Congo in Harlem 6: Special Panel Discussion on DRC's 2016 Elections .

Kambale Musavuli, Alain Seckler, Jason Stearns and I discussing the Democratic Republic of Congo's looming 2016 elections.

New report by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on the Democratic Republic of Congo

The new report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights on the Democratic Republic of the Congo in important, if troubling, reading. It says, in part:

The High Commissioner notes that the situation of human rights had significantly deteriorated since her previous report to the Council, especially in the eastern part of the country, where...an important increase in the number of human rights violations and serious violations of international humanitarian law that could amount to war crimes, committed by national security and defence forces, as well as by foreign and national armed groups. The increase in gross human rights violations during the period under review can be attributed to various armed groups, including Mouvement du 23 mars (M23), and to the security and defence forces, in relation to M23 activities. M23 combatants were indeed responsible for gross human rights violations and serious violations of international humanitarian law, including summary executions, rape and child recruitment. Other armed groups, which took advantage of the security vacuum that followed the redeployment of FARDC units to combat M23, since May 2012, were also responsible for gross human rights violations and serious violations of international humanitarian law. Such groups have sought to extend their influence and control over areas rich in natural resources in the eastern part of the country, committing attacks against civilians, often on ethnic grounds. In addition, in the context of operations against M23, members of the Congolese defence and security forces allegedly committed gross human rights violations and serious violations of international humanitarian law...

The full report can be read here.

2012: A Reporter's Notebook of the Year Gone By

This past year, my attention was sharply focused on two places near and dear to my heart: the Caribbean nation of Haiti and the Great Lakes region of Central Africa. Though I was not as prolific in churning out articles as I have been in the past, with my attention largely focused on completing my forthcoming book on the Democratic Republic of Congo and commencing work on a new book looking at Northern Mexico, I hope that this oeuvre will nevertheless be useful for those of you trying to make sense of this often-tangled world we live in.

With hopes for peace, both personal and geopolitical, for all in 2013.  

All best, 

MD


Letter from Haiti for the Huffington Post (28 November 2012)

The Fall of Goma for the Huffington Post (20 November 2012)

Oil discovery ignites political tensions in Uganda for fDi Intelligence (11 April 2012)    

After Charles Taylor, Justice for Haiti? for the Huffington Post (26 April 2012) 

How Invisible Children's Kony 2012 Will Hurt - And How You Can Help - Central Africa for the Huffington Post (9 March 2012)

The Problem with Invisible Children's "Kony 2012" for Huffington Post (7 March 2012)

North Kivu’s False Peace for African Arguments (29 February 2012) 

In northern Uganda, a difficult peace for Le Monde diplomatique (26 February 2012)

The Fall of Goma

The Fall of Goma 

By Michael Deibert

The Huffington Post 

(First published here)

When the provincial capital of Goma in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo fell to rebel forces today, the rapidity of the rebel advance was shocking, but the fait accompli failure of both Congo's armed forces and the country's United Nations mission was not.

As 2012 dawned, the international community and the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Congo - known by its acronym, MONUSCO (formerly MONUC) - were hailing the peace and stability that a 2009 deal with the Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple (CNDP) rebel group had supposedly brought to the eastern part of this vast country.

Formed by renegade general Laurent Nkunda, the CNDP's ostensible goal was the protection of Congo's Tustsi ethnic group and the defeat of the Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda (FDLR), the main Hutu-led military opposition to the Tutsi-led government of President Paul Kagame in Rwanda. The FDLR, though a severely degraded force from what it once was, has its roots in Rwanda's 1994 genocide when several hundred thousand Tutsis and Hutu moderates were slaughtered by extremist Hutu supremacist elements.

Succored by Rwanda, Nkunda nevertheless proved himself to be a headstrong and unreliable negotiating partner with the regional powers and with the government of Congo's president, Joseph Kabila, who Nkunda openly talked about toppling. Kabila's father, Laurent Kabila, had seized power with Rwandan help in 1997 only to then go to war with his former patrons and die by an assassin's bullet a little over three years later.

As a result of his recalcitrance, Nkunda was jettisoned and replaced at the negotiating table by another CNDP leader, Bosco Ntaganda, who had been indicted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague in January 2006 on three counts of war crimes allegedly committed while he was helping to command another rebel group in Congo's Ituri region, a time during which he earned the sobriquet "the Terminator."

The deal struck between the Kabila government and Ntaganda's CNDP in March 2009 saw the rebels become a registered political party and their forces integrated within the official armed forces, the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC). Bosco Ntaganda became an important powerbroker in the province of North Kivu, the Rwanda and Uganda-border region of which Goma is the capital.

Far from a road to Damascus moment, the agreement was rather a modus vivendi by cunning, ruthless political operators.

Kabila, reelected in a highly controversial 2011 ballot, has fashioned a government that is in many ways a younger, more sophisticated version of his father's. Relying on a narrow circle of trusted individuals and a network of international alliances, Kabila's power is built on a patronage base rather than a political base. This model was dealt a serious blow when one of Kabila's most trusted advisors, Augustin Katumba Mwanke, a man who often handled Kabila's most delicate financial and political transactions, was was killed in a plane crash this past February.

Across the border, Rwandan President Paul Kagame, for so long a darling of western donors and development workers, has for many years presided over a tight-lidded dictatorship where government critics meet either death (opposition politician Andre Kagwa Rwisereka, killed in Rwanda in July 2011), exile (former general Kayumba Nyamwasa, wounded in a shooting in South Africa in June 2010) or both (Inyenyeri News editor Charles Ingabire, shot dead by an unknown gunman in Kampala last December).

[Along with other neighbors who have seen fit to intervene in Congo over the years, Rwanda has been happy to help itself to large amounts of the Congo's extensive mineral wealth, as documented in a 2001 United Nations report]

As a number of people (myself included) warned at the time, the peace deal as implemented was a marriage of convenience destined for a nasty divorce. Unfortunately, the international community itself gave an additional seal of approval when, against the advice of their own Office of Legal Affairs, UN forces backed Congo's army as the latter launched Operation Kimia II ("Quiet" in Swahili) in March 2009 against the FDLR.

Despite the common knowledge that Ntaganda - a wanted accused war criminal - was acting a de facto deputy commander for Congolese forces during Kimia II, MONUC's command hid behind transparently false Congolese government assurances that Ntaganda was not involved.

According to one investigation, between January and September 2009 more than 1,400 civilians were slain in the provinces of North and South Kivu, at least 701 by the FDLR and the rest by Congolese and Rwandan government-allied forces. Over the same time period in the same provinces, over 7,500 women and girls were raped and over 900,000 people forced to flee their homes.

