« Previous | Main | Next »

In Congo, Keeping Peace on the Verge of War

October 30, 2008 3:21 PM

DANA HUGHES is the ABC News Digital Reporter for Africa, based in Nairobi

When I first arrived in Nairobi a year ago, I met with several NGOs and humanitarian organizations, many of them based here. I remember speaking with one U.N. official and asking him, “What’s the story everyone is missing? Where’s the most serious crisis in East Africa?” I expected him to say Somalia or Darfur, but instead he said, “Eastern Congo. It keeps me up at night.” He said the situation was already extremely tenuous -- more than 1 million displaced people, routine rape as a weapon of war, child soldiers, rivaling rebel groups -- but that it very well could get worse and blow up.

Reports coming out of Eastern Congo seem to confirm his fear. The United Nations estimates that more than 30,000 people have fled their homes in the last few days as the Tutsi rebel group continues to advance and “capture” villages. New refugees are overflowing camps already home to hundreds of thousands of refugees displaced by the ongoing conflict. Many humanitarian agencies, including the World Food Program, have had to suspend much of their activities – leaving some of the most vulnerable civilians without food or aid. A spokeswoman for Doctors Without Borders told me that the organization continues to work in the rebel-controlled areas, although the situation changes “hour by hour.” Humanitarian organizations are used to the continuous low-level violence and tension in the region, but the latest round seems on the verge of all-out civil war.

War is nothing new to the DRC; it took nearly 40 years before the country held its first democratic elections. As the largest country in Africa, roughly the size of Western Europe, the DRC borders the countries that make up Southern Africa, West Africa and East Africa and it often gets caught up in regional wars. The situation in Eastern Congo is the latest example. Today’s conflict can be traced to 1994, as a direct result of the genocidal war in Rwanda. Many of the Hutu perpetrators of the genocide fled across the border to Eastern Congo and formed a militia group. The rebels advancing today are led by Gen. Laurent Nkunda, a Congolese Tutsi who says he is protecting the minority Tutsi community in Eastern Congo from the Hutu milita. Nkunda signed a peace agreement in January, but now says his rebels will continue to fight until the Hutu militia disarms. Throw in an under-paid, rogue military force that both the Hutu and the Tutsi militias accuse of conspiring with the other, and you have a situation where it’s the civilians paying the price.

The United Nations estimates that there are currently more than 1 million people who are displaced. Eastern Congo is also synonymous with mass rape as a weapon of war. In January the International Rescue Committee published a study estimating that from 1998-2003, 5.4 million civilians had died because of the conflict, many from starvation and disease, as well as violence. The study pointed out that the ongoing conflict has had more fatalities than World War II. But the United Nations, along with international humanitarian organizations, is trying to help create peace in the region. There are 17,000 U.N. peacekeepers in the DRC, the largest number in the world, mostly concentrated in the east. But in this recent wave of violence, for the first time, MONUC, the U.N. mission in Congo, has found itself under attack. Rebels fired on a peacekeeping convoy last weekend, causing the peacekeeping force to resort to military action. The peacekeeping force had to disperse helicopter gun ships to fire on rebel areas in order to keep them from advancing into Goma, the provincial capital of Eastern Congo, home to around 1 million people.

Michael Bonnardeaux, the spokesman for MONUC, told me that the United Nations “has always made it clear that we will use all available means at our disposal to protect urban centers.” But even within Goma, there were violent demonstrations at MONUC compounds with civilians frustrated at what they view is a lack of protection by the peacekeepers from the rebels. For its part the United Nations says it’s completely overwhelmed, peacekeeping missions are there to keep the peace, it’s why they don’t go into a region until after a war is more or less over. But as the situation in Eastern Congo continues to deteriorate, U.N. officials, humanitarian organizations and world leaders may be forced to face the question once again of what to do when there’s no peace to keep?

Read more blogs by Dana Hughes

October 30, 2008 in Dana Hughes | Permalink | User Comments (4)

User Comments

Posted by: jan | Oct 31, 2008 1:18:06 PM

Posted by: ken | Nov 1, 2008 12:42:03 AM

Posted by: Gloria | Nov 2, 2008 1:32:20 PM

Posted by: Jacqui | Nov 2, 2008 9:02:26 PM

Post a comment

Name:

Email Address:

URL:

Remember personal info?

Comments: