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-- Congo
Congo
Is rapidly deteriorating. What the hell is wrong with the Congolese government? They've got so much wealth to benefit from, yet, are so incompetent as to not even pay their soldiers to protect their own people.
BBC Video Report
Refugee crisis...very bad...
Lebez, you're the Africa expert, what's going on?
I was just going to post a similar thread, but hadn't seen this one already existed.
Excellent topic.
Things have always been fragile in the Congo, but now they're quickly approaching chaos. General Nkunda's troops have been largely docile for the past few years, and though he doesn't exactly enjoy widespread support, he's always managed to fend off government attempts at rooting him out. The DRC is a fractured place, where local warlords exert far more control over the populace than a central government could ever hope to. In this case, Nkunda posits that he is defending his fellow Tutsis from a resurgence in anti-Tutsi violence among the many Hutus that fled retribution in Rwanda and took solace in camps in the DRC.
So yes, in a sense, this is a reignition of the Rwandan genocide that has been burning for some time but seems to be increasing in intensity.
The government has proven somewhat lackluster in combating Nkunda - 4000 rebel troops routinely push back over 20,000 government soldiers. Kind of absurd, when you consider that Nkunda is merely mimicking the strategy of guerrila warfare perfected under Laurent Kabila, who overthrew Mobutu Sese Seko in the late 90's by marching with just a few troops all the way from Kivu to Kinshasha. Nkunda is poised to do the same.
Kabila's march set off some of the most horrific violence in the African continent's history - a pretty amazing thing considering the legacy of Rwanda, Biafra, and Sierra Leone that stains the history there. Up to four million people perished between 1998-2002, and there are very real fears that pent up animosities and the increasing instability in surrounding areas (Burundi, Central African Republic, Northern Uganda, Darfur, Southern Sudan, Chad) could provoke a true continental war with any number of adversaries.
The rebels approached Goma earlier this week, and now it appears that they are burning Hutu refugee camps - an act that will assuredly set off retribution throughout the region against Tutsi innocents as well.
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| DR Congo refugee camps 'burned' Killings, rapes and looting have been reported around Goma The UN says it has credible reports that camps sheltering 50,000 displaced people in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo have been torched. Aid groups say they are struggling to reach an estimated 250,000 people in the region fleeing fierce fighting between government and rebel forces. Intense diplomatic efforts are under way to end the crisis. French FM Bernard Kouchner and his British counterpart, David Miliband, are preparing to travel to the country. A tense ceasefire is holding in and around Goma, the provincial capital of North Kivu. Rebel leader General Laurent Nkunda says he is fighting to protect his Tutsi community from attack by Rwandan Hutu rebels, some of whom are accused of taking part in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The Congolese government has often promised to stop Hutu forces from using its territory, but has not done so. Gen Nkunda has also objected to government plans for foreign involvement in exploiting the country's vast mineral wealth. The Congolese government has refused to negotiate with Gen Nkunda, calling him a terrorist. 'Extremely unsafe' Speaking in Geneva, aid agency chiefs said the situation in and around the city of Goma remained highly volatile with access to those in need extremely difficult. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said there were highly disturbing reports that the camps north of Goma had been forcibly emptied, looted, and burned. The region is now in rebel control, aid agencies have no access, and no-one knows where the 50,000 residents of the camps are now. Meanwhile, a desperate shortage of food and water in Goma is leading thousands of people who sought refuge there to leave, heading to the village of Kibati, about 12km (7 miles) to the north. The BBC's Peter Greste in Goma says the road from the city is choked with human misery. For mile after mile, it is full of families bent forward with their lives on their backs: stoves, food, clothes, bedding and children. Aid agencies have all but stopped work because of security fears. "The whole population in Goma, and around Goma are feeling extremely unsafe," Red Cross spokesman Marcal Izard told the BBC. "They need food, water, shelter and, most of all, protection, [and] some sense of knowing that they will not be attacked, that they will be spared by this new round of clashes." A Congolese aid worker based in Goma, Godefroid Marhenge, told the BBC's Network Africa programme that some displaced people were without water or shelter, and "in desperate need of humanitarian assistance". Oxfam and other leading international aid agencies have suspended operations in the city, where a main hospital as well as numerous businesses and homes have been looted. Gen Nkunda said on Thursday that he was opening a "humanitarian corridor" for people to return to their homes, and so that aid could reach those trapped between his forces and UN soldiers backing up government troops in the city. Our correspondent said that instead of an open corridor, he found people hurrying back to Goma. "Someone has been shooting at us," one breathless woman said. "We can't go any further." But those who did reach Kibati told the BBC that they had more chance of getting food in the forests and bushes around the village than inside Goma. Aid group Mercy Corps has begun to distribute water to the new arrivals. Overstretched peacekeepers After several days of fighting, Gen Nkunda declared the ceasefire late on Wednesday, and his Tutsi forces are positioned some 15km (nine miles) from Goma. However, Gen Nkunda has threatened to take the city unless UN peacekeepers guarantee the ceasefire and security in Goma. Looting, killings and rapes were reported in the city on Thursday, much of it blamed on retreating Congolese troops. Meanwhile, intense diplomatic efforts are going in a bid to maintain the ceasefire: � The parliament in DR Congo has called on government to negotiate with Gen Nkunda, although President Joseph Kabila has previously refused to do so � UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has said he is "deeply concerned" about the situation, and has called on regional leaders to take concrete measures to broker a peace deal � EU diplomats are meeting in Brussels to discuss whether to send troops to back up UN peacekeepers, after EU envoy Louis Michel met Mr Kabila and his Rwandan counterpart Paul Kagame � The EU is also to discuss sending troops to the area to aid the humanitarian effort � An African Union (AU) Peace and Security Council is to hold crisis talks at AU headquarters in Addis Ababa � US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer has held talks with Mr Kabila in DR Congo's capital, Kinshasa |
Re: Congo
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| Originally posted by Krypton Is rapidly deteriorating. What the hell is wrong with the Congolese government? They've got so much wealth to benefit from, yet, are so incompetent as to not even pay their soldiers to protect their own people. |
This is a brief but on-point outline of why Nkunda's troops are acting the way they are.