Despite these excesses, the UN signed a Joint Operational Directive with Congo's army as it launched yet another operation against the FDLR, this one dubbed Amani Leo ("Peace Today"), during January 2010. Immaculée Birhaheka of the Promotion et Appui Aux Initiatives Feminines (Promotion and Support for Women's Initiatives) pleaded that "the name of the military operation has changed, but the situation remains the same: Women are still being killed, maimed, abused like animals."

They would have been wise not to look to the UN for help. Though the UN peacekeeping mission in Congo is the largest in the world at nearly 17,000 military personnel, it is still cartoonishly small for a country the size of Western Europe.

Nor has the mission shown any great appetite for adhering to its mandate, which charges it with working "to ensure the protection of civilians, including humanitarian personnel, under imminent threat of physical violence."

In May 2002, when dissident soldiers mutinied against their commanders in the central city of Kisangani, MONUC troops did almost nothing as those commanders (including Laurent Nkunda) oversaw the killing of at least 80 civilians and a ghastly bout of rape. Two years later, in the city of Bukavu, Nukunda was again present as a series of ethnically-based attacks in and around the city saw looting, raping and murder take place as MONUC did little to aid common citizens. In November 2008, CNDP forces led by Bosco Ntaganda killed at least 150 people in the town of Kiwanja despite the fact that 100 UN peacekeepers were stationed less than a mile away.

Once part of the official apparatus in North Kivu, as pressure grew (as it inevitably would) on Ntaganda to break the parallel chains of command within the FARDC-integrated CNDP units, and with chorus of calls demanding his arrest, the warlord finally decided that the pressure was too much.

By early April of this year, former CNDP members began to desert their posts in North Kivu and fighting broke out around the province. By May, the deserters had named their group the Mouvement du 23 mars, or M23, a reference to the date of the 2009 peace accords between the CNDP and the Kabila government. They operated, as they always had, with strong Rwandan backing.

In July, saying that the Obama administration had "decided it can no longer provide foreign military financing appropriated in the current fiscal year to Rwanda," the United States announced - for the first time since 1994 - that it was suspending military aid to the Kagame regime, citing "evidence that Rwanda is implicated in the provision of support to Congolese rebel groups, including M23." That same month, the Netherlands announced that it was suspending five million euros ($6.2 million) in aid to Rwanda, a decision it said was directly linked Kigali's support of M23. The following day, the British government also announced the freezing of £16 million of aid.

[The recent decision of the UK's international development secretary, Andrew Mitchell, to restore aid to Rwanda on his last day on the job resulted in a storm of controversy and a pledge by his successor that she would gather evidence in terms of Rwanda's linkage with M23 before deciding on any new aid.]

But today, with almost-certain Rwandan (and Ugandan) backing and with, by all accounts, barely token opposition from UN forces stationed there, the M23 seized Goma. And tonight, as the United Nations and the international community stand by, the people of Congo are once again at the mercy of those who have tormented them in the past.

The approach of the international community thus far, both in exercising its mandate to protect civilian lives in Congo and in holding the outside supporters of Congo's rebel groups to task, has thus far proved woefully insufficient.

As word of Goma's fall spread throughout Congo, reaction was immediate. Buildings belonging to Kabila's political party - with many Congolese accusing the president of caving in to the Rwandans - were burned in the cities of Kisangani and Bunia, and UN buildings were pelted by stones in the latter town.

The fall of Goma may prove a defining moment, for both the Congolese government and for the gulf between the actions and the words of the international community in the Democratic Republic of Congo.


Michael Deibert's forthcoming book, Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair, will be published by Zed Books in cooperation with the Royal African Society, the International African Institute and the Social Science Research Council.

Organizations You Can Support in Central Africa

Given my two recent articles on the discussion surrounding the American organization Invisible Children and their Joseph Kony campaign (which can be read here and here), several people have written to me to ask me what organizations in Central Africa I do recommend supporting. A brief but by no means complete list, arranged alphabetically, would include the following.

Africa Institute for Energy Governance

This Kampala-based organization works for an environment where energy resources are equitably used for social and economic development, and the Government of Uganda uses such resources for the benefit of the country's citizens.

Artfully AWARE

An NGO that has been working in Uganda since 2008 and whose motto is "Connect, Collaborate, Change," Artfully AWARE connects communities and collaborates with local actors through advocacy events and innovative community development projects mostly centered around the arts. The organization has recently put out a wonderful new book, The Story of the Acholi: A Village Tale from Uganda, which can be purchased here, and which helps to show the beauty and richness of Acholi life and culture, with lovely drawings and fable-like text from people in and around Gulu.

Human Rights Focus (HURIFO)

Since its inception in 1994, Gulu-based HURIFO has championed the cause of human rights in the conflict-affected area of Northern Uganda,

Pole Institute

The Pole Institute, based in Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo's North Kivu province, serves as a meeting ground for reflection and discussion about issues confronting the Great Lakes Region of Africa.

Voix des Sans-Voix

Kinshasa-based Voix des Sans-Voix (Voice of the Voiceless) is the Democratic Republic of Congo's premier human rights organization.

Water Governance Institute

As it's name suggests, the Kampala-based Water Governance Institute works to improve the access to and quality of water for all Ugandans.

Apologies to any groups that I may have forgotten, but I hope that this gives readers a good base for exploring groups demonstrating genuine solidarity with the people of Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

North Kivu’s False Peace

North Kivu’s False Peace

By Michael Deibert

February 29, 2012

African Arguments

(Read the original here)

At first glance today, things in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s eastern North Kivu province seem far calmer than in years past.

As recently as 2008, a rebel group, the Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple (CNDP) under the command of renegade general Laurent Nkunda, controlled sizable swaths of the territory, especially around the area of Masisi in North Kivu’s south-eastern corner.

Nkunda, a Congolese Tutsi from North Kivu’s Rutshuru territory and a former commander in the Rwanda-backed Goma faction of the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie (RCD) rebel group, seemed poised to attack the provincial capital of Goma at any time.

Travelling much beyond the town of Sake, 25 km to Goma’s northwest, was a complicated endeavour, as the CNDP had battled the forces of Congo’s president Joseph Kabila fiercely for Sake in November 2006 before withdrawing in defeat. At the time, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimated that some 800,000 people had been displaced by fighting in the province.

Since those dark days, much has changed in eastern North Kivu.

