The Kivu conflicts: Begin the begin

A short history of a long war
Goma Nord-Kivu March 6th 2011

If someone were to ask what the conflict in Congo’s Kivu region was all about it might not be possible to answer without the framework for a PhD dissertation. It is complex, multi-dimensional and constantly changing. One could say that previous political and communal conflicts have been amplified and fused with a series of other conflicts and wars involving countries in the region, the weak Congolese state, at the national level and those armed groups either fighting or claiming to represent it locally, together with access to the region’s mineral and other resources, the fuel that can sustain conflicts in Africa almost indefinitely. That, in a nutshell, is the complex and pain-ridden world of the Kivus for the past 20 years, with all the suffering and tragedy that follows.

The coming of warfare to the Kivus is most often associated with the Rwandan genocide in 1994 when up to 1m Tutsi—and moderate Hutus—were murdered by the Interahamwe who, when defeated by the Rwandan Patriotic Front rebels of Paul Kagame, the country’s current president, fled across the border to Congo, taking with them the rump of their old government and army and over a 1m of their followers. They also brought with them their genocidal ideology against the Tutsis and, as the Kivus essentially mirror the ethnic make up of Rwanda itself—Hutus and Tutsis as well as the Hunde, Nande and other people, this found ready ground for violent ethnic conflict. The Interahamwe were able to “erase, in a matter of months, a long history of peaceful co-existence”. According to one eyewitness interviewed by human rights researchers at the time—a 60 year old Tutsi farmer—this is what happened:

“We have lived very hard times since the refugees came. Before they came, the local people didn’t know how to kill. But when the Interahamwe arrived, they taught them to use guns. They said take these! They’ll  help you get rid of the Tutsis. That was how it all began”.

The Kivus have been in a state of extreme, violent upheaval ever since; the epicentre of local and regional wars and humanitarian disaster. Congo’s civil and regional war has been described as the  deadliest since World War II with up to 5m killed and an estimated death rate of 1200 civilians a day.

The rest of the story regarding the unraveling of the Kivus—and of Congo—is well known. After two years of putting up with cross-border raids launched by the ex-Rwandan government and army, or ex-FAR (Force Armée Rwandaise), Rwanda, invaded Congo—then known as Zaire—in 1996 to put a stop to the Interahamwe and its genocide against Tutsis in eastern Congo. But the ambition did not end there—together with Uganda and the then little known, Laurent Kabila, a quixotic Congolese revolutionary and former disciple of Ché Guevara who had been kicking around East Africa for decades, a combined, nominally Congolese force, the Alliance des Forces Democratiques pour la Liberation du Congo-Zaire (AFDL), set out to topple the 3 decade long dictatorship of the kleptocrat Mobutu Sese Seko. In the space of months the old, rotten, regime was swept away and the Congolese, Rwandan, Ugandan AFDL took the capital, Kinshasa, 1500km to the west almost without a fight. Kabila was installed president amid much optimism of a new dawn in a country of misrule and perpetual disappointment.

Disappointment came quickly. Kabila proved to be a despot and a buffoon wedded to outmoded ideas of Marxist revolution from the 1960s who clamped down on political activity and civil liberties and imposed unworkable economic policies. Even Ché Guevara, and the other austere Cuban revolutionaries, had taken unfavourable measure of the man as a leader, famously describing Kabila as more interested in women and drink than revolution. But more seriously, he disappointed his former allies and, less than two years later, another Congolese rebellion, of the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie (RCD) backed by Rwanda and Uganda, began as a putsch against Kabila. After weeks of conflict that saw government controlled towns fall to the rebels the combined RCD, Rwandan, Ugandan, force was routed by a new pro-Kabila coalition involving military intervention from 6 other African states—Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia, Chad, Libya and Sudan. Kabila’s presidency was saved although front lines soon formed further east, effectively partitioning the country in two. Thus began the “Second Congo War”, the largest, most complex and deadliest conflict in modern times.

Fighting carried on, amid intermittent negotiations, before a peace accord was reached, although implementing it proved impossible while Kabila remained president. The terms of the accord, requiring democratic elections, withdrawal of foreign forces and UN scrutiny of political and economic affairs, was incompatible with Kabila’s style of government, meaning that the war continued, a situation not resolved until his assassination—under murky circumstances—in 2001, possibly even with the complicity of his own exasperated allies. Kabila’s son, Joseph, bundled into office by panicked presidential cronies, became president, age 29, taking a more serious approach to peace making and governance, and ending some of the more destructive and absurd policies of his Father—including the former’s mawkish personality cult and practice of treating the central bank as little more than a giant money printing machine. Inflation reached 300% under Kabila the elder, poverty and malnutrition sky-rocketed and dog meat had become common fair in the butcher shops of the capital.

The peace accord, which provided for the withdrawal of foreign forces, disarmament of the genocidal Interahamwe and democratic elections in Congo, was overseen by a UN peace keeping operation with a Chapter 7 mandate—meaning full live fire peace enforcement capability—backed by 19,000 troops and thousands of civilian personnel. The UN operation has been in place for a decade—the largest and costliest in history, at over US$1bn per year. It’s job is not done, and it is criticised for serious failings and weaknesses, although to its credit it has largely implemented its mandate and overseen a transition from a complex, multi-sided war involving dozens of belligerent parties and ended what had been unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe.