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| Rwanda's ghosts stalk DR Congo The UN, the European Union and the US are all trying to find a way to end to the fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo. BBC World Affairs correspondent Alan Little considers what the rebels there hope to achieve. Laurent Nkunda believes the genocide perpetrators are as deadly as ever General Laurent Nkunda's rebel force is motivated primarily by fear. They have taken to arms because they believe the genocide that killed up to million Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda in 1994 has never really ended. The Tutsis of eastern DR Congo have never felt safe. They say many of the Hutu militiamen who perpetrated that genocide fled into the hills and forests of the area, where they have continued to pursue genocide against the local Tutsi population. There is also sound reason for the rebels to distrust the Congolese army. The army, when the country was still called Zaire, was a strong ally of the genocidal regime in Rwanda. When the guilty men of Rwanda's killing fields fled into Congo, they were given safe haven there. No protection The rebel force wants the perpetrators of the genocide returned to Rwanda to face trial but these men are now so integrated into local Congolese military groups and alliances that it is now almost impossible to see how this could be achieved. Neither do the Tutsi rebels much trust the United Nations force. There was, after all, a multinational force in Rwanda in 1994 led by the despairing Canadian General Romeo Dallaire. And yet when the killing started, the UN provided no protection. Moreover, the UN and international aid agencies fed, watered and sheltered the Hutus of Rwanda for two years after the genocide, knowing all along that the refugee camps that international money sustained were bases from which the former killers could organise, plot and operate. Gen Nkunda's Tutsi rebels are unlikely to lay down their arms as long as this perceived threat to their very existence remains. |
So why is a country with such vast mineral wealth so decrepit?
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| Originally posted by Krypton So why is a country with such vast mineral wealth so decrepit? |
Meanwhile...
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Nov 3, 7:26 PM EST UN says Rwanda tanks fired at Congo By MICHELLE FAUL Associated Press Writer GOMA, Congo (AP) -- Rwandan forces fired tank shells and other heavy artillery across the border at Congolese troops during fighting last week, the United Nations said Tuesday. Congo's government had accused Rwanda of actively supporting Congolese rebel leader Laurent Nkunda, but the accusation marks the first time the U.N. has publicly said Rwanda was overtly involved in the latest fighting. Rwanda has repeatedly denied its military is involved in the conflict. U.N. spokeswoman Sylvie van den Wildenberg told The Associated Press in Goma that Uruguayan peacekeepers saw Rwandan tanks and other heavy artillery fire into Congo on Wednesday as Nkunda's forces advanced toward the regional capital, Goma. On Friday, Gen. Jorge Rosales, chief of Uruguay's army, said rebel troops "have tanks and heavy artillery" from Rwanda and that intelligence reports "indicate there are soldiers from that country integrated in the rebel forces." Van Wildenberg said U.N. officials had asked the Rwandans about the firing and they denied it. "But we saw it. We observed it," she said. Alan Doss, the top U.N. envoy in Congo, said in a videoconference Monday that the "fire had come across the border from Rwanda near the Kibumba (displaced) camp where hostilities were under way." Kibumba is located on a main road about 17 miles north of Goma. The Rwandan border is visible to the east, amid several volcanoes that straddle the frontier. "We also had a unit in that area that was trying to stabilize the situation. ... I don't think it lasted any time," he said of the shooting. He said it had been documented when "our reports came in from our military observers on the ground that morning." Rwanda invaded Congo twice in the late 1990s but initially denied its troops were there both times. Rwanda finally pulled its forces out after a 2002 peace deal ended a war in Congo that drew in half a dozen African nations. Despite fears of a regional conflict, the fighting in Congo has subsided in recent days. ---- Associated Press Writer Edith M. Lederer at U.N. headquarters contributed to this report from New York. |
Thanks for the research and quick posts Leb. Looks like I have some reading to do.
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| Barack Obama spoke often and passionately about Darfur while campaigning. But the African holocaust that will confront him first is the ongoing slaughter in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. More than 5 million have died in that conflict since 1996, and there's no sign of a letup. As rebels commanded by Laurent Nkunda, a renegade Congolese Army general, closed in on the city of Goma in recent weeks, the United Nations' 17,000 troops� its largest peacekeeping force in the world�proved too weak to stop the push or to prevent a rampage of rape and looting by government forces who were there to defend the city. The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously last week to send in 3,100 more troops, but "you would need a minimum of 100,000 soldiers to have a credible peacekeeping force in Congo," says Knox Chitiyo, an Africa expert at the Royal United Services Institute, a London think tank. Chitiyo thinks only an envoy of Obama's stature might be able to impose a settlement. What keeps the war going is eastern Congo's vast mineral wealth�gold, diamonds, tin and coltan, a vital component in mobile phones. Nkunda imposes a tax on illegal miners in his area; other militias do their own digging. Either way, the puny salaries offered if fighters disarm and join the national Army provide scant incentive to give up mining. Most of the take is smuggled out through Rwanda�and that may be a key. Enforcing a ban on minerals from militia-held areas might at least slow the fighting. Still, it's a tall order. "If there were something easy that could fix the Congo, it would have been done," says Anneke Van Woudenberg of Human Rights Watch. "There's no magic bullet." |
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| The Peacemaker Something has to be done--by the leaders of the Congo, the Great Lakes region and the international community. Olusegun Obasanjo NEWSWEEK From the magazine issue dated Dec 1, 2008 Olusegun Obasanjo has come a long way since the 1970s, when he was the military dictator of Nigeria. He went on to win two terms as president in democratic elections and is now one of Africa's elder statesmen. On Nov. 3, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon named him special envoy to help end the fighting in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has recently forced at least 250,000 people from their homes. After two weeks of shuttle diplomacy among nine countries, Obasanjo stopped in Lagos last week where NEWSWEEK's Rod Nordland caught up with him by telephone. Excerpts: NORDLAND: You must have been very upset, after you went to [rebel leader] Laurent Nkunda's headquarters, to learn that his ceasefire pledge was broken within hours. OBASANJO: I saw him on Sunday afternoon. That Sunday morning, the ceasefire was broken. I confronted him about that and asked him, what is the world going to think of you? The ceasefire must be respected, and we must get the Congo army involved, and MONUC [the U.N. peacekeeping force] must be the guarantor. By Tuesday he began to respect that, and now the ceasefire seems to be holding. There have been many ceasefires. Is there any reason to believe this one will be any more enduring? We have the Congo army on board, and with MONUC, things are looking better. We still have the problem of other militias, but for now at least [the major parties] agree on some things. Is sending in more troops the answer? The more zones of separation we create, the more areas we force [the militias] to leave, the better. To do more, we will need more MONUC troops. And there are a number of substantial IDP [internally displaced persons] centers that need to be looked after. Again, you need more troops to do that. Many aid workers and observers say only a robust foreign force, preferably from the European Union, could be effective. I don't believe at this point we should talk about EU or African Union troops. We