In January 2009, Rwanda’s government, long believed to be the CNDP’s key backer in its vying for regional advantage, announced that they had arrested Nkunda on Rwandan territory. This event took place shortly after the CNDP had begun to splinter, with one high-ranking member, Bosco Ntaganda, advocating dialogue and détente with the Kabila government.

Since then, a bitter pill scenario has seen Kabila, in power in Congo since the 2001 assassination of his father, Laurent Kabila, cede influence and control of much of the eastern part of the vast, mineral-rich country to Rwanda and its proxies, with the Rwandan army now allowed to enter Congolese territory in hot pursuit of the Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda (FDLR), the main Hutu-led military opposition to Rwanda’s Tutsi-led government. The FDLR has its roots in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide when nearly 1 million Tutsis and Hutu moderates were slaughtered by extremist Hutu supremacist elements.

The CNDP, for its part, has now become a registered political party and has seen its forces integrated with the official armed forces, the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC), and its chieftain, Bosco Ntaganda, has become an important powerbroker in Goma.

All is not as it appears, however.

Beyond simple integration, the Congolese army in eastern Congo is now dominated by the CNDP, much to the chagrin of other armed groups such as the government’s erstwhile allies in the Patriotes Resistants Congolais (PARECO) – a loose umbrella of paramilitary organizations who also have been gradually entering the official security forces.

A significant breakaway movement, the Alliance des Patriotes pour un Congo Libre et Souverain (APCLS) led by ‘General’ Janvier Buingo Karairi and mostly consisting of members of the Hunde ethnic group, broke off from the larger PARECO configuration in April 2008, and has thus far refused integration.

During Congo’s deeply-flawed general elections last year, which saw Kabila returned to office ahead of his main rival, long-time opposition figure Étienne Tshisekedi, Human Rights Watch recounted how in some villages in Masisi, voters were compelled by the presence of former CNDP rebels at polling stations to vote for Kabila and CNDP candidate Bahati Ibatunganya.

In the run-up to last November’s vote, Fabrice Mumpfiritsa, a well-known Hunde singer, was kidnapped in Goma and found days later, injured but alive. Formerly a Kabila partisan, Mumpfiritsa had grown disenchanted with the president and began vocally supporting Kabila’s local opposition.

Visiting North Kivu again this month, it soon became apparent to me that, after being in office for over a decade, Kabila, though once having strong support in the east, has brought precious little development to this part of Congo.

An entrepreneur in Goma with extensive contacts within both the CNDP and the government told me that “the state has a symbolic presence in North Kivu today, nothing more.” A high-ranking official in an international organization that has long had a presence in the province referred to the system of governance that has been put into place as being “like a mafia…Whoever doesn’t side with (the CNDP), doesn’t agree or says something in opposition will be intimidated, or eventually put under house arrest or killed.”

It would have been hard for the Congolese and Rwandan governments to have found a more poisonous and tainted proxy than Bosco Ntaganda.

In January 2006, Ntaganda was indicted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for three counts of war crimes that allegedly occurred while he was helping to command the Forces Patriotiques pour la Libération du Congo (FPLC) in Congo’s Ituri region during the early part of the last decade, a time during which he earned the sobriquet “the Terminator.”

The FPLC itself grew out of the Union des Patriotes Congolais (UPC), an armed group that claimed to champion the cause of the pastoralist Hema ethnic group against that of the agriculturalist Lendu, the very kind of apocalyptic ethnic politics that Ntaganda would also engage in with the CNDP in North Kivu.

The fighting in Ituri killed an estimated 60,000 people.

In a letter from the Group of Experts on Congo to the United Nations Security Council dated 18 October 2011, the group found that since his reintegration into the Congolese army, Ntaganda has continued to collaborate “with East African regional networks of dealers selling both real and counterfeit gold to international buyers.”

Troublingly, and as if to underline its occupant’s ultimate fealty to Kigali, Ntaganda’s Goma residence is situated on a lane that crosses directly over a neutral zone to Gisenyi, Rwanda, just across the border. According to a December 2011 United Nations Security Council report, Ntaganda crossed into Rwanda at least twice, in March and September of 2011, despite an ostensible travel ban imposed on him.

As before, the region’s politics remain nothing if not maddeningly complex and unsuited to the international community’s often one-size-fits-all approach to peace-building.

Surrounding Congo, in neighbouring Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni, who in 1986 told his country that “the problem of Africa in general and Uganda in particular is not the people but leaders who want to overstay in power” now enters his 27th year as the country’s president, having secured his current term through particularly controversial elections in February 2011.

Over the last year, several large scale protests against alleged political corruption and economic mismanagement have occurred in Uganda’s capital, Kampala, many aligned with the Forum for Democratic Change led by Kizza Besigye, a doctor and former soldier as well as a former Museveni ally turned critic.

In Rwanda, President Paul Kagame has solidified a tight-lidded dictatorship over the country based upon what the French academic Gérard Prunier has characterized as “passive acceptance of undivided Tutsi power over an obedient Hutu mass.” Government critics meet either death, (opposition politician Andre Kagwa Rwisereka, killed in Rwanda in July 2011), exile (former general Kayumba Nyamwasa, wounded in a shooting in South Africa in June 2010) or both (Inyenyeri News editor Charles Ingabire, shot dead in Kampala last December).

Throughout North Kivu itself, things remain tense, and the region’s civilian population continues to be at risk.

This month, around Masisi alone I spoke to residents of displaced person camps such as Kalinga (population 4,551), Bihito (5,742) and Bukombo (3,338), some of whom have been living in the most squalid of conditions for up to five years. Across the border in Kisoro, Uganda, I found around 2,000 refugees who had fled fighting between the FDLR and militia elements in Rutshuru camped in the shadow of Mount Muhabura. It is a situation replicated in hundreds of registered and unregistered displaced persons settlements throughout the province.

In the township of Bisie in North Kivu’s Walikale territory – which remains a stronghold of the FDLR – an illegal mine producing cassiterite, which is eventually turned into tin, has been giving up its bounty to an ever-shifting array of armed groups for a number of years. In villages and displaced persons camps such as those in Masisi, a sense of deep resentment against both the broken promises and lack of development offered by the Kabila government, and what some residents see as the growing Rwandanization of eastern Congo, continues to fester. Armed groups, particularly those flowing from former PARECO elements, continue to form, break apart and re-form in a dizzying array of alliances that the international community, patting itself on the back for its “success” in eastern Congo, seems ill placed to address should the tension once again flare into large-scale open violence.

