Last week, another armed group in the increasingly volatile eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) ignored a government deadline to disarm, increasing to three the number of illegal groups the Congolese army is chasing in that region.
At the same time, Human Rights Watch released a new report detailing the atrocities — rape, murder and looting — that threaten civilians living in this region every day, perpetrated by any one of the armed groups, and by the Congolese army and state security services. In a separate report, Amnesty International described the Congolese security services as “agents of torture and death” and said the culture of impunity for human rights violations undermines public confidence in the state.
For observers of the eastern DRC, or the country as a whole, this will not be news. What is new is the scale of the abuses and the fact that the escalating fighting in the east renders the population — nearly one-quarter of which is displaced in North Kivu — more vulnerable.
As a result, the case for a resolution of the conflict through dialogue, mediation and negotiation rather than military means is even greater. Negotiation has been the Congolese government’s preferred option. And the army has had some modest successes in keeping at bay the men of Laurent Nkunda, the renegade Tutsi general who has been attacking government positions since August after a failed deal to absorb his troops into the army.
But while Nkunda’s men have not progressed towards the provincial capital of Goma in the past two months, the Congolese army has almost no control over large areas of the hinterland where tens of thousands of displaced people are left to their own devices, out of the reach of humanitarian aid. These areas are hotly contested by Nkunda and other armed groups, such as the Forces Democratiques pour la Liberation du Congo (FDLR), the Rwandan Hutu militia responsible for the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the Mai Mai self-defence militia, the FDLR’s on-again-off-again allies.
None of these groups takes the Congolese army seriously and threats of forced disarmament — including the one issued this week to a faction of the traditionally pro-government Mai Mai — have fallen on deaf ears. Unless the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the DRC (Monuc) gets actively involved in chasing down the armed groups, as it did in the Ituri district to the north, the poorly disciplined and underpaid Congolese army stands no chance of successfully winning a military campaign against any of these groups.
Since May, Monuc has been deploying peacekeeping troops to the Kivus from other parts of the country and there are now 4Â 000 UN peacekeepers in the area. Although they provide important logistical support to the Congolese army, they are not actively engaged in military operations and it is unclear when or whether they will ever do so.
As with many others in the DRC who played a role in ensuring that elections took place last year, the UN had started to think about a time-table for pulling out of the DRC, not getting more engaged. At an annual price tag of $1-billion a year, Monuc, which has been in the DRC since 2001, is the UN’s most expensive peacekeeping mission. Other African conflicts, especially in Sudan, Chad and the Central African Republic, are vying for attention and resources.
So everyone — from international business and donors to the Congolese government — has been pretending all is well and the nasty little problems in the eastern DRC will simply go away.
The part that is truly inexplicable is this: both the 1996-97 war — to oust Mobutu Sese Seko and install Laurent Kabila as president — and the 1998-2002 war — to get rid of Kabila — started in the east. Both wars were fuelled by Rwandan interests in eastern DRC and manipulated latent local ethnic tensions between the Congolese Tutsi communities and their compatriots. None of these matters has been resolved, not by the 2002 Pretoria peace agreement, not by the transitional government and not by the newly elected Kabila government; it has always been a simple matter of time before tensions erupted again.
To rely primarily on military action now is not only too little too late, it is also to ignore the human misery that prevails in the country and to exacerbate it.
Although Nkunda is the most visible antagonist, the real problem and the main way he can justify his raison d’être — that he is protecting the Tutsi population against the FDLR — is the presence of militia in eastern DRC 13 years after the genocide in Rwanda.
Although there will probably have to be a military element to removing them from the area, much would be achieved if the Rwandan government were to consider the FDLR’s demands — such as that for political dialogue — and if it were to grant amnesty to fighters who did not participate in the genocide. Without some sort of political compromise, the FDLR has no incentive to lay down its weapons.
Meanwhile, the Congolese government must clarify its relationship with the FDLR and immediately end any and all support for them. Recent reports suggest that the government — which was allied to the FDLR during the 1998-2002 war — might still be providing support to this group through the Mai Mai, who have traditionally been its allies. It has denied this, as has Monuc, but doubts remain and, as long as they do, relations with neighbouring Rwanda will remain on edge.