need to deal with what we have on the ground, which is MONUC. And I won't say it has failed. Illegal mining and exploitation of resources finance the militias. Is this going to be part of your discussions? You have illegal mining problems because the Congolese authorities are not able to exert their authority in the area. [With] a cessation of hostilities, Congo can re-establish its authority, bring law and order and deal with the issue. And there are other problems, the ease of flow of small arms into Congo and the presence of foreign-armed troops. Why not win agreement from the neighboring countries to cut off the flow of illegal exports? I have raised that issue and whether we couldn't do what was tried in Liberia [boycotting blood diamonds]. But I was told while you can identify the source of diamonds, Congo's exports are not easy to identify. You visited Angola recently; did you raise the concerns that Angolan troops are already in Congo? Are you concerned that even peacekeepers from countries like Angola and Rwanda, which were previously involved in Congo's wars, could just drag the situation back to where it was in 1998, a war involving nine nations? I did visit Angola, and I was categorically told none of their troops are there. As to regional troops�they will have to all agree who will contribute troops. There's a sense that some of the most important players aren't talking to each other, like Rwanda's president Paul Kagame and Congo's president Joseph Kabila, who haven't even met over this, and also that Congolese leaders refuse to talk to Nkunda. Kagame assured me they are talking to Kabila every day, and his foreign minister just left Kigali, and on the 29th of this month, the chiefs of staff of both countries will be meeting. I believe Nkunda must talk to the government of Congo, and the government of president Kabila is not opposed to that. The next thing I want to do is get a dialogue going. What can be done about the [Hutu rebels]? Have you been able to talk to them? Something has to be done. The leaders of Congo and the Great Lakes region and the international community all have to put their heads together; there are foreign-armed troops within Congo and that is unacceptable. |
A fascinating interview with Laurent Nkunda:
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| Exclusive Interview: Congo Rebel Leader Accused Of War Crimes Tells His Story Georgianne Nienaber Congo rebel leader General Laurent Nkunda has been accused by human rights organizations of ordering his troops to rape and murder civilians and pillage communities. Huffington Post contributors Georgianne Nienaber and Helen Thomas traveled to Nkunda's compound in Kivu province, Congo, to interview Nkunda face-to-face. On the eve of Congo peace talks this week in the Kenyan capitol of Nairobi, the BBC reported that Congolese rebel leader Laurent Nkunda had been dismissed as commander of the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP). Nkunda insisted that he was still in power and that the removal was just a rumor. The rival who challenged Nkunda's leadership was CNDP military chief of staff General Bosco Ntaganda, who accused Nkunda of obstructing peace efforts in the region on January 8. This is the second time in recent months that Ntaganda has caused a controversy. In October, the general signed a statement announcing Nkunda's death, according to AFP reports. The Democratic Republic of Congo has been at war since 1996. The United Nations peacekeeping force in the region (MONUC) claims that it is over-committed and cannot maintain protection for the local populations from the confrontations between the Congolese Army (FARDC), the CNDP, local militias (Mai Mai), and the remnants of the Interahamwe (FDLR) who are responsible for the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. In January 2008, the Congolese Army and General Nkunda signed the Goma peace agreement, which fell apart eight months later, displacing over one quarter of North Kivu Province's population of 4 million people. According to Human Rights Watch, a total of 1.1 million people are displaced in North and South Kivu Provinces. Nkunda's rebel delegation is in Nairobi for another round of UN-brokered peace negotiations, which began on Wednesday. The talks had been suspended in December. The innocent victims of this war are civilians who are caught in the crossfire. Much information in this region is based upon rumor, and people in eastern Congo seem interested primarily in seeking safety from the fighting. This has resulted in severe overcrowding of the Internally Displaced People camps that have been in place since 1996. Conditions in the camps are no better than that found in barnyards, and newborn infants are seen sleeping on beds made of lava rocks, with barely a piece of cloth for covering. The following interview was obtained with General Nkunda at his compound three days before the BBC reports of his ouster. To date, Western media reports have been very unfavorable to Nkunda and the CNDP, including accusations of mass rapes and killings. Nkunda said he agreed to meet with Nienaber because he said he "was aware" of her reports on nature conservation from the region. Question. Would you say that you have been portrayed in a negative way in Western media? Nkunda. They cut my voice and they speak on my behalf. Journalists tell what they think will be sensational. Q. Are you the man to provide the leadership to develop Congo? N. I never talk about an individual when I talk about change or about leadership. I always talk about a spirit. Because a man cannot do, but a spirit can do. If you can find leadership, leadership can change Congo, but not a leader. Q. There have been terrible stories about how women are treated in Congo, especially how there have been mass rapes. N. You are in the area under CNDP control. Ask the women who have been raped. I cannot believe that they are raped here and then going to be treated in Goma or Bukavu. But if you go to Goma or Bukavu [under FARDC control] you are going to see hospitals full of women raped. Go to Rumangabo and they will tell you that the area under CNDP control is the most secure area in Congo. They say that we massacre Hutu tribes. The executive secretary of CNDP is a Hutu. Q. Can you tell the world what happened at Kiwanja? N. Kiwanja was liberated by the CNDP on the 28th of October, [2008]. We were in Kiwanja for one week without any killing, any rape, any looting. One week later the government [FARDC], along with Mai Mai, attacked Kiwanja and they occupied Kiwanja for 24 hours. My forces went back [withdrew] from Kiwanja. And in 24 hours, 74 people were killed. And before we came back to Kiwanja the governor of Goma, in the morning, announced that in Kiwanja there were massacres. When I heard on the radio that there were massacres in Kiwanja, I called my guys [soldiers] on the ground and said, "Where are you?" They said, "We are in Rutshuru." I said, "Who is doing this?" They said they did not know, that they were in Rutshuru. So we went back to Kiwanja on the afternoon of the 29th, or the 27th. [Nkunda leans over to check dates with an adviser.] We went back 24 hours later and some people were killed in the crossfire. To that we can testify. Because the Mai Mai, they do not know how to shoot; they shoot where they want and when they were retreating they were shooting. And we saw that even the Hutu community in Rutshuru wrote a letter about that and they gave it to [unclear] and said they were not killed by CNDP. Q. Do you have a copy of that letter? N. Yes, I do. Q. May we have a copy? N. You will have a copy. The same scenario was prepared in Goma. When we were around Goma, my intelligence services told me that there was a plan to kill people in Goma that night so that they could blame the CNDP. That is why I told my guys to not enter Goma. I was informed that there was a plan for FARDC [the government forces] to kill in the night. Those who were in charge of the killing never knew that we withdrew. But I told MONUC [UN mission in DRC] that I was going to withdraw from Goma for 12 kilometers. On that night, 64 people were killed in Goma. Q. The other charge against you is that you ordered the refugee camps destroyed. N. Please understand. Yes, there were internally displaced people in Kiwanja. When I came. I went to the camp and I told the population there, there are no houses here. You are in the rain. Please go back to your homes. I will take charge of your security. Please go home. On the following morning they said Nkunda forced people to