourists to visit. This year, the park hoped to generate $12.5 million in revenues. Patient Namagabe, who's the camp manager, shared some of the hurdles that he and his colleagues have faced while trying to make the park an attractive and viable place to visit. It's very hard, it's very sad to have been working with other people, and.

Because of the insecurity or some reason.

Some are killed or they died. Over the years, more than 200 Virunga Rangers have been killed in the line of duty. The war in Eastern Congo is complex and seems like it's been going on forever. It doesn't have any of the obvious geopolitical importance and simple good versus evil narrative that you find in, say, Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Even in Africa, the civil war in Ethiopia is increasingly attracting attention. But what is going on in Eastern Congo is nevertheless hugely important. There's no way that the Great Lakes region and in fact all of East Africa can prosper so long as there is anarchy in the east of Congo.

John, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thank you, John.

Each year in America, thousands of people lose their lives to an epidemic that's only been getting worse. According to the Centers for disease control, since 1999, more than half a million people have died from overdoses involving opioids, many of them prescribed.

Drug overdose deaths remain high across the country.

And according to the cdc, synthetic opioids are the main driver.

ABC Action overdose deaths top 100,000 for the first time ever in 2021 and nearly 70%.

It's a tragic cycle. Patients are prescribed drugs to treat pain, then they develop a tolerance, and as many as one in four of them will therefore go on to struggle with opioid addiction. Clearly, drugs that provide those painkilling benefits without presenting those risks would be preferred, but finding those has been difficult.

The opioid crisis is infamous because it outlined quite a big problem that we have when it comes to treating pain.

Alok Jha is our science correspondent.

We actually have limited options and although pain relief that we have can work in the short term, it isn't without its drawbacks, including addiction. And for longer term pain, people who've got pain for more than six months, it's really difficult to find solutions to those problems.

Okay, let's take a step back here. When we're talking about pain, what's going on in the body?

So the everyday experience of pain is what scientists called nociception. So, for example, say that you walk over to your cooker and you pick up a saucepan. You don't know it's hot. Your skin at the moment of contact of this incredibly hot saucepan will do a couple of things. There are receptors on there called nociceptors, and they have proteins on their surface that transform in shape as they detect this huge spike in heat. And those receptors allow sodium ions to sort of flood the nerve cells. And that sends a series of signals all the way through your spine up to your brain. And that creates the sensation of pain. That's what your brain does is go, ah, I need to drop this saucepan immediately. That's this defense mechanism that is a classic mechanism for, for detecting pain. And what your brain will then do after it's dropped the saucepan on the floor is to send signals back to the pain receptors to try and damp down the feeling so that you can then begin the healing process. And so when it comes to painkillers, well, they do one of two things. They either reduce the pain signal that's heading towards the brain or they increase the sort of calming signals coming the other way.

And those two directions, if you like, are the basis of the drugs that are available now.

That's right. So there are two broad categories of painkillers right now, so people will be familiar with them. There's the non steroidal anti inflammatory drugs, NSAIDs, things like aspirin, ibuprofen, they basically serve to reduce the pain signal that's heading up to the brain. And then the second category of pain medication are the opioids. What these do is to increase the signals coming back the other way from the brain. And both of these things are pretty effective. So if you've got acute pain, they'll both work. They do have drawbacks though. Anti inflammatory drugs can cause ulcers. If you take an ibuprofen or an empty stomach, you'll get lots of stomach acid and it can be a problem. You're always advised to eat something at the same time. And opioids, some of their drawbacks include breathing difficulties, so they can cause problems there. And if you take too many of them, these breathing difficulties can become fatal. And the other problem with opioids, of course, is that they can get really addictive.

So what we have works, but not without drawbacks. But you're suggesting also that alternatives are hard to come by.

