My guest today is Sudarsan Raghavan, a former correspondent at large for The Washington Post. Over three decades, he has reported from more than 65 countries, covering Islamist movements, global terrorism, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Arab Spring, and the Darfur genocide. As Baghdad bureau chief, he led The Post’s largest overseas operation during the Iraq War's most violent years. A 2001 investigation with a colleague exposed child labor abuses on West African cocoa farms, leading to U.S. anti-slavery legislation. Raghavan has won numerous awards, including the George Polk and Livingston Awards. He is based in Barcelona.
For this episode of The Reporters, Sudarsan chose a story he wrote for the Washington Post in 2014: “In Congo, Trapped and Forgotten.” Below are some highlights from our interview.
Sudarsan Raghavan, welcome to The Reporters. It's great to have you here.
Glad to be here.
So here we are, January 10th. Just a few days ago, M23 seized a little town called Masisi in North Kivu, eastern Congo, about 80 miles north of [the provincial capital] Goma. That seizure came on the heels of several months of fighting between M23 and the Congolese Army, the FARDC. Control has swapped back and forth. All of this is happening six months after a ceasefire was signed. There are something like four million internally displaced people in this area, and it’s just a horrendously complex conflict. In 2014, you wrote a story from this part of the world. Can you set the scene for us?
Well, the story centers around this village called Kibuye, which is about 70 or 80 miles west of Goma in the Kivu Province, but literally it takes six hours to get there driving the roads. It’s beautiful terrain, but there’s not a single paved road. You’re driving in a four-wheel drive going about five miles an hour because the roads are so terrible.
One of the great challenges is that it’s so vast and complicated. It’s a war of unparalleled enormity. Give us the 30,000-foot view of why this conflict is so huge and overwhelming.
For starters, the number of casualties in the Congo over the past three decades, from the 1990s, is basically more than the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq combined. You might add Ukraine as well. The war has claimed an estimated five million lives, mostly from starvation, disease, and other conflict-related causes. It had the world’s largest and most expensive UN peacekeeping mission, which failed to stop the conflict.
A year after I was there in 2014, the M23 were actually defeated by the Congolese army and UN forces. They were kind of on the way out. Here we are a decade later, and they're back and as strong as ever. And it's not just them, there are dozens more militias running around this area. A hundred thousand people have been displaced from Maisisi alone. It's like a grisly deja vu for me. There’s just extreme frustration that the world has forgotten this conflict.
“I wanted them to be more than just quotes. I wanted to get a sense of who they are, what they did, what their lives were like.”
In the end, all the actors that were there a decade ago are still around today. You have M23, you have the Congolese Army, you have the FDLR—the extremist Hutu militias that were partly responsible for the Rwandan genocide in 1994. They fled to Congo and have remained there ever since. To this day, Rwanda claims that the FDLR, this extremist Hutu militia, still represents a threat to Rwanda and that they have, for their own national borders and border security, every right to interfere.
Visiting a visit after a militia attack, eastern Congo
Let’s talk about the logistics of getting there to report. Was that tricky?
Well, let me backtrack a bit to explain the genesis. I’d covered the Congo since when the country was called Zaire. I first entered there right after the 1994 genocide, when civil war broke out, and I covered the fall of Mobutu Sese Seko. By 2014, I’d been in and out of the Congo for many years. I wanted to do something deep, and my editors initially weren’t too interested, but our executive editor green-lighted it. I started researching, talking to human rights folks, aid workers, Congolese sources, and settled on Kibuye.
“It’s more casualties than the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq combined.”
We spent six months going back and forth, four or five trips there. I wanted enough time so people could trust me. Sometimes we slept in a nearby town, other times in the village itself, sleeping bags in a cowshed. There was a translator to help because a lot of people spoke Kiswahili or other Congolese languages. I kept going until I felt I had enough for a story.
How did you know when you had enough to write the piece?
It happened over six months. Obviously, I couldn’t spend forever, but I needed to track down people I’d met earlier, see what they were doing, talk to all the actors involved. Part of it was to meet the FDLR, these Hutu extremists who were responsible for the genocide. That took a lot of meeting different people over months. Finally, they took me to where they were training. That was the last piece I needed. I wanted to talk to the UN, the army, the warlords, the militias, the villagers. I felt I had a sense of what the story was and could tell it from a human perspective. I wanted readers to feel emotionally connected to the Congolese people. I wanted them to be more than just quotes. I want to get a sense of who they are, what they did, what their lives were like.
There’s a part in the piece where someone says, “They burned my house down seven times. I fled four times from four different militias. My wife was killed.” That’s so harrowing. As a reporter, how do you handle the lack of clear good guys or bad guys?
In the Congo, you start off with the fact there are no good guys. Every armed group has done something horrific. The Congolese army is responsible for mass rapes, so are M23 militias. Everyone does terrible things toward civilians. You’re there to tell the story of people who are trapped, and I wanted readers to feel emotionally connected. To this day, they’re essentially voiceless. Even the UN is seen as a big failure.
“Nature had given them all the opportunities to become a wealthy, stable nation. It didn’t have to be like this.”
This is a war where people are suffering unimaginable horrors that the world simply doesn't know about, doesn't care about anyway. And sadly, that's still what's happening now. It's one of the biggest failures for the United Nations in their history. They were just unable to do anything. And many of the UN forces that were there, they were from countries like Uruguay or India, and they were just there for the salaries. They were getting big money from the UN and unfortunately, they were doing very little to protect the population. They didn't have the mandate often to go after these militias and so they were always in a very defensive mode.
