With all power held by Kinshasa, the DRC will never know peace
Congolese rebel leader Laurent Nkunda. Photo/REUTERS
Six months ago, I travelled to visit Gen. Laurent Nkunda at his headquarters in the wild and high Masisi territory of North Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). I wanted to hear why the rebel general thought it necessary to continue waging war. Today, Nkundas forces are threatening to capture the provincial town of Goma after routing government troops.
Fourteen years ago, the remnants of those responsible for the Rwanda genocide fled into then Zaire. About 8,000 remain there today, grouped into the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), occupying a chunk of the Walikale territory in North Kivu where Congolese Tutsi, among others, have become a proxy-target for their schemes to one day again capture Kigali. This partly explains why war continues to rage in the DRC.
Mobutu Sese Seko was removed from power in Kinshasa in May 1997 by a (largely) Tutsi-inspired force wanting to put an end to his misrule, which had allowed the Rwandan génocidaires to set up camp in Zaire and operate there with relative impunity. His installed successor, the one-time revolutionary colleague of Ché Guevara, Laurent Kabila, proved little better. He soon turned against his Rwandan and Ugandan sponsors as he tried to reverse notions that he was simply a foreign stooge and cement his Congo support base, showing little heart and plenty of darkness as he went easy on the génocidaires.
Democratic elections
After Kabila senior was assassinated by his bodyguard in January 2001, his son and successor, Joseph, toed his line. Well before the first-ever democratic elections in October 2006 won by Kabila and funded by the West to the tune of a $1billion, there were rumblings in the jungle to Congos east.
This is about the time and place where Gen Nkunda comes into the frame.
A native of North Kivu, Nkunda had abandoned his psychology studies to join the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) in 1990. After the RPF seized power and stopped the genocide in Rwanda in July 1994, as an officer of the Alliance for Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (AFDL), Nkunda was part of the invading force that so quickly toppled Mobutu. By 2003, he was a Congolese brigadier-general, the regional commander in Goma, the capital of North Kivu. He left in disagreement when he says he saw the three key issues for Tutsi security the right of return of dispossessed Congolese Tutsi, the safeguarding of their national identity, and the disarmament of the génocidaires not being handled properly.
Today, Nkunda is viewed by many as an international outlaw, the leader of the National Congress for the Defence of the Congolese People (CNDP), a broad anti-government front purportedly pursuing the defence of minority tribes in the Kivus. Controlling an area claimed to be half the size of Uganda, the CNDP has refused to disarm and integrate its 8,000 (or so) troops into the governments 135,000-strong Forces Armées de la Républic Démocratic du Congo (FARDC). The Congolese government has issued an arrest warrant for Nkunda on charges of insurrection, war crimes and crimes against humanity relating to his role in the suppression of an army mutiny in Kisangani in May 2002 and the Bukavu incident in June 2004.
Such obstinacy has pitted Nkunda and his men against more than Kinshasa. The UN is leading the worlds largest current peacekeeping mission in the Congo, with over 19,000 UN military and civilian peacekeepers in the Central African nation at an annual cost of $1.15 billion.
Despite a UN arms embargo and targeted personal sanctions against him, the 20,000 FARDC troops deployed against Nkunda have so far failed to defeat the renegade general. He and his men have a cause for which they are clearly willing to fight that bit harder than the FARDC.
Tentative ceasefire
The tentative cease-fire signed this January allowed the first-hand visit through government lines to Nkundas headquarters.
At first, AK47-toting government troops would not allow us through the péage, a single toll across the road in Sake, outside Goma. After much haggling and several phone calls to mon general in Kinshasa and mon colonel in nearby Goma, our jeep was able to break free of the gathering crowd, their bloodshot eyes consistently flicking over the vehicles contents, and head off through the demilitarised buffer zone and up into the hills.
The general was to found in the town of Kitchanga, at the end of a four-hour backbreaking ride over some of Africas worst roads. A slushy earth track climbed through the forest, breaking through the rain and mist into green meadows spotted with grazing cattle. We could have been in England, save for the omnipresent, camouflage-bedecked, stoic-faced troops en route, the shoeless, snotty-nosed, pot-bellied small children splashing in puddles, and men and women, young and old, hauling enormous loads carried by a rope slung around their foreheads. As we progressed, avoiding four-tonne trucks heaving with charcoal bags and sheltering human bodies slipping and sliding their way down the mountain-sides, the slush giving way to a corrugated volcanic topping bisecting bright green jungle.
Functional wooden house
We waited in a nondescript functional wooden house, replete with an Oxfam-sponsored outhouse, for the general to arrive. The pink-draped wooden furniture and concrete floor spoke of a certain, if humble, privilege in a town where ramshackle reed huts were de rigeur. The generals arrival was announced by the entry of a rail-thin, tall soldier carrying a grenade launcher. His smart appearance and professional manner contrasted with the earlier FARDC encounter. Outside were several more, two unsmiling types carrying belt-fed machine-guns and looking a little more than purposeful.
Enter the general. Dressed in a dark, three-piece suit carrying a large cane with a silver-eagle as its handle, he was less Fidel Castro than Wesley Snipes. His affectations display the wear and tear of his being at war for nearly two decades. But he denies waging war for wars sake.
After leaving his post in the army, Nkunda recounts, he organised an intervention against killings of local Tutsi, Banyamulenge, in Bukavau in South Kivu in 2004. For me it seemed like another genocide, he says. For me to sit and do nothing and to watch the FARDC and FDLR co-operate would be to betray the blood of my Rwandan brothers. And so the Nkunda legend was born...
DAILY NATION - With all power held by Kinshasa, the DRC will never know peace