leave. I am asking people to go to their HOMES! MONUC has been unable to take charge. So it is a crime because I am asking them to go to their homes? One day I told the person responsible for OCHA; the one in charge of humanitarian affairs, if we do a study in the camps around Goma, in each week there are about a hundred people dying from different diseases. In four years, CNDP has been accused of killing 100 people. But you are killing one hundred people each week in your camps. Who is the criminal? Q. Can you explain the military ethic of your soldiers? N. Rape will be punished by firing squad. This is known. And two weeks ago [approximately December 21, 2008] two officers were executed for this. Q. Who executed them? N. Other soldiers of the same rank. They were second lieutenants and they were killed by second lieutenants. These are strong measures, I know. Q. Some people call this a war for minerals. N. How can you fight for your own minerals? [Laughter] If this were about minerals, I would not be here. You see minerals are being exploited by China, by Belgium, by South Africa. Petrol is under French control, uranium under American control, copper under Belgium, diamonds under Jewish, and gold under South African control. Q. Have you met personally with Alan Doss [MONUC]? N. No. We talk only on the phone. The first time I talked to him was in January when we were in Goma during the peace talks. One day I told him, you are coming with your tanks to ask us to shut our mouths. And so you ask me to not fight. I said to him bring other tanks and other aviation forces because we will fight until we will be free. You want me to be a slave, an economic slave to China, I will not accept this. I'll fight till I die, then my brothers will continue to fight, and my elders will fight and my son will fight. Q. So does China's influence concern you now? N. Yes of course because we are going now into economic slavery. If we accept this Chinese contract it is the end for Congolese. Q. Have you heard President-elect Obama's statement about Congo, that this is just an ethnic conflict? N. He has to raise his thinking about Congo. If I could meet him one day, I would tell him that it is not a matter of ethnic conflict, it is a matter of leadership. The world is talking about a black person in power, but Americans didn't vote for a black man, they voted for an American showing the capacity to rule. But they are talking about a black person. No, no, it is not that. On his identity card it doesn't say 'black'. When the American people were voting, they voted for an American. Q. What are your views about Human Rights Watch? N. I will tell you, they are writing from the UK and from the US and they are not on the ground. I even talked to Anneke van Woudenberg. She came to see me in Masisi but after leaving here and then writing their things I had to call her back and say, "Why? You were here, now what are you doing?" She always says that the information is from "reliable sources." But all these reliable sources are unidentified. Q. General, is there anything you want to say to us that we didn't ask you about as a last question? N. I can say that what Congo expects from the world is help to be free from the leadership it is currently under. Instead of bringing so many troops, we want to have well-trained and equipped soldiers in Congo. Instead of spending money on MONUC we want to have roads. Instead of bringing ex-pats from elsewhere, we want well-trained leaders for Congo. Help Congolese leaders to have a vision for the country that is good for the people. #### Georgianne Nienaber is a regular contributor to the Huffington Post. She has written a biography of murdered primatologist Dian Fossey and has spent considerable time in African conflict zones since 2004. Helen Thomas is a print and radio journalist in Australia. Her interest in African affairs stems from her involvement in an organization that seeks to provide a more balanced portrayal of Africa in the media. The confusion shrouding the Congo crisis compelled her to travel to the region herself to gain a first-hand insight of why one of the most resource-rich countries in the world continues to wallow in war, poverty and suffering. |
^^^ Fockin' eh! Thats a GREAT article ... cant believe much of the media nowadays! They had me fooled. Nkunda is a very smart man - we'll see how long he will stay alive for. Yes, I had my suspicions that Nkunda wasnt as evil as they say - after all, he is after those specific armed Hutu militias responsible for the 1994 genocide.
Thanks for the link.
Wow.... Crazy shit. It is turning into a sad cliche about these so called leaders of these countries. They seem to be popping up all the time, each one trying to outdo the last in their level of corruption and brutality. How can we expect to even make a dent when it's so ingrained in their culture and way of life to settle disputes by slaughtering the masses and accepting such inhumane behavior as the norm?
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| Originally posted by The17sss Wow.... Crazy shit. It is turning into a sad cliche about these so called leaders of these countries. They seem to be popping up all the time, each one trying to outdo the last in their level of corruption and brutality. How can we expect to even make a dent when it's so ingrained in their culture and way of life to settle disputes by slaughtering the masses and accepting such inhumane behavior as the norm? |
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| Originally posted by Magnetonium ^^^ Fockin' eh! Thats a GREAT article ... cant believe much of the media nowadays! They had me fooled. Nkunda is a very smart man - we'll see how long he will stay alive for. Yes, I had my suspicions that Nkunda wasnt as evil as they say - after all, he is after those specific armed Hutu militias responsible for the 1994 genocide. Thanks for the link. |
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| Originally posted by Krypton We have made dents. Whose benefiting from their natural resources? Sure isn't the Congolese. |
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| Originally posted by The17sss I don't mean making dents for the benefits of countries abroad (from Africa), I mean how can we make a dent in helping those own countries forming civil societies and benefiting from their own resources. Seems hopeless |
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| Originally posted by Krypton They need to nationalize their natural resources |
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| Originally posted by The17sss I don't mean making dents for the benefits of countries abroad (from Africa), I mean how can we make a dent in helping those own countries forming civil societies and benefiting from their own resources. Seems hopeless |
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| Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov This is how it was under Mobutu, and with disastrous results. It's not so simple - especially when leaders are most prone to corruption. There are two things that most African states desperately need, which the17sss hinted at - an active civil society and a sense of accountability in the government bureaucracy. In other words, Africa needs to foster the sentiment of public service. Too much of post-colonial African history has been driven by public greed, which has shut down civil society activity. To its credit, the World Bank and other development institutions are beginning to realize the role that an active civil society can play in making the state accountable to its people. The proliferation of watchdogs and interest groups may seem to be one of the more contentious things in American democracy (after all, how many complaints have you heard about the ACLU?), but research is suggesting that these groups can restrain the actions of the government by illuminating corruption and ensuring that the interests of the people are heard by the state. http://www.ngocongo.org/index.php?w...ources&id=10376 What's intriguing about Nkunda is that he seems to realize the importance of accountability, and while he isn't fostering a burgeoning civil society sector, he is delivering public services in a way that may suggest a greater willingness to respond to the needs ot the people. That said, Hamas is also great at distributing public services to its population in a popular manner. |
breaking news BBC(cant find a source as of yet):
Laurent Nkunda apparantly detained on Rwandan soil.
things fell apart for this guy real quick.