By turning the other way as North Kivu in general and Goma in particular have become, with Kigali’s connivance, a virtual fiefdom of Bosco Ntaganda’s CNDP, the international community, including the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Congo (known by its acronym, MONUSCO), are not guaranteeing peace in North Kivu. They are in fact fanning the embers for the potential eruption of a new conflict in the province.

The belief that the more territory held by the Kabila government’s FARDC and CNDP allies equals more stability in the long-term may very well prove to be sadly mistaken, and MONUSCO is currently in danger of being perceived as dangerously partisan to a government and military of questionable popular legitimacy.

By ceding an axis of influence in the east to Rwanda, Kabila may have indeed rid himself of the immediate problem of the CNDP armed insurgency, but the group’s subtle takeover of the province has helped to plant the seeds for enmities and resentment that could lead to an even greater crisis in the future.

It is important that all international actors speak out against the abuses being committed with official sanction in North Kivu today, and to hold the state actors behind them, whether they be in Kinshasa or Kigali, accountable for the crimes of those who act in their name. Without such accountability, lasting peace in North Kivu would seem to remain a distant dream.

Michael Deibert is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies at Coventry University and the author of the forthcoming Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair (Zed Books).

Thoughts on leaving Africa

Photo © Michael Deibert

I write now as I prepare to depart Kampala, Uganda in a few hours for my trip back to the United States. I traveled across Uganda yesterday during an 11 hour bus journey after interviewing several of the circa 2,000 refugees camped out in Kisoro, Uganda, who have fled fighting between the Forces démocratiques de libération du Rwanda (FDLR) and Mai Mai militias in the Rutshuru territory of Congo's North Kivu province.

While in North Kivu, I spoke to many other displaced people in the sprawling camps throughout Masisi territory such as Bihito, Kilimani and Kalinga, and discovered the worrisome false peace that has descended on the province since the 2009 détente between the Congrès national pour la défense du peuple (CNDP) rebel group (now led by accused war criminal Bosco Ntaganda) and the government of Congo's president, Joseph Kabila. I was also able to witness first-hand the tight-lid military dictatorship that currently rules Rwanda even as its president, who is directly responsible for helping to cause so much suffering in Congo, continues to be fêted abroad.

As during my previous visits to Congo, I found so many stories to be told there, so many people who wanted to have their fate be known, not just as a footnote to the larger geopolitical struggles of the Great Lakes Region, but as the living, breathing testimony of those swept up by forces they did not seek out and which they could not control.

It is in the measure that it gives voice to the people such as those pictured above - the residents' council of Kalinga Camp - that this work I do is worth anything. And it is in gratitude for being able to hear and record their stories that I again thank my generous Kickstarter backers and the International Peace Research Association for their support of my upcoming book, Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair (Zed Books). This research couldn't have been done without you.

Asante sana.

Children Burned to Death by Rwandan Hutu Militia in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo

The FDLR came and circled my house. When we tried to leave, they said, “You can’t leave or we’ll kill you.” I was able to move out a bit and get some distance from the house, but my three young boys were still inside, sleeping on a single bed. Then I saw the FDLR combatants light a fire directly on my house and my three boys burned to death.

-Father of three young boys (ages 3, 4, and 6) burned to death in their home:

According to Human Rights Watch, on the night of April 17, 2009, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR, a Rwandan Hutu militia) attacked Luofu and Kasiki villages in the southern Lubero territory of North Kivu province in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. As a result of the attack at least seven civilians, including five young children, were killed, the latter burned to death in their homes.

Though the FDLR had warned earlier that Luofu would be attacked, according the Human Rights Watch, neither the Mission de l'Organisation des Nations Unies en République démocratique du Congo (MONUC) nor the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC) took any precautionary measures to protect civilians in case the threat was carried out.

Photos and first-hand accounts of the attack can be read here.

A Plea from Local Organizations and Civil Society in North Kivu, Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo

A Plea from Local Organizations and Civil Society in North Kivu, Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, to the United Nations Security Council and Other International Leaders

Goma, November 18, 2008

Dear Excellencies,

As the representatives of Congolese non-governmental organizations in North Kivu, we come before your authority to request an immediate reinforcement of peacekeeping forces for the Democratic Republic of Congo, reinforcements that would be capable of protecting us. This would help to prevent the atrocities that continue to be committed against civilians on an ever greater scale here in North Kivu, on the border of Rwanda and Uganda.

This letter presents a sad, cynical, tragic and very frustrating situation, which reveals the misery in which the population of North Kivu are immersed. We are anxious, afraid and utterly traumatised by the constant insecurity in which we live. We don’t know which saint to pray to; we are condemned to death by all this violence and displacement. We have been abandoned. Who will protect us? Who will help us? The United Nations says that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights, but our dignity and our rights are violated every day with hardly a cry of protest. Do we not deserve protection? Are we not equal to others?

Since August 28, fighting has intensified in many areas, causing deaths, rapes, lootings, forced recruitment and further displacements of civilian populations. The population has thus been immersed in unspeakable suffering. In the last few days, fighting has drawn closer to large populated areas, such as the town of Goma. Fighting has also invaded and torn apart the region of Rutshuru, particularly in the town of Kiwanja, where hundreds of civilian deaths have now been recorded.

The suffering has gone on too long for the population of North Kivu. It is time for the government and the international community to protect the civilians who have fallen victim to the atrocities of the conflict.

We are aware that during several high-level visits to eastern Congo this year, you and your representatives heard many firsthand testimonies which could not have left you indifferent to the tragedy facing the population of our region of the DRC.

The various diplomatic and political meetings held over the last few weeks have demonstrated your commitment to finding an immediate and sustainable solution that would establish peace in North Kivu and thus bring stability to the Great Lakes region. Among the most remarkable developments, we note Rwanda’s direct involvement in the search for a sustainable solution to the crisis.

While we wish to thank you for these supportive visits and for your concerns about the tragedy here in eastern Congo, we also urge you to move from theory to practice, by transforming your kind speeches and messages into action. Diplomacy always takes time, and we understand this, but unfortunately we do not have time. The population of North Kivu is at risk now; with each day that passes, more and more people die.

For more than three decades, eastern Congo has been at war, and those who suffer most are civilians, especially women and children. There have been many attempts to resolve the crisis in the east, but none have succeeded. The most recent initiative to date was the Goma Peace Agreement (the Act of Engagement], signed by all belligerents in January 2008. But today this is no longer respected. Instead of peace, we are witnessing the continuation and exacerbation of the conflict.

