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This guest post was written by Enough Project staffer Ledio Cakaj. Read more posts about Sudan at Enough’s blog, Enough Said. “Tell them about our suffering here,” said the Bishop… More»
DR Congo
Overview
The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has been on the Museum's Warning list since 2003. The Museum's concern about DRC stems from the:
• Relationship of the crisis to the 1994 Rwandan genocide
• Scale and effects of violence against civilians
• Mass sexual violence against women
• Continued fighting in the East
• Role of ethnicity in the perpetration of violence
The Democratic Republic of the Congo (known as Zaire until 1997) has suffered two wars since 1996. The first war (1996), began as a direct result of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The second began in 1998 and involved the armed forces of at least seven countries and multiple militias. According to the International Rescue Committee, since 1998, an estimated 5.4 million people have died, most from preventable diseases as a result of the collapse of infrastructure, lack of food security, displacement, and destroyed health-care systems.
In 2006, DRC held the first multi-party elections in over 40 years, and over 25 million citizens participated. The elections signified the end of a three-year transition period during which time the country moved from intense war to a system of power sharing between the former government, former armed forces, opposition parties, and civil society. However, national and provincial structures remain incapable of ensuring basic security for communities, providing transparent management of resources and wealth, and addressing entrenched problems of corruption, poverty, lack of development and heightened ethnic and regional tensions.
In the East, the war never conclusively ended. A range of armed forces continue to perpetrate violence against the civilian population, including forced displacement, abductions, looting, forceful recruitment and use of child soldiers, and massive sexual violence. According to the United Nations, 27,000 sexual assaults were reported in 2006 in South Kivu Province alone, a figure that represents only those assaults that were officially reported. Ethnic hostility, fed by inter-group violence in Congo over the past ten years in addition to the impact of genocide and violence in Rwanda and Burundi, has produced an environment where groups fear their entire existence is under threat and engage in pre-emptive attacks. Multiple armed forces, including the national armed forces and various militias engage in armed conflict and prey on the civilian population. Among the most brutal of the armed forces are the FDLR, a group whose leadership is associated with the perpetrators of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
Current Situation
A Humanitarian Disaster Backed by the UN
The UN-backed Rwanda-Congolese operation launched last January against rebel groups in eastern Congo has been criticized as a “humanitarian disaster” by rights groups. The FDLR, a Rwandan Hutu militia group, and FARDC, the Congolese Armed Forces, have both engaged in widespread atrocities. Since January, more than 1,000 civilians have been killed, 7,000 women and girls have been subjected to rape and extreme sexual violence, and nearly 900,000 people have been forced to flee their homes.
Satellite imagery collected by the American Association for the Advancement of Science shows extensive destruction of homes and villages occurring as recently as September. Since the launch of the offensive, over 6,000 homes have been burned down in the eastern provinces of North and South Kivu. The Congo Advocacy Coalition calculates that for every rebel combatant disarmed, one civilian has been killed, seven women and girls have been raped, six houses burned and destroyed, and 900 people have been force to flee their homes. According to UN statistics, only 1,071 FDLR rebels — out of a force as large as 6,000 to 7,000 combatants — have surrendered since January. Many reports indicate that the FDLR has recruited continuously to maintain its numbers.
The Great Lakes Contact Group meets this week in Washington, DC to discuss the situation in eastern Congo and the wider region. Rights groups are calling on diplomats and UN officials attending the meeting to increase protection for civilians and prosecute those responsible for serious human rights abuses, in addition to disarming the FDLR.
Top Rwanda Genocide Suspect Arrested
One of the most wanted suspects in the 1994 genocide was arrested in Uganda this week and extradited to Tanzania to face trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). The head of intelligence and military operations at Rwanda’s elite military training school during the genocide, Idelphonse Nizeyimana was indicted by the ICTR in 2000 and charged with crimes against humanity, as well as complicity in genocide and direct and public incitement to commit genocide. The indictment charged that:
From late 1990 until July 1994, military personnel, members of the government, political leaders, civil servants and other personalities conspired among themselves and with others to work out a plan with the intent to exterminate the civilian Tutsi population… In executing the plan, they organized, ordered and participated in the massacres perpetrated against the Tutsi population and moderate Hutus. Idelphonse Nizeyimana elaborated, adhered to and executed this plan.