In your piece, you describe a warlord who imposed a “right to life tax.” What was that?
It’s pure extortion—a way for militias and warlords to get money and keep people locked in fear. If you’re a villager, you can’t protest because there’s no one to turn to. Congo’s been known for corruption in many forms, going back decades. This was just part of working in the Congo. I wasn't too surprised by it because I'd seen it in other parts of Africa. Militias prey upon the people that they lord over. There's no way of protesting because there's no one to turn to. There's no official who is going to stand up to these militias. Congo has been known for corruption in so many different forms.
I was in Kinshasa in 1997 when Mobutu was just about to flee. He had a press conference at one of his homes. To enter, his men were basically saying, “Hey, journalists, can you help us with the Coca-Cola?” Which was code for give me some money, or you're just not gonna enter. So if the dictators' own troops are demanding money from journalists trying to enter his own press conference, imagine what all the other militias and rebels and everyone else is doing in other parts of the country. This is just part of working in the Congo.
How did you start working in the Congo?
Decades ago, I was freelancing for Newsweek in Johannesburg. When the war in the Congo broke out, it was a big story, so I spent a lot of time going in and out of the country. My first trip was actually in 1995, right after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, when a million Hutus fled across the border. Many of the extremists responsible for the genocide remained in the Congo—those became the FDLR. I went into Goma and I followed this swarm of people coming back to their homes. Many of them had been involved in the genocide, forced to kill their neighbors. It was really, really sad. You had people who had watched their neighbor who killed a father or relative and their family suddenly came back to live back next to them. There was vigilante justice. Then Laurent Kabila ousted Mobutu, and the war just kept going. I’ve been covering it ever since.
“In the Congo, you start off with saying there aren’t any good guys. I’m not looking for heroes in this. I’m just trying to get the voices of the victims out.”
I still remember a time when Kabila took over Kisangani, which was the second largest city in the Congo. flew to Nairobi and then from there to Kigali and then I had to take a car into Goma before I was able to get on hop on a UN flight to Kisangani. It took me nearly two and a half days to get there.
Journalists were just starting to trickle in. The rebels had kind of been taking control, but there was still fighting going on. Mobutu had hired these Croatian mercenaries to fend off the rebels. The leader of these Croatian mercenaries was nicknamed Colonel Yugo. He was like the character of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. He was essentially tormenting locals, killing them. When I got there, there were mass graves where his men had killed people for defying them. They were raping local women. It was a horrific situation. I always wanted to go to Kisangani because it's the city in one of my favorite books, “A Bend in the River,” by V.S. Naipaul. It's a post-colonial novel about this Indian trader from Nairobi who moves to Congo. One of the people he gets to know becomes the big bad dictator of Congo. It was a bit about Mubutu himself. Sadly, when I was there, my vision of Kissingani was tainted by Colonel Yugo and all the bad things he had done.
Why do you think the Congo is under-covered or ignored?
Resources have shrunk dramatically. There are so many fires to put out in the world, and Congo’s been at war for 30 years. I can’t recall the last big story by American media really digging into the war itself.
Congo is huge, has massive resources. Why is it stuck in this cycle?
Congo is actually one of the richest countries in the world in terms of natural resources. If there had been stability, no plundering, and the right leaders, there’s no reason why it couldn’t have been as stable or wealthy as the U.S. But instead, it’s among the worst-off in the world, with unimaginable violence.
It's been going on for 30 years now with no end in sight. The same groups continue to fight over the same set of problems and resources. It involves so many different factors, economic, social, ethnic, historical, et cetera. It becomes very difficult to parse out what is the “war” and what is just a simmering conflict about all the different things that are threatening them or that they're having to contend with.
I think the UN is about to pull out. I mean, the UN was ineffective, but at least was a presence there. And ten years ago they felt a little more protected, at least to see the UN peacekeepers, even though they weren't doing anything. At least there was a sense that the world was paying attention to some extent. If the entire UN peacekeeping force is gone, then things are just gonna get even worse. I think part of what we're seeing now is probably that — you've got the M23 taking over entire cities, towns. They're realizing that they can move forward with even more impunity.
Let’s do a lightning round.
Okay!
Your daily required reading list?
The newspapers. New York Times, Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal. I like the LA Times as well, because I'm from LA, especially now, given what's happening there.
With a Ukrainian sniper team, eastern Ukraine
Your favorite opinion columnist?
David Hoffman and Keith Richburg. They both write for the Washington Post. David Hoffman won a Pulitzer Prize last year for his columns.
Your guilty media pleasure?
Since I live in Barcelona, sitting in front of the TV with a glass of red wine and watching CNN, catching up on the news in America.
Your favorite research tool?
It's got to be Google.
Not ChatGPT?
I've never used ChatGPT. Not once. I don't believe in it.
With the Taliban, Afghanistan
Words of wisdom for aspiring reporters who want to cover these under-reported places?
Go to places no one else is going. That’s why I got into journalism. You want to tell stories no one is reading about and give voice to people who are never heard from.
What are you reading right now?
James by Percival Everett.
Your favorite story by another reporter?
I recently read some great pieces by Azam Ahmed in The New York Times about how the Americans basically lost the war in Afghanistan. They crystallize all that failure.
Thanks so much for joining us. I look forward to seeing your project come out.
Thank you very much. This is a lot of fun. I think what you’re doing is great—connecting people with journalists so they can really understand what we go through in covering a story and how we think about the world today.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and brevity.
Share this post