In the past several days, the region of Rutshuru has been in the grip of hostilities. The town of Kiwanja has been taken and re-taken by the CNDP, and the population is paying the price. We are witnessing tragedies on a scale never experienced before in history, in which civilian populations are being summarily executed by bullets or blows from machetes, knives, hoes and spears. Corpses line the streets of the city and the odour of decomposing bodies greets passers-by. Indeed, the number of corpses already found is not conclusive, as searches continue, and, according to the latest reports, even more dead bodies are locked inside houses or thrown down latrines.

As the conquering army of Laurent Nkunda gradually takes new areas, the Congolese army takes flight. As they flee, they end up killing, pillaging, raping and stealing, leaving chaos and total disorder in their wake. This is the case in Goma, where more than 20 civilians were killed, several women were raped, and valuable goods were stolen on October 29. Since last week, the towns of Kanyabayonga, Kirumba and Kayna have been invaded in almost the same way as Goma by FARDC soldiers fleeing the fighting.

Forced recruitment has also intensified. In several areas of Rutshuru and Masisi, armed groups, the CNDP in particular, go from door to door to force young boys and adults – aged between 14 and 40 – to go to the front, without any prior military training. Last week, reports documented the recruitment by force of hundreds of civilians by the CNDP, especially in Kitchanga, Kiwanja, Rutshuru and Rubare.

In all of these cases, we, the civilian population, have been held hostage and caught between many lines of fire.

Women are among the first victims. Sexual violence has become dramatically worse since the end of August, as military forces and armed groups have reduced women to a battlefield.

Faced with a sense of abandonment, the people’s reaction has become one of self-defence. We do not know the limits of this. This has been the case of Mai Mai in Kiwanja and in the Kanyabayonga area.

MONUC has fallen short of fulfilling its mandate to protect civilians, openly and publicly, but no concrete action has been taken. Powerless, MONUC witnesses all the atrocities committed by the armed forces and groups. At times, its interventions are delayed, if not ineffective. We can therefore no longer continue to rely on MONUC to protect us. The case of Kiwanja, where civilians are massacred daily near the MONUC base, is a striking example.

We ask you urgently to assist us at this most difficult time. It is absolutely clear to everyone that we need reinforcements of troops capable of protecting civilians effectively and efficiently, with the means to deal with any kind of attacks. This must be done quickly.

We therefore urge you to:

• Immediately send EU troops which can deploy quickly to provide protection and security for civilians as you did for our brothers and sisters in Bunia, Ituri, in June 2003.
• Increase the number of troops for MONUC and provide them with a mandate that allows them to sufficiently protect civilians and to do so as their top priority.

Your Excellencies, you must save our lives now; otherwise it will be too late.

Yours sincerely,

The representatives of 44 Congolese NGOs in North Kivu:

1. Action de Promotion et d'Assistance pour l'Amélioration du Niveau des Vies des Populations (APANIVIP)
2. Action Paysanne pour la Reconstruction et le Développement Communautaire Intégral (APREDECI)
3. Action pour la Promotion de la Participation Citoyenne – Nord Kivu (APPC/NK)
4. Action pour la Promotion et la Défense des Droits des Personnes Défavorisées (APRODEPED)
5. Action Sociale pour la Paix et le Développement (ASPD)
6. Africa Justice Peace and Development (AJPD)
7. Blessed Aid
8. Bureau d’Information, Formation, Etude et Recherche en Développement (BIFERD)
9. CADRE
10. Campagne Pour la Paix (CPP)
11. Centre d’Observation des Droits de l’Homme et d’Assistance Sociale (CODHAS)
12. Centre de Recherche sur l'Environnement, la Démocratie et les Droits de l'Homme (CADERCO)
13. Centre de Recherche sur l'Environnement, la Démocratie et les Droits de l'Homme (CREDDHO)
14. Centre pour la Paix et les Droits de l’Homme – Peace and Human Rights Center (CPDH-PHRC)
15. CEREBA/RDC
16. Change Agents Peace Program (CAPP)
17. Coalition pour mettre fin a l'utilisation d'enfants soldats en RDC /Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers in DRC
18. CODHOP
19. Collectif des Associations des Femmes Pour le Développement (CAFED)
20. Collectif des ONG de Droits de l'Homme (CODHO)
21. Collectif des Organisations des Jeunes Solidaires du Congo (COJESKI)/ Nord Kivu
22. Conseil Régional des Organisations Non Gouvernementales de Développement (CRONGD)
23. COPADI
24. Encadrement des Femmes Indigènes et des Ménages Vulnérables (EFIM)
25. GAMAC
26. Group d'Etudes et d'Actions Pour un Développement Bien Défini (GEAD)
27. Human Dignity in the World (HDW)
28. Platform des Femmes du Nord Kivu pour un Développement Endogène (PFNDE)
29. Programme de Lutte Contre l’Extrême Pauvreté et la Misère (PAMI)
30. Promotion de la Démocratie et Protection des Droits Humains (PDH)
31. Promotion et Appui aux Initiatives Féminines (PAIF)
32. Réseau Congolais d’Action sur les Armes Légères et le Petit Calibre (RECAAL)
33. Réseau d’Organisations des Droits Humains, d’Education Civique et de Paix (RODHECIP)
34. Réseau Femme et Développement (REFED)
35. Réseau Provincial des ONG de Droits de l'Homme (REPRODHOC)/Nord Kivu
36. SAMS
37. Société civile Territoire de Rutshuru
38. Solidarité pour la Promotion sociale et la Paix (SOPROP)
39. SOS/Grands-Lacs
40. Syndicat des Associations Féminines pour un Développement Intégral (SAFEDI)
41. Synergie des femmes pour les victimes des violences sexuelles (SFVS)
42. Synergie des ONG locales pour les Urgences Humanitaires dans le territoire de Rutshuru
43. UPADERI
44. Villages Cobaye (VICO)

Congo: Between Hope and Despair

Congo: Between Hope and Despair

By Michael Deibert

(The following the complete text of my article on the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo that appeared in the Summer 2008 edition of the World Policy Journal.)

RUTSHURU, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO—In the middle of a schoolyard in this war-torn corner of eastern Congo, a village of fragile tarpaulin has sprung up amid the weed-choked gravel. Surrounded by children in ragged clothing, Bonaparte Kananzo, a farmer, steps forward to explain what has brought the local population, now refugees in their own country, to this pass.

“We arrived here at the beginning of February,” explains Kananzo, who says that some 1,000-plus villagers trekked here through the lush mountains of North Kivu province fleeing fighting between forces loyal to the government of Congo’s president, Joseph Kabila, and the army of renegade general Laurent Nkunda. An ethnic Tutsi, Nkunda leads the Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple (National Congress for the Defence of the People, CNDP), a politico-military organization.