Nizeyimana was also specifically accused of establishing “secret units of extremist elements” to help carry out the genocide.
Hiding out in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since the genocide, Nizeyimana served as a top commander in the FDLR, a rebel army comprised of perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide and responsible for countless atrocities across eastern Congo.
Secretary Hillary Clinton Visits Eastern Congo
In an unprecedented visit by an American secretary of state, Hillary Clinton visited Goma in eastern Congo this week, in order to call attention to the region’s ongoing conflict, which is marked by extreme brutality and widespread sexual violence. Secretary Clinton’s visit comes admit increased concern for the region, as hope vanishes that the combined Rwandan-Congolese operation launched last January against rebel groups would finally bring an end to the violence.
Instead, the joint military operation provoked revenge attacks and drove more than 500,000 people from their homes. The number of internally displaced persons in the Congo now stands at two million, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). A spike in rape cases since January is being blamed on the overstretched and unpaid Congolese army, with the number of rapes doubled or tripled in the areas government soldiers are deployed.
Just days before Secretary Clinton’s arrival, Congo’s President Joseph Kabila and Rwandan President Paul Kagame held a rare meeting on the border. Former rivals, the two leaders agreed to plan joint economic initiatives and to revive the Joint Permanent Commission for cooperation between the two countries that has not been in operation for 21 years.
Despite Operations, the Situation Worsens
Since Laurent Nkunda’s capture in January by Rwandan military forces, the rebel leader has remained under house arrest in Rwanda, despite being wanted for war crimes in neighboring DR Congo. It is unclear whether Rwanda intends to extradite him to the Congo.
With the disintegration of Nkunda’s Tutsi rebel organization CNDP, the Congolese government struggled to incorporate at least 12,000 of its former rebels into the Congolese military. On March 23, the CNDP signed a peace treaty with the government, agreeing to become a political party in exchange for amnesty for its captured rebels. In May, the Congolese Parliament passed such a law granting amnesty for “acts of war.” With its ranks swollen by the rapid integration of former rebels, the Congolese army has come under recent criticism for attacking, burning, and looting villages, killing at least 19 civilians and raping more than 143 women since January.
As agreed, Rwandan forces withdrew from the Congo in late February, leaving the Congolese army to combat FDLR rebels who continue to kill and rape their way through eastern Congo. In May, the FDLR attacked a village in North Kivu, where they shot, hacked to death, or burnt alive over 60 civilians. Authorized by the Security Council in November 2008, an additional 3,000 UN troops still have yet to arrive.
According to Oxfam, the humanitarian situation in eastern Congo has only worsened since the launch of the joint military operation that was intended to bring a decisive end to the conflict. The UN believes that 800,000 people have been displaced since January.
The situation is not any better in northeast Congo, where the Lord’s Resistance Army, a small rebel group of no more than a thousand soldiers that had previously operated in Uganda, are terrorizing civilian populations. Since a botched operation against them last December, the LRA has killed at least 1,400 people and abducted nearly 2,000 people, mostly children.
The End of Nkunda?
On January 23, 2009, Rwandan forces arrested former rebel leader Laurent Nkunda as he was fleeing into Rwanda from an attack on his base in Bunagana, Congo.
Nkunda is the former head of the CNDP, a Tutsi-dominated rebel group that claimed to be protecting civilians from the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide, collectively known as the FDLR, who operate in the mountains of Eastern Congo.
The atrocities perpetrated by the CNDP under Nkunda’s command over the past decade are well documented: the massacre of several hundred deserters in Kisangani in 2002; days of pillage in Bukavu after it was seized by the CNDP in 2004; and, last fall, the massacre of hundreds of unarmed civilians in Kiwanja, a tiny village Northeast of Goma, during fighting to seize control of North Kivu.
