Congo conflict threatens to create a new regional crisis

General news - Friday December 14, 2007

FOCUS / DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO (FORMERLY ZAIRE)

Congo conflict threatens to create a new regional crisis

By LYDIA POLGREEN

Sake, Congo _ A major confrontation between the Congolese army and a renegade general is plunging the country back toward war, threatening to undermine the fledgling democratic state and set off a new regional conflict on a scale not seen here in years. The battle between government troops and the rebel general, Laurent Nkunda, turns on many of the same bedevilling issues that caused Congo's civil war, which supposedly ended in 2003. It was Africa's deadliest modern war, fuelled by the ethnic tensions between Hutus and Tutsis that had led to the genocide in neighbouring Rwanda, and by the quest to control the nation's rich endowment of minerals and farmland, especially here in the rolling, green patch of earth known as North Kivu province.

None of those underlying problems have been fully resolved, and the recent violence they have spurred has pushed 425,000 people from their homes in the past year alone, including the residents of this strategic provincial town.

On Tuesday, they flooded out of town in a vast river of suffering, bedrolls and clothing bundles atop their heads, children toddling at their sides. Many were running for the second time in two weeks, as Gen Nkunda's forces routed army troops in towns they had taken just days before, and threatened to take Sake as well. Gen Nkunda is Tutsi and has vowed to protect Congolese Tutsis against Hutu militias from Rwanda at all costs. His advance here was just barely staved off by UN peacekeepers, who swept in late Tuesday to occupy the town as the Congolese army fled.

The fight comes only a year after Western nations helped organise and pay for a historic election that produced Congo's first democratically chosen government. The violence is also unfolding despite years of military and diplomatic intervention by the United Nations, the European Union and the United States to stem the tide of blood here and create, for the first time since its independence from Belgium in 1960, a stable and prosperous Congo.

''The fundamental issues that led to the Congo war have never really been dealt with,'' said Anneke Van Woudenberg of Human Rights Watch. ''We are seeing the results of that now.''

After years of being overlooked in favour of crises in Darfur, Somalia and elsewhere, Congo has once again sprung to the top of US and European agendas on Africa. Last week, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with leaders of the region, with a considerable focus on Congo, and another high-level meeting of diplomats is scheduled for this weekend.

The recent fighting has unleashed a catastrophe of a proportion that is outsized even for Congo, where some researchers say 4 million people have died, mainly of disease and hunger, since the civil war began in 1996.

''This situation now is the worst we have had'' since the end of the war, said Patrick Lavand'homme, a senior UN emergency aid official in Goma, the regional capital. ''And it is going to get much, much worse.''

The Congo civil war traces its roots directly to the Rwandan genocide. The perpetrators of the slaughter of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus fled, along with more than 1 million Rwandan Hutu refugees, spilling across the border into Congo in 1994. The Tutsi-led Rwandan government sponsored a rebel group to pursue them into Congo in 1996. Congo's long-time ruler, Mobutu Sese Seko, presided over an increasingly unstable nation rotted through by his autocratic, corrupt rule. Other neighbouring countries like Angola and Uganda, sensing a chance to cash in on Congo's mineral riches, jumped into the fray as well.

In 1997, Mr Mobutu was forced into exile, and the rebel leader Laurent D Kabila became president. A year later, though, he split with his Rwandan backers, who then sponsored another rebellion, this time against Mr Kabila. It would set off the civil war, which threw the region into turmoil as neighbouring countries backed different sides.

The current crisis again risks drawing in Congo's neighbours, especially Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi _ a possibility that Western officials consider particularly worrisome.

The military setback to the government has been stunning. With his army in retreat, Mr Kabila is left with few options. Attempts at negotiating with Gen Nkunda over the past year, including an experiment at mixing his men into army brigades, collapsed in August, leading to a new round of fighting. After a cease-fire agreement collapsed in October, the Congolese government vowed to remove Gen Nkunda by force.

''Kinshasa is in a panic,'' said one senior UN military official, referring to the nation's capital. ''They gambled everything on a military solution and were humiliated.''

But reopening negotiations with Gen Nkunda is also a dangerous proposition for President Kabila. Other ethnic and regional militias willingly went through an integration process requiring them to be redeployed into regions where they had not fought, a move that made them give up control of lucrative mining areas. They would be angered by special treatment for Gen Nkunda's force, which they see as another ethnic militia.

Gen Nkunda is demanding that his men be allowed to stay in North Kivu, so that their families can be protected. He is also demanding the dismantling and deportation of the Rwandan Hutu militia led by some of those responsible for the genocide in Rwanda in 1994.

Congo's government proposed a new plan to break up the militia beginning in March, but Gen Nkunda's forces have insisted that the militia must be disarmed first. AP

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