Please Spare the Congo This Liberation (A. Peterson)
Quick
background: Nkunda is from Nord-Kivu, the Congolese province that
borders Rwanda. After the Rwandan genocide, Hutus flooded across the
border and Hutu rebels went with them, launching cross-border raids
into Rwanda from the refugee camps in Nord-Kivu. In 1996, the Rwandan
government backed a rebel force led by Laurent Kabila and including
Nkunda to march on Kinshasa and overthrow Mobutu who at that point was
weak, isolated, and in all likelihood, insane. He could have cared less
about what was happening on his borders. Kabila seized power from him
in 1997 and so ended the First Congo War. After Kabila settled in
somewhat, he noticed that the Ugandan and Rwandan forces who had helped
him to attain power were also settling in—with its lack of law
enforcement and wealth of natural resources, the Congo has long been a
magnet for every man with a gun and a dream—and so he ordered them
out of the country in 1998. Enraged by the order (and supported in
their enragement by the Rwandan government), the ethnic Tutsis in
Nord-Kivu rebelled against Kabila. Nkunda led the rebellion and thus
began the Second Congo War,
which grew to include many more factions, took the lives of more than
five million people, and ended in a peace agreement in 2003. Nkunda
participated in the agreement and joined the new government with
Laurent Kabila's son Joseph (Laurent had been assassinated), but then
decided to rebel again in 2004. The reason is unclear—he says the
rebellion was and is to protect ethnic Tutsis in Nord-Kivu against Hutu
rebels who have not been disarmed by a corrupt Kabila government, but MONUC disputes this and accuses Nkunda of war crimes.
so that wasn't quite as quick as I thought it would be, but given this
background, what can we say about Nkunda's statement that he is going
to take his rebellion nationwide? 1) He can really do it. 2) He has the
connections to bring Rwanda and possibly Uganda into the conflict. 3)
He must be stopped. Around one thousand Congolese
are still dying every day because of factors attributed to the last
conflict, which was the bloodiest the world has seen since WWII. It's
true that the Kabila government is corrupt, but this is the Congo: if
you're not corrupt, you're not trying. There are no good guys here.
There are only guys who don't want to plunge a bloodied and unstable
country into a deeper well of bloody instability. When a man speaks of
liberation in the Congo, he speaks of death.
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