THE GENOCIDE THAT NEVER ENDED PHIL CLARK unravels the ongoing conflict in the Great Lakes region that has claimed three million lives
GOMA, THE LARGEST town in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), is wedged between the volcanic Mount Nyiragongo and the humid, grey waters of Lake Kivu, still clogged with corpses from the 1994 genocide of nearly a million Tutsi and moderate Hutu across the nearby border in Rwanda.When Nyiragongo erupted in January 2002, a river of lava engulfed the ground floor of every building in Goma. Today the town remains half-buried: its inhabitants either live and work above the lava-line on the upper floors of the few buildings that survived the volcano or in new houses and offices built on the craggy surface of hardened lava, often using the black volcanic rock as a construction material. The air is permanently thick with black dust and ash. In this frontier town, smugglers, merchants, spies, soldiers, miners and scavengers converge from all over Africa to wheel and deal in Euros, US dollars, Rwandan francs and brick-like wads of tattered orange Congolese franc notes.
Goma also constitutes the nerve centre of the world’s deadliest conflict zone. Since 1996, more than 3 million people have died in eastern and north-eastern DRC, the majority from disease and starvation caused by continuous violence between a dizzying array of combatants, including around 20 rebel groups and the armies of half a dozen African nations. Understanding who is responsible for the violence in the DRC and what motivates them is a fraught undertaking, as the complex web of military alliances changes by the week and much of the region is too dangerous for travel by foreign journalists and analysts.While trying to cross from Rwanda into the DRC north of Goma in February 2003, I was mistaken for a journalist and, with a Congolese soldier’s Kalashnikov jammed between my shoulder blades, I was marched back to a dusty, red road and told never to return.
The DRC has become a theatre for the World War that the world forgot. Tony Blair told the Labour Party conference in October 2001: “The international community could…, with our help, sort out the blight that is the continuing conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where three million people have died through war or famine in the last decade.”Yet since then, the UK and international community have sat idly while armed groups from across Africa fought each other on Congolese soil, often supported by Western arms dealers and multinational corporations. The protagonists are driven by two primary motivations: ethnic hatred and a lust for control of the DRC’s vast mineral wealth. The main catalyst for the decade of conflict is one event: the 1994 genocide of Tutsi in Rwanda, which continues to reverberate with volcanic hatred and violence throughout the Great Lakes region.
Currently, violence in the DRC stems from three overlapping conflicts: between rebel groups and the governments of the DRC and Rwanda in the Congolese provinces of North and South Kivu; between Hema and Lendu ethnic groups, and their various state and non-state supporters, in Ituri province in north-east DRC; and ongoing tensions between Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda, Burundi and the Kivus. These conflicts are highly fluid, with the same armed forces sometimes engaged in simultaneous fighting on more than one of the three main fronts. Understanding how the three conflicts arose requires coming to terms with the regional impact of three recent periods of fighting within the DRC: the so-called ‘first war’ of 1996–7, which involved seven African nations and various militia groups; the ‘second war’ of 1998–9, which involved the DRC, Rwanda and Uganda and their rebel proxies; and the three years since 2002, when genocidal tensions flared between Hema and Lendu in Ituri, fuelled by conflict between Rwanda and Uganda inside the DRC.
The first Congo war broke out in 1996 when Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi supported rebels led by Laurent Desirée Kabila in order to topple the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, then President of Zaire (which later became the DRC). In response,Mobutu called on military allies in Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe.All of the countries involved in this pan-African conflict, whether fighting for Kabila’s Alliance or defending Mobutu’s crumbling dictatorship, fought to attain their own short- and long-term strategic objectives, turning Zaire into a battleground for a host of competing foreign interests.
The key external players in the conflict were Rwanda and Uganda. Rwanda’s involvement stemmed directly from the 1994 genocide: in the aftermath of the killing spree, around 1.5 million Hutu refugees, including many of the orchestrators of the genocide, poured into Zaire at the border crossing at Goma, fleeing the advance of the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) – the rebel force that halted the genocide and assumed control of the Rwandan government.After the genocide, armed Hutu militias, known as the ‘interahamwe’, fed and clothed unwittingly by Western aid organisations, continued to train in the refugee camps and made several incursions into Rwanda, threatening to ‘finish the job’ of killing all Rwandan Tutsi.
Meanwhile, Uganda sought to overthrow Mobutu largely out of support for its key ally, Rwanda. Tutsi fighters from Rwanda had supported Yoweri Museveni’s rise to power in Uganda in 1986 and, after becoming President of Uganda,Museveni supported the creation and training of the RPF, which sought to install a Tutsi administration in Rwanda. Furthermore, Uganda suffered regular incursions from Mobutu’s militias and thus wanted to dethrone the dictator for its own peace and security.
KABILA’S ALLIANCE EVENTUALLY prevailed in May 1997, forcing Mobutu into exile, ensconcing Kabila as President and scattering the interahamwe and Mobutubacked militias throughout eastern DRC. Celebrations were short-lived, however, as the Alliance quickly disintegrated, plunging the region into a second Congo war and even greater chaos. Kabila was angered by the refusal of Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda to leave eastern DRC. These countries instead stayed and pillaged the region’s gold, diamond and coltan (a rare mineral used in the manufacture of mobile phones) through military proxies such as the Rwandan-backed Rally for Congolese Democracy-Goma (RCD-Goma). Kabila turned against his former benefactors and began arming the interahamwe and local militias known as ‘Mai Mai’ in an attempt to drive the foreign forces, their proxies and Congolese Tutsi out of the DRC. The Rwandan government responded by attacking Goma, Bukavu and Uvira in North and South Kivu in August 1998. Kabila called on the governments of Angola and Zimbabwe to help repel Rwandan, Burundian and Ugandan forces in exchange for a small share of the DRC’s mining riches. The barely concealed greed that motivated the invaders of the DRC was most evident when Rwanda and Uganda came to blows in August 1999 in the southern city of Kisangani, a centre for the DRC’s diamond trade, destroying an alliance between the two staunch allies that has never been repaired. Between August 1998 and August 2000, as Hutu-Tutsi animosity and a desire for control over DRC’s mineral wealth kept the conflict raging, nearly two million people died in eastern DRC, either as a direct result of violence or through related disease and deprivation.