It and its constituent agencies have fed and kept alive hundreds of thousands of displaced people through food aid and public health, organised elections and basic administration and services in a country of nearly 70m people the size of western Europe with little transport and other infrastructure, promoted independent journalism—including its own radio network—trained police and judges, empowered political parties and civil society watch dog groups, supervised the departure or disarmament of belligerent armies, policed rights abuses, integrated tens of thousands of soldiers from various rebel groups into a new national army, demobilised tens of thousands of others and overseen a democratic transition to elected government—a first in 46 years.

All this and the job is not done and the outcome is far from satisfactory. No one wants the UN to stay and everyone knows it cannot, or should not, leave. But the government, which would rather solve the country’s problems on its own, without oversight and hindrance from outside, has asked for its departure, with the timeline all that is at stake.

The peace that has come to Congo is a highly imperfect one, like most things in this country. The democratic transition has been flawed and violent—the elections in 2006 ended with days of street fighting in the capital between the armed forces of the loser, Jean-Pierre Bemba, and the government army. Bemba himself is now facing war crimes charges at the international criminal court for other, earlier, atrocities. The government itself has weak democratic credentials, and is tightening political space in advance of the next elections, due next year. It’s human rights record, including that of the national army is appalling. Just as serious, a country known as a byword for corruption and rapacious mismanagement of natural resources, has slipped back toward the familiar ways of the old kelptocratic regime of Mobutu. Economic governance is deteriorating and foreign investors, invited in to develop the moribund mining sector, are now the targets of shake downs and looting by the presidential elite. Earlier hopes that a weak state, government institutions and social services would be revived by foreign aid, and that Congo would establish the economic and political governance for economic growth, poverty reduction and an open successful society, have been dashed.

All of this is mere backdrop to the complexity and ongoing suffering of the Kivus. Even as the rest of the DRC has stabilised and emerged from war, the Kivus remain a centre of conflict as: “the stage on which national political and military antagonisms play out”, someting that persists to the present.

During the second Congo war Tutsis in the Kivus rose up in rebellion and were promptly aided by Rwanda, which occupied the east of the country, and together with the RCD—now the political-military vehicle for Tutsis—established a rebel state in Eastern Congo. Although the RCD was the militarily dominant party, occupying the provincial capitals the Kivus remained a contested area. The national government of Laurent Kabila now sided, disastrously, with the genocidaires of the Interahamwe, renamed the Forces Democratiques de Liberation du Rwanda (FDLR), a militarily powerful force in the Kivus. Amid ethnic antagonism, political and economic competition and resistance to RCD hegemony in the Kivus, new militias formed, including the Mai-Mai, ostensibly village self-defense forces, although largely the militias of the Hunde and Nyande, in alliance with the central government and Kabila.

This was a period of extreme conflict involving the national war, with a front line, and ethnic, political and resource conflicts going on behind the lines in the Kivus and elsewhere. Additional complexity arose from the fracturing of the RCD which eventually included six splinter groups each claiming some variation of the RCD name. The coalition between Uganda and Rwanda had earlier collapsed into warfare, leading to zones of influence, or occupation, between their respective factions—RCD-ML and RCD-Goma. These essentially become fiefdoms for resource exploitation and money making by Rwandan and Ugandan army officers.

The number of armed groups in eastern Congo multiplied, generally with ethnic and regional components but also involving officers carving out mini republics based on mining and resource exploitation. Although it is not worth listing them all here, they eventually numbered more than a dozen, not even counting the Ugandan and Rwandan rebel forces.

The most notorious of these entrepreneur ethnic bandit warlords, Thomas Lubanga, who went on to establish the Union of Congolese Patriots, was accused by Human Rights Watch, among others, of: “ethnic massacres, murder, torture, rape and mutilation, as well as the recruitment of child soldiers”. At one point Lubanga’s forces, which largely represented the Hema people against the Lendu—the latter fronted by another group, the Nationalist and Integrationist Front (FNI)—included 3000 child soldiers between the ages of 8 and 15. In 2005 Lubanga was finally arrested, in connection with the murder of 9 UN peace keeping soldiers from Bangladesh, and in a major gain against impunity for rights abuses in Congo, extradited to the International Criminal Court for war crimes.

In North and South Kivu implementation of the peace accord required the RCD to cede power to central government as part of the political transition. Instead this led to the creation of duplicate or parallel administrative structures between the national government and whatever military group was dominant in the various districts of the province, a situation to some extent still in effect today. Political and military supremacy in the Kivus generally follows from economic supremacy with the economic interests of military groups and individual commanders involving control over millions of dollars of revenue from mining and other resources or levying taxes and customs on the import and export of goods. Great fortunes in the Kivus have been established by RCD officers in this way and anyone can easily see this in the building boom and luxury vehicles in the city of Goma and elsewhere.