story
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| Originally posted by Magnetonium Nkunda is a very smart man - we'll see how long he will stay alive for. |
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Gen Nkunda aimed to target those responsible for the Tutsi genocide By Peter Greste BBC News, Nairobi By almost any measure, it has been a spectacular reversal of fortune for General Laurent Nkunda. Two weeks ago, he was widely regarded as the key power-broker in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo. He had forced the Congolese government into direct negotiations after advancing his troops to the outskirts of the regional capital, Goma. A seemingly endless conga-line of diplomats and envoys had passed through his headquarters in the town of Rutshuru, begging him to accept a permanent ceasefire and a lasting peace agreement. When I last saw him, Gen Nkunda was on the veranda of his sprawling farmhouse headquarters, locked in an animated conversation with diplomats despatched by the UN secretary general's special envoy. Meanwhile, a European Union delegation led by Commissioner for Humanitarian Affairs Louis Michele sipped tea in the lounge waiting for their turn with the uniformed commander. Capable military leader Now he is under arrest, captured by the Rwandan troops he once served; his own rebels under the command of the Congolese forces they'd been fighting only months earlier. Gen Nkunda built his reputation as a loyal and capable military leader in the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) - the rebel force which ended the genocide of 1994, and drove the ethnic Hutu Interahamwe militias out of Rwanda and into eastern Congo. Displace people stretch for a handout at a camp in Kibati, Congo More than 250,000 people were displaced by recent fighting Gen Nkunda then joined rebels led by Laurent Kabila in the Congo (then Zaire) to topple President Mobutu Sese Seko from power. But when Mr Kabila broke with his Rwandan allies, Laurent Nkunda became a commander in another rebel force, the Congolese Rally for Democracy. That force eventually joined the coalition government and Laurent Nkunda was promoted to general in the Congolese Army. But he never took up his post, instead forming his own militia, the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP), which he said was aimed at protecting eastern Congo from the remnants of the Interahamwe. The coincidence of goals for both Gen Nkunda and Rwanda - targeting those responsible for the genocide - led many to assume he had the covert backing of his former comrades in the RPF. That is also why his arrest by the Rwandans seems such a stunning turn-around. Battle mistake? His greatest mistake may have been the military offensive he launched last October, pushing his troops to the edge of Goma, and forcing more than a quarter of a million people from their homes in the process. The attack humiliated the Congolese army, and appeared to trigger a cabinet reshuffle in Kinshasa where President Joseph Kabila (Laurent Kabila's son) scrambled to shore up his own political support. That, and intense international pressure to end the conflict, opened the space for a new relationship between Kinshasa and Kigali. The first signs of trouble for Gen Nkunda emerged earlier this month, when his chief-of-staff, Gen Bosco Ntaganda, announced that the group's leader had been relieved of his duties because "of a failure of political leadership". Congolese army soldiers ready to fight the rebel CNDP, November 2008 The Congolese army fought Gen Nkunda's rebel troops Then Gen Ntaganda announced his forces would work with the Congolese army to fight the Hutu militias, and eventually integrate into the army. And in a final blow, the Congolese government invited about 4,000 Rwandan troops to join them in their own bi-lateral push against the Hutu forces. It is not entirely clear what will happen to Gen Nkunda now. The Congolese government has indicted him for war crimes, and will almost certainly seek his extradition. It's less clear whether the Rwandan authorities will be willing to hand him over to their former rivals and risk damaging revelations about their past relationship. But either way, Gen Nkunda appears to be out of the way, and his forces effectively neutralised. War not over All this is, of course, good news for the civilians who have suffered terribly from the fighting. But it doesn't mean the war is over. In fact UN diplomats have warned that it could even deteriorate in the short term. The new joint Congolese-Rwandan force is yet to take on the Hutu militias every bit as ruthless as the Lord's Resistance Army which has killed at least 600 civilians in reprisals for a similar multi-national offensive further to the north. And eastern Congo is - still - a bewildering patchwork of warlords who will scramble to fill the vacuum. Gen Nkunda's arrest takes one element out of the problem, but it by no means solves it. |
Africa in civil war shocker.
Excellent review of a couple new pieces on the international origins of the current conflict in the Congo, as well as a treatment of some of the root causes.
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Volume 56, Number 14 � September 24, 2009 Kagame's Hidden War in the Congo By Howard W. French Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe by G�rard Prunier Oxford University Press, 529 pp., $27.95 The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa by Ren� Lemarchand University of Pennsylvania Press, 327 pp., $59.95 The Congo Wars: Conflict, Myth and Reality by Thomas Turner Zed Books, 243 pp., $32.95 (paper) Although it has been strangely ignored in the Western press, one of the most destructive wars in modern history has been going on in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa's third-largest country. During the past eleven years millions of people have died, while armies from as many as nine different African countries fought with Congolese government forces and various rebel groups for control of land and natural resources. Much of the fighting has taken place in regions of northeastern and eastern Congo that are rich in minerals such as gold, diamonds, tin, and coltan, which is used in manufacturing electronics. Few realize that a main force driving this conflict has been the largely Tutsi army of neighboring Rwanda, along with several Congolese groups supported by Rwanda. The reason for this involvement, according to Rwandan president Paul Kagame, is the continued threat to Rwanda posed by the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a Hutu militia that includes remnants of the army that carried out the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Until now, the US and other Western powers have generally supported Kagame diplomatically. And in January, Congo president Joseph Kabila, whose weak government has long had limited influence in the eastern part of the country, entered a surprise agreement with Kagame to allow Rwandan forces back into eastern Congo to fight the FDLR. But the extent of the Hutu threat to Rwanda is much debated, and observers note that Rwandan-backed forces have themselves been responsible for much of the violence in eastern Congo over the years. Rwanda's intervention in Congo began in 1996. Two years earlier, Kagame's Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) had invaded Rwanda from neighboring Uganda, defeating the government in Kigali and ending the genocide of some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. As Kagame installed a minority Tutsi regime in Rwanda, some two million Hutu refugees fled to UN-run camps, mostly in Congo's North and South Kivu provinces. These provinces, which occupy an area of about 48,000 square miles�slightly larger than the state of Pennsylvania�are situated along Congo's eastern border with Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi and together have a population of more than five million people. In addition to containing rich deposits of minerals, North and South Kivu have, since the precolonial era, been subject to large waves of migration by people from Rwanda, including both Hutus and Tutsis. In recent decades these Rwandans have competed with more established residents for control of land. Following Kagame's consolidation of power in Rwanda, a large invasion force of Rwandan Tutsis arrived in North and South Kivu to pursue Hutu militants and to launch a war against the three-decade-long dictatorship of Congo (then known as Zaire) by Mobutu Sese Seko, whom they claimed was giving refuge to the leaders of the genocide. With Rwandan and Ugandan support, a new regime led by Laurent Kabila was installed in Kinshasa, the Congolese capital. But after Kabila ordered the Rwandan troops to leave in 1998, Kagame responded with a new and even larger invasion of the country. Kabila's hold on power was saved at this point by Angola and Zimbabwe, which rushed troops into Congo to repel the Rwandan invaders. Angola was motivated by fears that Congolese territory would be used as a rear base by the longtime Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi, following the renewed outbreak of that country's civil war. Zimbabwe appears to have been drawn by promises of access to Congolese minerals. The protracted and inconclusive conflict that followed has become what G�rard Prunier, in the title of his sprawling book, calls "Africa's World War," a catastrophic decade of violence that has led to a staggering 5.4 million deaths, far more than any war anywhere since World War II.