So pharmaceutical companies have tried for decades to find targets along the pain pathway which they can sort of send drugs to in a bid to sort of damp down pain. They failed for multiple reasons. I mean, one reason is that it's incredibly difficult to target very specific ion channels in nerve cells which control the flow charged particles which then send signals onto the brain and so on. Another sort of route that people have tried is to look at the chemicals associated with pain, whether that's the signals going to the brain or the signals coming back, and either increase or damp down those chemicals. The problem is that the human body tends to use the same chemicals for many different purposes. So by messing around with this stuff, you're also causing all sorts of other side effects which you may not Want. So it's just a world where the mechanisms are very hard to understand, and messing around with them causes all sorts of other problems. And it's been one failure after another for the past couple of decades.

So are there any promising avenues here?

Well, there are actually. So there's a company in Boston, Massachusetts, called Vertex Pharmaceuticals that's been working on the issue of pain for some time. And it has a compound called VX548. What that compound does is it limits the flow of sodium ions into nerve cells. And this is the beginning of the causal chain of sending signals to the brain which are interpreted as pain. And by limiting the number of sodium ions going into a nerve cell, it limits the signal so you have less pain. Now, this drug completed its phase two trials in March this year, and the results were very promising. Bear in mind phase two trials are quite small. It will now have to go through phase three trials, which are much larger, much longer on many more causes of pain than its initial trials. You know, and it could be a meaningful, brand new way to treat pain. But it only deals with one type of pain, which is acute pain, the immediate impact of touching a hot saucepan, for example. So acute pain is defined quite arbitrarily as anything lasting less than six months.

And why is that materially different from pain that lasts longer?

So there is another class of pain which is loosely called chronic pain. Chronic pain is really the sort of the last larger problem of all of this, and it affects something like a fifth of adults. And chronic pain can be sort of split into two categories. Some of it is what's known as neuropathic pain. This is the result of the nerve cells and the nerve fibers themselves somehow being damaged and causing pain signals to misfire, essentially. Or another type of pain is called nociplastic. And this is for when the nervous system, which, for reasons that we don't, you understand, the nervous system will augment the signals that are being transmitted along to the brain, you know, and we really don't know the true mechanisms for either of these types of chronic pain. And therefore trying to work out how to treat them is incredibly difficult.

And what's the outlook there for treating chronic pain?

There are potential drugs out there, including a drug in development that is an opioid, but which has been stripped of the properties that would otherwise make it addictive. That's at a very, very early development stage. And the idea there is that you'd be able to take it for a longer period of time without the drawbacks of addiction. And Fundamentally, the tricky thing is that you want to reduce the discomfort so that people's quality of life is better and they're not suffering. But also you can't switch these signals off completely, otherwise that's dangerous too. I mean, you need to know to drop that saucepan or you need to know that something inside you isn't working properly and is causing pain so that you can get help for it. Pain is a signal that's incredibly important to understand. And until we know the basic neurology behind things like chronic pain and even acute pain, it is going to be a difficult balancing act to try and find useful, meaningful solutions.

Alok, thank you very much for joining us.

It's a pleasure, Jason.

Bears, especially brown bears, have enormous appetites. To make it through their impressively long winter slumber, they first need to store up a huge amount of energy, energy that comes in the form of fat. They build up through the summer and fall from eating salmon, berries and really anything they can get their enormous claws on. In the process, these bears can get absolutely rotund. And now every October, a national park in America has a contest where the public can vote for their favorite fat bear. And it's called Fat Bear Week.

So Fat Bear Week is a week long contest that takes place every year.

Aaron Braun is the Economist West Coast Correspondent.

And it's based around bears in Katmai national park, which is in far southwestern Alaska. And members of the public are basically voting on who the fattest bear is and then that bear wins.

I have to admit that this is the midterm contest I know least about. How does this election work?

