An Interview with Les Roberts

ePulse: What about in a country such as El Salvador?

LR: This is how the UN measures mortality in most dysfunctional countries. The reason we know what the death rate is in Angola and Columbia is because the United Nations goes and does a cluster survey because they don’t trust the registration processes.

ePulse: That brings an interesting question: If it works everywhere else, why doesn’t it work in Iraq?

LR: Oh, it works.

ePulse: That was a setup, I guess. Can you describe the situation in the Congo?

LR: Now?

ePulse: When you did your research in the Congo.

LR: Well, describing the situation in the Congo is a lot like describing the situation in California. There are pockets where its really posh, and there are pockets where things seem really bad. The war in the Congo involved gangs of guys running around in the forest and periodically appearing and stealing food and raping women and then they would go back into the forest. So it was, as wars go, very low intensity. On any given day, it probably wasn’t one in a thousand people that saw a combatant.

But because people were so poor and living so close to the edge already, having these soldiers come and having to all flee into the forest to hide from them made it so people just died at an extraordinary rate.

There was one area in 2000 called Moba. I think it was a health zone with, if I’m not mistaken, 60,000 people. And when we did our survey about two-thirds of children died by the age of two. They weren’t shot by bullets, [it was] just the economy didn’t work. People wouldn’t dare drive trucks down roads. No clinics functioned. Periodically almost everyone in this district would repeatedly run into the hills and hide from rebels who were coming.

But it looked beautiful.

ePulse: The country itself

LR: The countryside looked beautiful. It was the closest thing to hell lots of people who went there would ever see, but it looked beautiful.