[1] It also has resulted in one of the largest�and least followed�UN interventions in the world, involving nearly 20,000 UN soldiers from over forty countries. Throughout this conflict, Rwanda�a small, densely populated country with few natural resources of its own�has pursued Congo's enormous mineral wealth. Initially, the Rwandan Patriotic Front was directly operating mining businesses in Congo, according to UN investigators; more recently, Rwanda has attempted to maintain control of regions of eastern Congo through various proxy armies. Among these, none has been more lethal than the militia led by Laurent Nkunda, Congo's most notorious warlord, whose record of violence in eastern Congo includes destroying entire villages, committing mass rapes, and causing hundreds of thousands of Congolese to flee their homes. Nkunda is a Congolese Tutsi who is believed to have fought in both the Rwandan civil war and the subsequent war against Mobutu. In 2002, he was dispatched by the Rwandan government to Kisangani�an inland city in eastern Congo whose nearby gold mines have been fought over by Ugandan and Rwandan-backed forces. Nkunda committed numerous atrocities there, including the massacre of some 160 people, according to Human Rights Watch. In 2004, Nkunda declined a military appointment by Congo's transitional government, choosing instead to back a Tutsi insurgency in North Kivu near the Rwandan border. He claimed that his actions were aimed at preventing an impending genocide of Tutsis in Congo. Most observers say that these claims were groundless. Nkunda's insurgency was put down, but clashes between his rebels, government forces, and other groups continued to foster ethnic tensions in eastern Congo, including widespread sexual violence against women; in 2005, the UN estimated that some 45,000 women were raped in South Kivu alone.[2] And in the fall of 2008, Nkunda�apparently with Kagame's encouragement�led a new offensive of Tutsi rebels in North Kivu that uprooted about 200,000 civilians and threatened to capture the city of Goma, near the Rwandan border. In January 2009, however, the Rwandan government made a surprise decision to arrest Nkunda. Kagame's willingness to move against Nkunda appears to stem, in part, from increasing international scrutiny of Rwanda's meddling in eastern Congo. The arrest took place just after the release of a UN report documenting Rwanda's close ties to the warlord, and concluding that he was being used to advance Rwanda's economic interests in Congo's eastern hinterlands. The report stated that Rwandan authorities had "been complicit in the recruitment of soldiers, including children, have facilitated the supply of military equipment, and have sent officers and units from the Rwandan Defense Forces," while giving Nkunda access to Rwandan bank accounts and allowing him to launch attacks on the Congolese army from Rwandan soil. Following Nkunda's arrest, Congo president Joseph Kabila agreed to allow Rwandan forces to conduct a five-week joint military operation in eastern Congo against Hutu rebels.[3] But attacks against civilians have increased precipitously since the joint operation, and with Hutu and Tutsi militias still active it remains unclear whether there will be a lasting peace between Rwanda and Congo. Africa's World War is the most ambitious of several remarkable new books that reexamine the extraordinary tragedy of Congo and Central Africa since the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Along with Ren� Lemarchand's The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa and Thomas Turner's The Congo Wars: Conflict, Myth and Reality, Prunier's Africa's World War explores arguments that have circulated among scholars of sub-Saharan Africa for years. Prunier himself, who is an East Africa specialist at the University of Paris, has previously written a highly regarded account of the genocide. But these books will surprise many whose knowledge of the region is based on popular accounts of the genocide and its aftermath. In all three, the Kagame regime, and its allies in Central Africa, are portrayed not as heroes but rather as opportunists who use moral arguments to advance economic interests. And their supporters in the United States and Western Europe emerge as alternately complicit, gullible, or simply confused. For their part in bringing intractable conflict to a region that had known very little armed violence for nearly thirty years, all the parties�so these books argue�deserve blame, including the United States. The concentrated evil of the methodical Hutu slaughter of Tutsis in 1994 is widely known. For many it has long been understood as a grim, if fairly simple, morality play: the Hutus were extremist killers, while the Tutsis of the RPF are portrayed as avenging angels, who swooped in from their bases in Uganda to stop the genocide. But Lemarchand and Prunier show that the story was far more complicated. They both depict the forces of Kagame's Rwandan Patriotic Front as steely, power-driven killers themselves. "When the genocide did start, saving Tutsi civilians was not a priority," Prunier writes. "Worse, one of the most questionable of the RPF ideologues coolly declared in September 1994 that the 'interior' Tutsi"�those who had remained in Rwanda and not gone into exile in Uganda years earlier�"deserved what happened to them 'because they did not want to flee as they were getting rich doing business'" with the former Hutu regime. He also notes that the RPF "unambiguously opposed" all talk of a foreign intervention, however unlikely, to stop the genocide, apparently because such intervention could have prevented Kagame from taking full power. Moreover, slaughter during the one hundred days of genocide was not the monopoly of the Hutus, as is widely believed. Both Lemarchand and Prunier recount the work of RPF teams that roamed the countryside methodically exterminating ordinary, unarmed Hutu villagers.[4] This sort of killing, rarely mentioned in press accounts of the genocide, continued well after the war was over. For example, on April 22, 1995, units of the new national army surrounded the Kibeho refugee camp in south Rwanda, where about 150,000 Hutu refugees stood huddled shoulder to shoulder, and opened fire on the crowd with rifles and with 60mm mortars.