It honestly is kind of like a campaign. If you look on one of the many Facebook groups devoted to Fat Bear Week, there are super fans campaigning for their favorite bear, making memes, making little videos. But this year, Fat Bear week starts on October 5th and it will run till the 11th. It's a single elimination bracket where fans will vote in head to head matchups and bears will be eliminated as the tournament goes on. And there's actually the website you can go to, it's just fatbearweek.org and you can see the before and after pictures and read a little bit about the history of each bear. There's no prize for actually guessing which bear is the fattest. They don't weigh them. It's completely subjective. It's kind of more of a popularity contest where different people are voting on which bear they thought gained the most weight, which bear they think is the fattest. Some people just vote based on personality or which bear they think is the cutest. So fatness in this case is really in the eye of the beholder. And it's kind of gone viral the last couple of years.

When was the first one? How did all of this begin?

It started in 2014. A couple of park rangers at Katmai decided to throw up a couple of photos of the bears on Facebook and let the public vote on which one they thought was the fattest. And they called this Fat Bear Tuesday, which I love. And one of the rangers who started it at the time, Mike Fitz, told me that he saw engagement on social media like they had never seen for the national park. And so they brought it back year after year and it morphed into a full week of festivities. And it has really grown. I mean, that first year they got something like 1700 votes total, and last year they got 800,000, and they're hoping it'll be over a million this year. And I talked to another former ranger, Sarah Wolman, who now is the official artist of Fat Bear Week, and she says that that success was super unexpected and caught them all by surprise. When it first started to really take off, like, we were not prepared. We didn't expect that at all. So it's really, really wild to see it get like, not just the national, but like international following. Like, this is crazy. And some people really get into it. When I was reporting this story, I talked to fans from all over the US and even Australia. People have office bracket pools where they work, and they are devoted to these live webcams of the bears in the national park. They watch them constantly. They have potluck parties. One woman I talked to changed her license plate recently to love Otis. And Otis is a four time champion of Fat Bear Week.

So why do you think this contest has gone viral?

The contest is just, it's a lot of fun. It's really joyful. And it's also crazy when you look at the before and after pictures of the bears, just how much work they put in over the summer. Like, they emerge from their dens in the spring and they're kind of scrawny looking. And then the after pictures in the fall, they're just these like rotund, roly, poly creatures that you can tell they've been feasting on a diet of salmon the entire summer. And as Sarah, the former park ranger, points out, it has this really good news story element to it that seems vanishingly rare. That Bear Week is. It's like a little bit of an escape. And it's Also, a little bit of, like, positive news. These bears are massive, but they're that way because the ecosystem is so healthy there. And that's not a story you hear about every day.

It sounds like a lot of fun, but is there a purpose to it beyond just looking at pictures of fat bears?

There is, yes. I think for a lot of people, the purpose is just looking at fat bears. But there's kind of two larger purposes to Fat Bear Week. The first is that it sort of democratizes access to one of America's more remote national parks. A lot of national parks are really hard to get to and sometimes really expensive to get to. And so it's only a select few people who can experience them. So this is a way to bring Alaska to the people and therefore increase the number of people that care about these bears and care about their ecosystems. And the reason that these bears in Katmai are so fat is because they benefit from one of the healthiest salmon runs in the world. If you go further south in the Pacific Northwest, a lot of salmon ecosystems have been hurt by overfishing or dam construction or warming waters because of climate change. And in Brooks river, where a lot of these bears like to fish, it has been shielded from these threats because of the protection of the national park. And thanks to these bear cams and the kind of excitement around Fat Bear Week, you can have a little piece of that at home on your computer screen or your phone screen. And I think it really has helped bring the national park to people in a way that before social media and the Internet really wasn't possible. And that, in turn, raises awareness for conservation.

So you mentioned people can follow along on a webcam at home. If our listeners want to weigh in on Fat Bear Week, where should they go?

There's a couple of different places, but the easiest thing to do is just go to fatbearweek.org and you'll be able to see a bracket and biographies of the bears and links to the webcams in case you want to vote on your favorite fat bear.

All right, Erin, always great to talk to you. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Thanks, John.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. Let us know what you think of the show. You can get in touch@podcastseconomist.com and you.

Can subscribe to the economist@economist.com intelligenceoffer. The link is in the show Notes. We'll see you back here tomorrow.