Rather than a genuine democratic transition the process of national reunification in the Kivus has represented continuation of the previous ethnic, political and economic competition of the previous 20 years or longer. Ethnically, the province is divided among Hunde and Nyande and Hutus and Tutsis. At various times the province’s Hutus and Tutsis were  in conflict, succumbing to the genocidal ideology of the Rwandan Hutu FDLR, and at other times and more latterly, united as the “Banyarwandan bloc” under Tutsi direction. Agency reports from this period, during what was meant to be a period of peace building, point to continuing, serious violence and human rights abuses by all sides, but in particular the RCD, with the UN peace keeping operation, MONUC, unable to stop it.

Although the largely Tutsi RCD was nominally integrated into the national army the process was neither complete or successful, with many units held back, or with the RCD maintaining its parallel administration and economic interests. On two occasions in the last six years—in 2004 and 2008—former RCD officers, now operating through a new, militarily dominant, splinter, Congrès national pour la défense du peuple, (CNDP), have opted out of the national army and launched major military operations that conquered much of north and south Kivu, defeating the national army, displacing a quarter of a million people and rendering the UN peace keeping operation powerless. On both occasions peace agreements subsequently brought it back into the national army without sanction.

The CNDP is still a restive and unpredictable force, and involved in a tug of war with the central government for economic and political influence in the Kivus as the arena for political and military competition at the national level. This points to unfinished business in the Kivus and for peace building in Congo regarding the status of the Tutsis and the need for a workable and effective peace at communal, provincial and national level. In another, worrisome, development the CNDP is moving away from its historical anchor, Rwanda, which is now closer to the national government in Kinshasa, a situation which is leading to new alliances and fracturing, including hints of a possible link up with former RPF figures who have fallen out with President Kagame. Taken further, such developments could have disastrous consequences. They also underline just how changeable, unpredictable and mutation-prone the Kivu conflict and its alliances can be.

The defensive strategies of Tutsis are at least understandable—as well as victims of attempted genocide, they have been the primary target of the destructive idea that their nationality and citizenship in Congo is not legitimate, that they are foreigners and actually belong in Rwanda, a politicisation of citizenship that had been manipulated during the outgoing Mobutu regime and has since taken root more solidly through the subsequent decades of war in which Congo has been invaded and occupied by Rwanda, operating in alliance with local Tutsis. The national governments in Kinshasa of Kabila senior and junior have pursued this idea in political terms promoting the idea of a nationalist “Congophone” block against the Banyarwandan “Rwandophones”.

The continuation of these policies to the present is regarded to be one major factor in the failure to make greater progress with consolidating peace and restoring ethnic concord in the Kivus. It is also something that has also contributed to radicalism among Tutsis with many political moderates marginalised in favour of powerful military commanders in the CNDP. The failure to resolve the “citizenship question” directly contributes to the Kivus current political and military instability with the CNDP occupying the ambiguous, half-in, half-out, situation of being integrated into the national army but remaining, de facto, a powerful and autonomous sub-identity. The CNDP and Tutsis are reluctant to give up the military option indefinitely while they remain under threat, from the genocidal FDLR, which remains active in the Kivus, and from the lack of consensus in Congolese politics and society about the legitimacy of their rights as citizens. The entrenched economic interests of senior commanders of the CNDP in mining, taxation and parallel administration, merely provides incentives for continuation of the status quo.

The status quo, even now during a period of relative stability in the Kivus, is still highly volatile and dangerous. Armed groups and violent acts continue and if incident reports from the UN and other sources are any guide there is still a huge amount of violence and lawlessnes going on—murders, rape, pillage, even kidnapping of foreigners, of which there have been nearly a dozen in recent months. But all things relative—this is nothing like what the province has seen and some claim to see a positive trend line.

It is a common place to assume that the conflicts of this country throughout the first and second Congo wars up to the present have their origins in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, which spilled over into Congo, took root and set of the spectacular implosion that has followed. In reality the Rwandan genocide and its aftermath came to a Kivu region that was already in flames with violent communal and political conflicts already well under way for years before hand.

The contested status of eastern Congo’s Tutsis—the Banyamulenge—despite being a long established indigenous community has its origins at least in part in colonial policy. Belgium as the colonial power in Congo also administered Rwanda and Burundi, separately, as League of Nations trust territories transferred from the former German East Africa after WWI, but in practice as an almost unified administration. When the Belgians began promoting the migration of Tutsis and Hutus into Banyardwandan and non-Banyarwandan areas of the Kivus from an over-crowded famine stricken Rwanda during the 1930s, they helped introduce the idea, which has now taken hold years later, that all Congolese Tutsis—and ultimately Hutus, also—are not legitimately local, that they are Rwandan not Congolese. As a densely populated multi-ethnic territory with a history of land and other conflicts these ideas have since developed on fertile ground in the Kivus. When political competition gathered pace during a failed democratic transition in Congo—then Zaire—during the early 1990s under Mobutu, the “citizenship question” came to the fore, driven by those who regarded Tutsis and Rwandophones as usurpers. By the time the Rwandan genocide and its aftermath arrived in eastern Congo the Kivus were already in a state of war.

It would be hard to find a conflict of greater size and complexity than the catastrophes of Congo and Rwanda or not be moved by it.

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