[5] According to Prunier, a thirty- two-member team of the Australian Medical Corps had counted 4,200 corpses at the camp before being stopped by the Rwandan army. Prunier calls the Kagame regime's use of violence in that period "something that resembles neither the genocide nor uncontrolled revenge killings, but rather a policy of political control through terror." Some commentators in the United States have viewed Kagame as a sort of African Konrad Adenauer, crediting him with bringing stability and rapid economic growth to war-torn Rwanda, while running an administration considered to be one of the more efficient in Africa. In the nine years he has led the country (after serving as interim president, he won an election to a seven-year term in 2003), he has also gotten attention for the reconciliation process he has imposed on villages throughout Rwanda. Firmly opposed to such views, the three authors reviewed here characterize Kagame's regime as more closely resembling a minority ethnic autocracy. In a recent interview, Prunier dismissed the recently much-touted reconciliation efforts, calling post-genocide Rwanda "a very well-managed ethnic, social, and economic dictatorship." True reconciliation, he said, "hinges on cash, social benefits, jobs, property rights, equality in front of the courts, and educational opportunities," all of which are heavily stacked against the roughly 85 percent of the population that is Hutu, a problem that in Prunier's view presages more conflict in the future. In his book, Lemarchand, an emeritus professor at the University of Florida who has done decades of fieldwork in the region, observes that Hutus have been largely excluded from important positions of power in Kagame's Rwanda, and that the state's military and security forces are pervasive. "The political decisions with the gravest consequences for the nation...are undertaken by the RPF's Tutsi leadership, not by the political establishment," he writes. Those concerns are shared by human rights groups, which have documented the suppression of dissent in Rwanda.Freedom House ranked Rwanda 183 out of 195 countries in press freedom in 2008, while Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have also described the Rwandan government as imposing harsh and arbitrary justice�including long-term incarceration without trial and life sentences in solitary confinement. Other Western observers and human rights activists have noted that the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda has never properly investigated atrocities committed by Tutsis. In June, more than seventy scholars from North American and European universities wrote an open letter to the UN secretary-general, President Barack Obama, and Prime Minister Gordon Brown expressing "grave concern at the ongoing failure" of the tribunal to bring "indictments against those soldiers of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) who committed crimes against humanity and war crimes in Rwanda in 1994," and warning that this omission may cause the tribunal "to be dismissed as 'victor's justice.'" On the question of Rwanda's principal motive for seeking to control or destabilize eastern Congo, the books broadly agree: Kagame and his government want, as Lemarchand writes, "continued access to the Congo's economic wealth." Lemarchand says that within Congo itself the FDLR poses a "clear and present danger to Tutsi and other communities." Like Prunier, though, he concludes that the threat the Hutu group poses to Rwanda's own security is "vastly exaggerated," noting that its fighters "are no match" for Rwandan and Rwanda-backed forces amounting to "70,000 men under arms and a sophisticated military arsenal, consisting of armored personnel carriers (APCs), tanks, and helicopters." Thomas Turner draws parallels between the exploitation of Congo by Rwanda and Uganda and the brutal late-nineteenth-century regime of King Leopold of Belgium, whose thirst for empire drove his acquisition of what became known as the Congo Free State. Citing a 2001 United Nations investigation of the conflict, Turner concludes: Resource extraction from eastern Congo, occupied by Uganda and Rwanda until recently, would seem to constitute "pure" pillage.... Much as in Free State days, the Congo was financing the occupation of a portion of its own territory. Unlike Free State days, none of the proceeds of this pillage were being reinvested. According to a 2005 report on the Rwandan economy by the South African Institute for Security Studies, Rwanda's officially recorded coltan production soared nearly tenfold between 1999 and 2001, from 147 tons to 1,300 tons, surpassing revenues from the country's main traditional exports, tea and coffee, for the first time. "Part of the increase in production is due to the opening of new mines in Rwanda," the report said. "However, the increase is primarily due to the fraudulent re-export of coltan of Congolese origin." When Rwanda moved to invade Mobutu's Zaire in 1996, Prunier says, the country's administration "was so rotten that the brush of a hand could cause it to collapse." Since the 1960s, Congo had remained relatively stable by virtue of a confluence of circumstances, which suddenly no longer held. After backing the wrong side during the Rwandan genocide, France had lost its will or interest in playing its longtime part as regional patron to several client regimes. Following the removal of Mobutu, who often did the bidding of Western powers, there was no longer any clear regional strongman to mediate disputes. The allegiance of African states to the idea of permanently fixed borders, which had held firm since independence, was being challenged. And finally, the vacuum created by Mobutu's overthrow unleashed fierce competition for Congolese coltan and other resources and led to what Turner calls the "militarization of commerce" by both foreign governments and rebel groups. In allowing the Rwandan invasion of Zaire, the United States had two very different goals. The most immediate was the clearing of over one million Hutu refugees from UN camps near the Rwandan border, which had become bases for vengeful elements of the defeated Hutu army and Interahamwe militia, the agents of the Rwandan genocide. In Prunier's telling: When Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Susan Rice came back from her first trip to the Great Lakes region [of East Africa], a member of her staff said, "Museveni [of Uganda] and Kagame agree that the basic problem in the Great Lakes is the danger of a resurgence of genocide and they know how to deal with that. The only thing we [i.e., the US] have to do is look the other way." The gist of Prunier's anecdote is correct, except that participants have confirmed to me that it was Rice herself who spoke these words. In fact, getting the Hutu militia out of the UN camps was rapidly achieved in November 1996 by shelling them from Rwandan territory. Thereafter, the war against Mobutu dominated international headlines, overshadowing a secret Rwanda campaign that targeted for slaughter the Hutu populations that had fled into Congo. Here again, Washington provided vital cover. At the time, the American ambassador to Congo, Daniel Howard Simpson, told me flatly that the fleeing Hutus were "the bad guys."[6] One of the worst massacres by Kagame's Tutsi forces took place at the Tingi-Tingi refugee camp in northeastern Congo, which by 1997 contained over 100,000 Hutu refugees. But on January 21, 1997, Robert E. Gribbin, Simpson's counterpart in Rwanda, cabled Washington with the following advice: We should pull out of Tingi-Tingi and stop feeding the killers who will run away to look for other sustenance, leaving their hostages behind.... If we do not we will be trading the children in Tingi-Tingi for the children who will be killed and orphaned in Rwanda. There was a grim half-truth to Gribbin's assessment. The Hutu fighters traveling amid the refugees were often able to avoid engagement with their Tutsi pursuers by fleeing westward into the Congolese rain forest. The genuine refugees, who by UNHCR's estimate accounted for 93 percent of the Hutus in flight, could not. The best evidence suggests that they died by the scores of thousands in their flight across Congo, in what Lemarchand calls "a genocide of attrition." Prunier estimates the number killed in this manner at 300,000.