The third and most recent period of violence in the DRC centres on the northeastern province of Ituri and violence between local Hema and Lendu ethnic groups. Traditionally, the Hema, like the Tutsi in Rwanda and Burundi, are pastoralists and the Lendu, like the Hutu, are cultivators. In 1999, a land dispute in Djugu district of Ituri sparked a violent confrontation between Hema and Lendu which, stoked by Ugandan support for the Hema, flared into widespread conflict. Uganda has long employed the Hema as a business partner in the plunder of natural resources from Ituri. In August 2002, Hema combatants and their Ugandan allies attacked Lendu militias and civilians in Bunia, the biggest town in Ituri, massacring hundreds and inciting revenge killings by Lendu militias. Both sides are suspected of using rape as a tool of war and, in some instances, of committing acts of mutilation and cannibalism against their victims. During an escalation in the Ituri conflict in May 2003, human rights groups accused both sides of committing genocide.
The regional dimension of the Great Lakes conflict is apparent in Ituri: Uganda created the rebel group the Union of Congolese Patriots (UCP), only to see the UCP switch allegiances to Rwanda, which, despite its vociferous denials, is now accused of having an active presence in Ituri, through its government forces and the proxies of RCDGoma and the UCP. Rwanda’s primary objective appears to be to defeat Uganda for a greater share of the province’s gold, diamonds and oil. The conflict Ituri therefore follows the pattern of other recent conflicts in the DRC, involving rapidly changing alliances between rebel groups supported by regional actors, with ethnicity and greed the protagonists’ primary motivations.
Whilst the three current conflicts in the DRC are essentially regional African affairs, the international community plays several roles in them, with varying effectiveness. Its main role is maintaining a peacekeeping presence in the Kivus and Ituri. Two months after the escalation of violence in Ituri in 2003, the UN Organisation Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC) received a Chapter VII mandate from the UN Security Council, transforming it from a peacekeeping into a peace enforcement mission. The strengthened mandate now permits MONUC troops to fire on combatants in order to protect civilians – the first time a UN force anywhere in the world has been granted this capability.Yet so far MONUC has generally failed to prevent the massacres of civilians in the Kivus and Ituri. Further complicating MONUC’s mission, some of its own peacekeepers have recently been accused of committing sexual crimes against the local population.
THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY plays a crucial economic role in the conflicts in the DRC.Western governments, particularly the UK and the US, provide vast amounts of foreign aid to Rwanda and Uganda,much of which has been funnelled into the war effort in the DRC. Rwanda receives more foreign aid from the UK than any other developing country and consequently the UK carries major diplomatic clout there. In all-too-rare instances of this country wielding its influence over events on the ground, the UK successfully convinced the Rwandan government twice in 2004 to withdraw its troops from the border near Goma after Rwanda threatened to invade the DRC to track down interahamwe, whom the Rwandan government claimed were hiding in the jungles of North Kivu and preparing again to massacre Tutsi in Rwanda. Concerted diplomatic pressure from the UK and the US could have a significant impact on many of Rwanda’s and Uganda’s practices in the DRC.
Western corporations have heavily influenced events in the DRC throughout the last decade. In October 2002, a UN report named 85 Western companies – including the British-registered Barclays Bank, De Beers and Anglo American – as having participated directly in, or benefited indirectly from, the exploitation of the DRC’s natural resources. So far, only Belgium has launched an official investigation into the involvement of its national corporations in the DRC.
Finally, the international community may yet play an important role in bringing the main perpetrators of the conflicts in the DRC to justice. The first judicial proceedings of the newly-created International Criminal Court (ICC) this year concerned possible crimes against humanity and acts of genocide committed in Ituri. Speaking at a conference in Oxford in June 2004, Chief Prosecutor of the ICC Luis Moreno-Ocampo said that investigating and prosecuting crimes committed in the DRC would provide a vital first test of the Court’s ability to respond to the world’s most serious crimes.
While the world struggles to comprehend the overlapping conflicts in the DRC, the civilian population in Goma, trapped between the volcano and the corpse-filled lake, tries to go about its daily business. Mobutu’s brutal dictatorship is long gone but in its place a new raft of ethnic tensions, many imported from the Rwandan genocide, and a frenzied scramble for natural resources have made civilian life in the DRC, and the entire Great Lakes region, perpetually uncertain and frequently perilous.As an old man said to me in the central marketplace in Goma in May 2003, when Hutu-Tutsi tensions in the Kivus were high and stories of genocide were emerging from Ituri, “We are stuck in this town because there is fighting all around us. Sometimes we think that God has forgotten us.We know that the world has forgotten us. But where else can we go? If we move, we will only find more fighting. So we stay here and hope that one day the men with guns will grow tired, they will all go home and the fighting will stop.” The wait for the fighting in the DRC to stop, though, is likely to be a long and dangerous one.
Phil Clark is researching for a D.Phil in Politics and International Relations at Balliol College, Oxford. He is specialising in a study of the Rwandan genocide [Illustration Guy Shrubsole]