“The war in Kivu brought a lot of insecurity to our town, a lot of violence against women and other things,” says Kananzo. “People are afraid to return home.”

It has been two years since the international community, led by the United States and the European Union, spent tens of millions of dollars organizing the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (DRC) first democratic elections in 40 years, which solidified Joseph Kabila’s rule and marked the end of the main phase of Congo’s civil war. The war was a conflict which, according to a report released in January by the International Rescue Committee relief organization, killed an estimated 5.4 million people between August 1998 and April 2007— many from health-related concerns caused by the social and economic disruption of the ongoing conflict. Since the formal end of Congo’s 1998–2002 civil war, about 2.1 million have died from similar causes, the report said, with, at present, some 45,000 dying monthly.

As if to underline the gravity of Kananzo’s words—that intense combat and attendant atrocities, including widespread rape and the forced recruitment of child soldiers, have succeeded in emptying whole villages—the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that, since 2003, some 800,000 people have been displaced by fighting in North Kivu out of a population of 4.2 million, or roughly one in five individuals.

In addition to the CNDP and Congolese government forces, two other armed groups operate and frequently clash in the region: the government’s local paramilitary allies such as the Patriotes Résistants Congolais (Congolese Resistance Patriots, PARECO), and the Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda (Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, FDLR)—a group comprised mainly of ethnic Hutus with its roots in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide.

A Century of Blood

Congo’s bloody decades must be seen in the broader context of Central Africa’s regional conflicts that have left vast territories traumatized and victimized by rebel forces that sweep across borders, often with the complicity of governments that have profited from the terror and violence.

Congo—a nation as vast as Western Europe and dotted with rich reserves of cobalt, coltan, copper, diamonds, and gold —is a case study in human avarice, vanity, and misrule. With its western reaches comprising part of an African empire for centuries, by 1877, Congo was occupied by the forces of Belgium’s King Leopold II.

As brutal a tyrant as Africa has ever seen, Leopold, though cloaking his presence in the guise of a civilizing mission, instituted mutilation and massacre as the rules of the day while extracting huge quantities of rubber. After Leopold reluctantly relinquished his personal administration of the territory to his nation’s civilian bureaucrats in 1908, the Congolese were governed by colonial functionaries until independence in 1960. One of the heroes of that independence, Prime Minister Patrice Émery Lumumba, was killed the following year, and General Joseph-Désiré Mobutu seized power in a military coup in 1965, ruling the nation until his ouster in 1997.

Mobutu subsequently renamed Congo as Zaire and dubbed himself Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga (“The all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake”). Mobutu’s three decades of brutal kleptocratic rule saw the country virtually disintegrate: inflation, unemployment, illiteracy, and infant mortality rates sky-rocketed, while the dictator and his cronies enriched themselves. The name “Zaire,” incidentally, died with his ouster as the nation reverted to Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Recent events have been little kinder to Congo. Following the mass slaughter of Tutsis and moderate Hutus in neighboring Rwanda by Hutu extremists there in 1994 —and because of the subsequent success of the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in wresting power from the authors of the genocide—an estimated two million refugees flooded into eastern Congo. Mixed in among them were many high-ranking figures in the brutal interahamwe Hutu militias that had taken the lead in organizing the genocidal massacres in Rwanda. Hundreds of thousands of Hutu civilian refugees feared RPF reprisals. The interahamwe, direct precursors of today’s FDLR who spread terror in vast reaches of eastern Congo, created spheres of influence in the squalid refugee camps of the provinces of North and South Kivu, from where they launched cross- border attacks against Rwanda’s new government and harassed local Congolese Tutsis known as Banyamulenge.

Mobutu, echoing the behavior of King Leopold II, had by this point ruled Congo for three decades as little more than a personal fiefdom, and allowed these génocidaires, as they were known, to go about their murderous business largely unmolested, much to the chagrin of the ruling government in Rwanda. In late 1996, using a rebellion by the Banyamulenge as cover, an umbrella group of Congolese rebel factions calling themselves the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (AFDL) launched an insurgency to oust Mobutu with extensive Rwandan and Ugandan backing. Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame and Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni were both eager to see the duplicitous Mobutu fall so that they might pursuetheir own interests in Congo—a country of vast mineral wealth.

With longtime rebel leader Laurent-Désiré Kabila at the helm, the AFDL and their foreign patrons made quick progress across Congo’s vast interior, marching westward to the capital, Kinshasa, with tacit approval provided by the administration of U.S. President Bill Clinton, still stung by its failure to do anything to halt the Rwandan genocide two years earlier.

Tens of thousands (and possibly hundreds of thousands) of Hutu refugees are
thought to have been slain in eastern and central Congo as the AFDL and Rwandan security forces pursued the interahamwe and their civilian human shields through the forests and jungles of the region. Largely painted in the West in simplistic terms of good vs. evil, the rebellion against Mobutu was anything but a simple homegrown revolution, and in fact represented the extension and continuation of a brutal policy of ethnic warfare that would soon engulf the entire country.

Kabila‘s Gunpoint Diplomacy

Once Kabila ascended to power, however, relations with his Rwandan and Ugandan backers cooled rapidly. Apparently feeling that he had solidified his political base within Congo enough to jettison his foreign supporters—a conviction that would prove a bad miscalculation—Kabila ordered all Rwandan and Ugandan military units to depart Congo in August 1998.

Following their departure, and in apparent response to this order, a rebel group calling itself the Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD), made up of Banyamulenge and other ethnic groups and operating with extensive Rwandan and Ugandan backing, took up arms in North Kivu province.

Kabila, in a dizzying about-face, en-listed the help of the very same interahamwe remnants his forces had once pursued through the region to defend his tottering government. With rebellion also erupting in the west of the country, Kabila recruited the governments of Angola, Namibia, and Zim-babwe to his side, and these forces, combined with still-loyal elements of the Congolese army, succeeded in stemming the rebel advance.

At the same time, in northern Congo, a new rebel group, the Mouvement pour la Libération du Congo (Movement for the Liberation of Congo, MLC), another partial creation of the Ugandan government, also appeared.

In August 1999, following a faltering series of peace talks, a split between the Rwandan and Ugandan factions within the RCD resulted in the two sides turning their weapons on one another in the central town of Kisangani, which lies astride the Congo River and is bitterly immortalized by V. S. Naipaul in his 1979 novel, A Bend in the River.