[7] In August 1997, the UN began to investigate Tutsi killings of Hutu civilians and, as Turner recounts, "a preliminary report identified forty massacre sites." But the investigators were stonewalled by Kabila's Congo government�then still backed by Rwanda�and received little support from Washington. Roberto Garreton, a Chilean human rights lawyer who headed the UN investigation, was barred from the Rwandan capital of Kigali and his team was largely kept from the field in Congo. Garreton later wrote: One cannot of course ignore the presence of persons guilty of genocide, soldiers and militia members, among the refugees.... It is nevertheless unacceptable to claim that more than one million people, including large numbers of children, should be collectively designated as persons guilty of genocide and liable to execution without trial. Rwanda's designs on eastern Congo were further helped by the Clinton administration's interest in promoting a group of men it called the New African Leaders, including the heads of state of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Uganda, and Rwanda. As Clinton officials saw it, these New Leaders were sympathetic and businesslike, drawn together by such desirable goals as overthrowing Mobutu, by antagonism toward the Islamist government of Sudan, which shares a border with northeast Congo, and by talk of rethinking Africa's hitherto sacrosanct borders, as a means of creating more viable states. Then Assistant Secretary of State Rice touted the New Leaders as pursuing "African solutions to African problems." In 1999, Marina Ottaway, the influential Africa expert of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told the Senate Subcommittee on Africa: Many of the states that emerged from the colonial period have ceased to exist in practice.... The problem is to create functioning states, either by re-dividing territory or by creating new institutional arrangements such as decentralized federations or even confederations. In fact, the favored group of African leaders were also authoritarian figures with military backgrounds, all of whom had scorned democratic elections. According to Turner, support for the New Leaders "apparently meant that the USA and Britain should continue to aid Rwanda and Uganda as they 'found solutions' by carving up Congo." As in the case of the Rwandan genocide, Lemarchand suggests, the policies of the United States and other Western powers toward the conflict in Congo have been misguided in part out of ignorance of Central Africa's complicated twentieth-century history. Episodes of appalling violence in this region have occurred periodically at least since 1959, and cannot be remedied without first understanding their deeper causes. As Lemarchand writes: From the days of the Hutu revolution in Rwanda [in 1959�1962] to the invasion of the "refugee warriors" from Uganda [under Kagame's leadership] in 1994, from the huge exodus of Hutu from Burundi in 1972 to the "cleansing" of Hutu refugee camps in 1996�97, the pattern that emerges again and again is one in which refugee populations serve as the vehicles through which ethnic identities are mobilized and manipulated, host communities preyed upon, and external resources extracted. Some will always quibble with where to begin this story, whether with colonial favoritism for the Tutsis by Belgium in the first half of the twentieth century, or with Brussels's flip-flop in 1959 in favor of the Hutus on the eve of Rwandan independence, which led to the anti-Tutsi pogroms that sent Kagame's family and those of so many others of his RPF comrades into exile in Uganda. These events in turn had far-reaching effects on Rwanda's small neighbor Burundi, a German and later Belgian colony that gained independence in 1962 and, like Rwanda, has a large Hutu majority and Tutsi minority. In 1972, an extremist Tutsi regime there, driven by a fear of being overthrown, carried out the first genocide since the Holocaust, killing 300,000 Hutus. In the West, the Burundi genocide is scarcely remembered, but its consequences live on in the region. Terrorized Hutus streamed out of Burundi into Rwanda, helping to set Rwanda onto a path of Hutu extremism, and priming it for its own genocide two decades later. The final instigator of the Rwandan tragedy was the mysterious shooting down of a presidential plane on April 6, 1994, which killed presidents Juv�nal Habyarimana of Rwanda and Cyprien Ntaramyira of Burundi, who were both Hutu. This precipitated the horrific massacre of Rwandan Tutsis, but also a broader Hutu�Tutsi conflict, which by 1996 had begun to tear apart large swaths of eastern Congo. The events that have followed Rwanda's arrest of the warlord Nkunda in January of this year suggest that Congo and Rwanda have finally found reasons to sue for peace. Congo's weak government and corrupt army are powerless to fight Rwanda or its proxies, and there is desperate need to rebuild the state from scratch. Rwanda, meanwhile, is seeking to placate important European aid donors, who account for as much as half of Rwanda's annual budget and who, for the first time since its initial invasion of Congo in 1996, are asking difficult questions about its behavior there. As part of the deal that gave Rwandan forces another chance to fight Hutu militias in eastern Congo last spring, Kagame agreed to withdraw Rwanda's support for the Tutsi insurgency in eastern Congo while at the same time pressing Congolese Tutsis to integrate into Congo's national army. Kagame hopes now to find a legal means to sustain Rwanda's economic hold on eastern Congo, for example by promoting civilian business interests in the area. These are often run by ex-military officers or people with close ties to the Rwandan armed forces. In interviews, both Prunier and Lemarchand say that the direct plunder of resources by the Rwandan military has ceased, but that a large "subterranean" trade in minerals has continued through corrupt Congolese politicians and local militias. For its part, the United States has begun to acknowledge the scale of the problem in eastern Congo. In August, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton paid a two-day visit to the country, during which she described the conflict as driven by "exploitation of natural resources" and announced a $17 million program to help women who have been raped in the fighting. Notwithstanding these developments, the conflict in the east has been surging again, as the UN-backed Congolese army pursues a new campaign against Hutu rebels.[8] It is hard to dispute Lemarchand's logic. Without addressing the problems of exclusion and participation, whether in a Rwanda ruled by a small Tutsi minority or in heavily armed eastern Congo, where contending ethnic groups want to get hold of the region's spoils, it will be impossible to end this catastrophe. �August 25, 2009 Notes [1]According to the International Rescue Committee, whose epidemiological studies in Congo use methodology similar to that of studies it has carried out in Iraq and elsewhere. [2]See Adam Hochschild's account in these pages, "Rape of the Congo," August 13, 2009. [3]Nearly simultaneous permission was granted to Uganda and South Sudan to send their forces into Congolese territory to pursue factions of the Lord's Resistance Army, one of Africa's most vicious rebel groups. [4]Reports of RPF killings first surfaced, briefly, in a 1994 report by a UN investigator, Robert Gersony, who concluded that RPF insurgents had murdered between 25,000 and 45,000 people. Under pressure from the United States, the Gersony report was never released. [5]In his recent book, Journey into Darkness: Genocide in Rwanda, Thomas Odom, a former US military attach� to Kigali, writes that the Kibeho massacre did not undermine US support for the Rwandan government. "The bottom line was a difficult operation had gone bad, and people had died. I put the casualties at around two thousand," he wrote. "Yet the United States did not suspend foreign assistance�just barely restarted�as did the Belgians, the Dutch, and the European Union. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Vince Kern passed word to me that our report had saved the day." See Journey into Darkness (Texas A&M University Press, 2005), pp. 229�230. [6]Howard W. French, A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (Knopf, 2004), p. 142. [7]In his self-published manuscript on the events, In the Aftermath of Genocide: The US Role in Rwanda (iUniverse, 2005), Gribbin discounts this number, writing that "some would die in fighting, some would succumb to their terrible living conditions and to abuses by rebel forces, but 300,000 killed? Never." Nonetheless Gribbin acknowledges that serious efforts at investigation were blocked. [8]See Stephanie McCrummen, "A Conflict's Deadly Ripple Effects," The Washington Post, August 2, 2009. |
Good article... I actually enjoyed reading it when I know very little about Africa. Are you still planning or trying to make it over there to see the real thing?
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| Originally posted by The17sss Good article... I actually enjoyed reading it when I know very little about Africa. Are you still planning or trying to make it over there to see the real thing? |
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