The Five-Hundred Billion Dollar Norwegians

September 22, 2009 - 12:00am
By Luke Pryor

This past week, two Norwegian men were sentenced to death in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for allegedly killing their personal driver. Despite some very vocal concerns by international groups about the fairness of their trial, there is some pretty damning evidence for the two. This includes testimony of many eyewitnesses and a photo of one of the pair cleaning blood out of their car with a big smile on his face. The fact that their official alibi was “gunmen came out of nowhere and killed our driver and then they left”, while actually completely conceivable in the DRC, is not entirely convincing either.

Anyway, the decision will likely be commuted to life sentences. But this story of cold-blooded murder and gunmen caught the eye of the powers-that-be in the DRC, who are always looking to make a quick buck. So the country has now demanded reparations from Norway for the paltry sum of $500 billion. After a friendly “Are you kidding me?” from Norway, they have lowered their demand to still-entirely-insane $60 million (that’s a dollar for every man, woman, and child in the DRC). This is despite the fact that Norway had nothing to do with these two men (who appear to be, by all accounts, idiots) being in the Congo in the first place.

There is, of course, no chance of Norway giving Congo a cent, when it would be much more interested in extraditing it’s citizens back home. But maybe the Congo thinks it can’t hurt to ask?

Actually, it can. This is a nation in great need of being taken seriously. Conflict has ravaged the country for, well, pretty much forever, and the current war which began in 1998 born out of the remnants of the First Congo War and the Rwandan Genocide has claimed more than 5.4 million lives – more than any war since World War II. Furthermore, the economy is in shambles with the average income in the country being below a dollar a day.

Clearly, the Congo needs a lot of help.

But to get that help, they have to show that they are a government you can deal seriously with and trust. Demanding $500 billion from a country that already provided it with 30 free tons of medicine last year is not the way to do that, and it will drive away the foreign aid and organizations the country could use so desperately. This most recent act of lunacy on their part is just another nail in the coffin that is the Congo.

But it doesn’t need to be that way. Congo could use this time to show maturity and logic. They could reassert their verdict, but extradite the two men in exchange for a promise of continued imprisonment and increased aid. They could turn the unfortunate death of this driver into something positive for the country, and use it to get extremely rare good DRC press in the international media. But they won’t do that acting like a petty extortionist.

So come on, DRC. Let’s get it together. There are lives at stake here.