With the Rwandans and Ugandans squaring off against one another at various points across the country, the war expanded rapidly northward to the hitherto largely peaceful Ituri region. An amalgam of ethnic and linguistic groups like much of Congo, the dominant tribes in Ituri had traditionally been the Lendu, a group composed mainly of farmers who arrived from southern Sudan centuries before; and the Hema, a Nilotic people who came to the area more recently and devoted themselves to livestock grazing. The two had co-existed in a tense calm for many years, helping to form a tapestry that had encompassed other ethnic groups such as the Ngiti, who are sometimes associated with the Lendu, and the Gegere, sometimes linked to the Hema.

With the rest of Congo engulfed in war, the tensions between the Lendu and Hema erupted into violence in 1999, in a conflict that would last until 2007 and claim at least 60,000 lives. Rwanda and Uganda again proved only too happy tosupply men and arms to shore up local militias such as the Union des Patriotes Congolais (UPC), which claimed to be defending the interests of the Hema and Gegere, and the Forces de Résistance Patriotique d’Ituri (FRPI) and Front Nationaliste et Intégrationniste (FNI), which pretended to defend the interests of the Lendu and Ngiti people.

Growing Pains

Although the conflict in Congo continues most vigorously in the provinces of North and South Kivu in the east—a mineral-rich region of looming mountains, fertile pastures, and mist-shrouded volcanoes—the rest of the country has not been spared occasionally violent outbreaks that, while dismissed as the growing pains of a country emerging from decades of dictatorship by some, are viewed by others as signs of a deeper malaise at the heart of the international community’s involvement in the country.

In March 2008, Titinga Frédéric Pacéré, an independent United Nations expert for human rights, lamented Congo’s situation. Some 14,200 rape cases were registered in South Kivu alone between 2005 and 2007, Pacéré reported, while only 287 were taken to court. The decision of the United Nations Human Rights Council not to renew Pacéré’s mandate to continue working in the country has subsequently drawn vigorous criticism from human rights quarters.

Congolese security forces, meanwhile launched a scorched-earth campaign against the Bundu dia Kongo (“Kingdom of Kongo” in the Kikongo language, BDK) in the western province of Bas-Congo, torching and looting BDK strongholds throughout the province. The BDK, who only nominally acknowledge central state authority, have as their stated goal the reunification of Kingdom of Kongo, an empire that existed in various incarnations for nearly 500 years until the early twentieth century, encompassing swaths of what is now Angola, Gabon, the Republic of Congo (a former French colony once called Congo- Brazzaville), as well as the DRC. A June
2008 report on the violence published by the United Nations Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, said that at least 100 people were killed in the clashes and noted that “the high death toll resulted, in large part, from unwarranted or excessive use of force.”

During a trip through Bas-Congo at the height of the violence, I frequently encountered individuals dressed in Congolese police uniforms speaking Lingala, the lingua franca of Congo’s army, who attested that they had been sent from Kinshasa to contain unrest there. Lorries full of armed men ferried police equipped with Uzi submachine guns and automatic weapons with fixed bayonets through country crossroads.

“There is a cleavage between east and west when you look at the election results,” says Theodore Trefon, who directs the Contemporary History Section at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium. Trefon points to President Kabila’s roots in the eastern province of Katanga, over 1,000 miles away from the DRC’s capital of Kinshasa, and where English and Swahili are spoken, as opposed to Lingala, Kikongo, and French in the west. “This is representative of a deep- rooted issue.”

Ethnic Enigmas

The current president, Joseph Kabila, who assumed office following the assassination of his father in 2001, remains something of an enigma. Said to be shy and reserved, the 38- year-old president goes for weeks at a time without making public appearances or statements, leading Congo’s rumor mill, always active on matters of political intrigue, to engage in frequent public speculation about possible ill-health or even plots against his life. Despite his seeming elusiveness, Kabila has surprised many with his adroit hand when it comes to international relations, deftly balancing allies such as Angola and Zimbabwe while also engaging potentially hostile states like Rwanda.

He has also shown great savvy in attracting foreign investment to boost the country’s economy, battered by a decade of war and Mobutu’s 30 years of larcenous rule. Just days ahead of an important EU-Africa summit held in Lisbon, Portugal, last December, the Chinese government announced a $5 billion loan to Congo, one of many such trade projects that Kabila’s government has overseen in its two years of democratically elected rule.

However, many of these investments have themselves been controversial. The activities of the Australian company Anvil Mining, for example, have come under close scrutiny: in October 2004, at least 73 people were killed when Congolese soldiers raided the town of Kilwa, in response to a half-dozen self-declared “rebels”from an obscure group that had appeared in the village. A quartet of human right organizations, including the London-based Global Witness, have charged that Anvil, the leading copper producer in the DRC, provided logistical support to the army during the siege, including allowing use of its company cars to transport bodies of those killed in summary executions and to ferry stolen goods looted by soldiers. Investigators for the United Nations mission were later able to confirm that three of the company’s drivers were behind the wheel of Anvil Mining vehicles used by the Congolese army during the raid. Similarly, the South African company AngloGold Ashanti has been accused of fostering links to the FNI militia to ensure the security of mining operations in Ituri during that region’s armed conflict.

The UN peacekeeping force in Congo (the world’s largest at some 17,000 troops), meanwhile, has also come under criticism since its creation in 1999. UN peacekeepers were linked to a gold smuggling enterprise with local militias in Ituri in 2005, and a 2004 internal UN report concluded that sexual abuse and exploitation of women and girls by both military and civil elements of the force appeared to be “significant, widespread and ongoing.”

The State of Modern-Day Congo

Today, a largely undefended population is at the mercy of competing armed factions; natural resources are being looted by avaricious multinationals with precious little oversight; the UN mission is at once under- manned, ineffective, bloated, and unresponsive; and the nominally elected government shows a commitment to representative democracy that is, at best, questionable.

Perhaps things did not have to be this way. Cold-War era backing for the Mobutu dictatorship was followed by the callous foreign policy of a Clinton administration that uncritically lauded Rwanda’s Paul Kagame and Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni as they supported the AFDL rebels’ bloody march across Congo. More than a decade of violence has followed, shredding an already fragile kaleidoscope of diverse ethnic groups that have been compressed within the country’s largely arbitrary, European-drawn borders. Congo’s African neighbors— especially overpopulated and resource-poor Uganda and Rwanda, though also Angola and Zimbabwe—are more than eager to throw political and military support behind ethnic factions in the DRC in an attempt to carve it into spheres of influence. Foreign companies, equally keen to profit from
Congo’s resources, have legitimized some of the worst human rights abusers in the country in their desire to exploit natural resources. And the international community is also culpable: anxious to write off Congo’s 2006 elections as a success, it continues to turn a blind eye to some of the more troubling signals sent by the behavior of Congo’s young president and those around him towards forces who would oppose his government.