As part of a joint Rwandan-Congolese operation against the FDLR, Rwandan forces entered the Congo in mid-January, occupying areas previously held by the CNDP. Although Rwanda provided support to the CNDP in the past, Rwandan officials promised to return Nkunda to the Congo to stand trial and to remove Rwandan forces from Congolese territory by the end of the month.
Nkunda was by no means the only threat to peace in the region. In early January, Bosco Ntaganda, Nkunda’s chief of staff, announced that he had taken control of nearly half of the CNDP forces formerly loyal to Nkunda. While he agreed to integrate his faction into the Congolese army, it is unclear whether this process will be successful. Ntaganda now serves as deputy commander of the joint military offensive, despite being wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes.
While the joint operation could mark a turning point in the conflict, the renewed fighting places civilians at risk yet again.
Violating Peace
In the last six months, UN officials reported at least 200 violations of the Goma Peace Agreement. Since the agreement was signed in January, the violence in eastern Congo has killed more than 200 people and displaced 150,000 people. Those newly displaced add to the already one million people displaced by earlier violence in North and South Kivu. Violence against women continues, with more than 2,200 cases of rape recorded in June 2008 in North Kivu province alone, according to the Congo Advocacy Coalition. Humanitarian workers have also been attacked, stymieing their ability to provide assistance.
With 10,000 troops spread thinly across northeast Congo, the United Nations peacekeeping force MONUC is largely unable to halt the attacks. Civilians seeking safety often gather near UN deployment sites, but their protection is short-lived as peacekeepers rotate frequently in a struggle to cover the vast terrain.
Former vice-president and presidential candidate Jean-Pierre Bemba was arrested on May 25, 2008 in Brussels by Belgian authorities and transferred to The Hague a few weeks later. The International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant charges him with several counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity for leading Congolese rebels in a widespread and systematic attack against the Central African Republic’s civilian population in 2002 and 2003.
Optimism in a Peace Agreement
There was sporadic fighting in Kinshasa in May 2007 between the forces of former rebel-leader and at the time Senator Jean-Pierre Bemba and President Joseph Kabila; the situation in the capital has since quieted and 2007 saw limited progress on building a credible democratic government.
Continued tension in the provinces of North and South Kivu involving the Congolese army, dissident troops loyal to rebel leader Laurent Nkunda and predatory militias — including the FDLR (former perpetrators of Rwanda’s genocide) and local Mai Mai “self defense” militias — continue to place civilians in the crossfire. The conflict has resulted in looting, abduction of children as soldiers, and massive sexual violence targeting women that is destroying families and communities throughout eastern Congo.
In mid 2007 the process of mixage, whereby Nkunda’s rebel forces, the National Congress for the Defense of the People, (CNDP) were to be integrated into the Congolese armed forces (FARDC), collapsed, and fighting between Nkunda and the Congolese army resumed. The renewed conflict led to further civilian displacement in late 2007. All told, some 800,000 civilians remained displaced within North Kivu province in early 2008. The majority are women and children living in squalid camps where rape, disease and malnutrition are constant threats.
In late 2007, the conflict flared up again. The ill-trained FARDC, with the logistical support of the United Nations peacekeeping force MONUC, launched a major military operation against Nkunda which ultimately led to a stalemate. Tens of thousands more were displaced in November and December, while sexual violence and child abduction remain at critical levels.
There have been some positive developments as well. In November 2007, the governments of Congo and Rwanda agreed to deal with the question of refugees and the remnants of the FDLR in eastern Congo. In January 2008, a landmark conference was held in the North Kivu capital of Goma. Its stated aim was to bring peace and development to eastern DRC, most primarily a cease-fire between Nkunda’s CNDP forces and the FARDC. Participants included government officials on the national and provincial level, as well as other leaders and members of civil society. A peace agreement was signed at the conference and, despite a notable absence of language dealing with the FDLR, has been tentatively heralded by experts as the best chance for peace for Eastern Congo.