If Congo’s future is to be different from its tragic past, there is much to be done. But time is running out when international intervention can still turn the tide toward a true democratic system where violence is suppressed before it can threaten the way of life of millions of innocent men, women, and children. Among the ingredients of a potential antidote to the country’s ills, would certainly be a more robust, transparent, and responsive United Nations mission; greater international diplomatic engagement to insure the right of expression and dissent for Congo’s diverse opposition; and an active and sustained campaign to demand accountability of the foreign companies doing business there.

Trapped between these competing forces, the Congolese people know only that the suffering that has seemed assured to them in recent years is continuing with precious little abatement.

Peace at Last?

In Bulengo, a camp for internally displaced persons reached from North Kivu’s provincial capital of Goma via a rough ride in a 4x4 down a dirt road, a group of children are performing traditional dances and singing in the Hunde language of eastern Congo to celebrate the installation of a new committee to advocate on behalf of those living in the camp. They are watched over by adults who, unlike them, can remember a time when life held the promise of something other than deprivation and seemingly endless war.

“All of these groups have caused a massive flight of the population here,” says Chantal Lenga, 32, dressed in a distinctive brightly colored blouse, or libaya. Referring to the combatants as she watches the ceremony, she adds. “Before the war, all of these communities lived together without any problems.”

Nearby, Baguma Bashombana, a diminutive, pygmy farmer dressed in tattered clothes, who arrived in the camp with 150 members of his community, echoes her words.

“The children, the fathers, the mothers, we are all hungry,” says Bashombana. “These fighters have all been negative forces that have menaced us.”


Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press, 2005). He has reported on Africa for a variety of publications since 2007 and served as the Democratic Republic of Congo correspondent for the Inter Press Service.

Congo: Between Hope and Despair

My new article on the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Congo: Between Hope and Despair, has appeared in the Summer 2008 edition of the World Policy Journal and can found at newsstands or read in PDF format here.

A few photos from the Democratic Republic of Congo

DRC: With Rebel Leader's Indictment, a Tentative Step to Accountability

DRC: With Rebel Leader's Indictment, a Tentative Step to Accountability

By Michael Deibert

Inter Press Service

JOHANNESBURG, May 1, 2008 (IPS) - The indictment against a militia leader whose alleged abuses span the Democratic Republic of Congo's war-ravaged east was finally made public at the end of April, almost two years after being delivered under seal to war crimes prosecutors.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) alleges that Bosco Ntaganda "committed war crimes of enlistment and conscription of children under the age of 15", using the children "to participate actively in hostilities in Ituri, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, from July 2002 until December 2003."

Formerly the chief of military operations for the Union des Patriotes Congolais (Union of Congolese Patriots, UPC), Ntaganda now serves as military chief of staff of the Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple (National Congress for the Defence of the People, CNDP).

The warrant was made being made public now because it would "not endanger the witnesses of the DRC cases" at the present moment, the ICC said in a statement.

Read the full article here.

A Humanitarian Disaster Unfolds in Eastern DRC

A Humanitarian Disaster Unfolds in Eastern DRC

By Michael Deibert

Inter Press Service

KIBUMBA, Democratic Republic of Congo, Mar 1, 2007 (IPS) - In a mist-shrouded valley between the Mount Nyiragongo volcano and a pair of its dormant cousins looming in Rwanda to the east, nearly 3,000 souls wait in limbo, having fled a conflict that has succeeded in making this lush corner in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) nothing less than hell on earth for its people.

"We arrived here fleeing the war," says Gilbert Naimrwango, president of the Kibumba camp's displaced persons association and a primary school teacher in his former life, speaking amidst a sprawling collection of grass and banana-leaf huts covered with thin sheets of tarpaulin. As he speaks, he is surrounded by dozens of other residents and shoeless children, some with distended bellies and reddish hair that suggest severe malnutrition. "Life here is very complicated, and we have much difficulty finding food."

"Here we are with women and children, with little food, little water, where bandits can get us," adds Rusigariye Nubaha, a 54-year-old farmer who says he fled conflict in the district of Rutshuru, to the north, in late November.

The camp took shape in November 2007 amidst brutal fighting between army forces loyal to President Joseph Kabila, backed by the government's local paramilitary allies such as the Patriotes Résistants Congolais (Congolese Resistance Patriots, PARECO), and the army of renegade general Laurent Nkunda. An ethnic Tutsi, Nkunda leads the Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple (National Congress for the Defence of the People, CNDP), a politico-military organisation.

Read the full article here.

Note from North Kivu

We drove north from Goma along the road to Rutshuru, along a ribbon of concrete that wound towards the Ugandan border. To the west loomed a volcano that glowed red as dusk fell, still active and perilous. To the east, a pair of its now-dormant brothers rose many thousands of feet into the air, visible in Rwanda. The landscape was impossibly green and fecund, densely packed semi-tropical forest dappled with mist in its upper reaches. My traveling partner, Andrew Mcconnell, a photo journalist from Northern Ireland, and I, were ranging far in the Congolese province of North Kivu, as stunningly beautiful a place as I have ever set foot in, but which warring political foes have succeeding in turning into a hell for its people.

Refugee camps, crowded and squalid, dot the landscape, as fighting between Congolese government forces (the Forces Armées de la Republic Démocratique du Congo or FARDC) and their allied paramilitary Mayi Mayi supporters (such as the Patriotes Résistents Congolais or PARECO), forces loyal to renegade Tutsi general Laurent Nkunda (who leads the Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple, known as the CNDP) and the Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda (FDLR), a group with its roots in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide and comprising mainly of ethnic Hutus from Rwanda itself and Congo, has succeeded in emptying out whole villages whose residents flee the mass rape, forced recruitment of child soldiers and other attendant atrocities that have characterized the conflict.

What I saw, and those whom I interviewed while there, will form the basis of some articles that will be appearing over the next several weeks.

In the meantime, I offer this photo of children at the Magunga 1 camp for internally displaced persons, or les déplaceés, as they are called here, where nearly 20,000 souls live under an intense sun in an expanse of temporary huts constructed of banana leaves and grass, with thin sheets of UNHCR-donated tarpaulin slung across them. I believe that the look on their faces speaks in eloquent commentary of the situation as it stands today in North Kivu, and the necessity of committed journalists to go there and report on what is a largely forgotten though ongoing conflict, one in which many actors from Europe, North America and Africa itself have a long history of involvement in and culpability for.