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| The camp for internally displaced persons on April 22, 2013. (Armin Rosen) |
The
conflict in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, which I visited over the
last week of April, has killed somewhere between 3.5 and 5.4 million people
since 1996. It destroys human life in crushing and un-cinematic fashion. Its
victims live deep in the mountains of central Africa, and despite the efforts
of a few intrepid journalists, scholars, and human rights observers, their
suffering goes largely undocumented. They include peasant women who are raped
collecting firewood, children dying of cholera in bulging refugee camps, and
starving young boys conscripted into militia groups so numerous that experts
have trouble keeping track of them all. The DRC's conflict might be the
deadliest since World War II, and one of world's worst active crises. But it
also may be the most obscure -- the most anonymous.
In
Kitchanga, the conflict erupted into view during a bloody week in February and
March. The aftermath is still visible, although the journey there is a torrid
demonstration of how the land, a blinding-green labyrinth of steep valleys
bordered with jagged volcanic hills, can mask the tragedies contained within
it. The road from Goma, the eastern DRC's largest city, rises into the
mountains of the East African Rift, where villages stand silhouetted against
the distant shores of Lake Kivu, a harmony of sloping green and mesmeric blue
that stretches far into an unpolluted sky. As the road climbs, travelers can
have the illusion of being eye-level with the white smoke billowing from the
Nyiragongo volcano, alone in the center of the gaping mountain-ringed valley.
The
dirt road is studded with tiny mountain ranges of bumps and craters that turn
the back seat of a Landcruiser into a human eggbeater. The drive is an unending
gamut of violent quakes -- every puddle and pothole inflicts a painful snap of
the neck, along with the mental image of brain hitting braincase, or maybe a
jarring collision between one's forehead and the passenger-side window.
Breakdowns are common on every unpaved mountain road in North Kivu province;
traffic can be snarled for hours if a large enough truck gives out in exactly
the wrong spot. In the rain, the danger is magnified, and we arrived in
Kitchanga under graying skies.
In
the center of town, merchants peddled shoes and dress clothes in the skeletons
of burned-out structures, and in the bare concrete lots where buildings had
recently stood. The downtown was a checkerboard of charred rectangles marked
with lonely support beams and piles of stone and ground-up cement. Life
continued amid the ruins: rivulets of creek water gushed through the central
drag, where motortaxi drivers washed their vehicles and young children bathed
in crowded gutters. Columns of soldiers from the Congolese military, called the
FARDC, hogged the center of a street bursting with commerce and activity -- the
city continued living, paying little mind to its own physical destruction.
Sellers had set up along the frontage of a building that had nearly collapsed,
and the crowds were so thick that I barely realized that its sagging and ruined
backside was still the best-preserved structure in sight.
This
was naked evidence of war, burned-out testimony to a violent mania that had
ground the physical environment to asphalt -- it's a place that reminded me of
descriptions I had read of burned-out cities in Syria or Mali or the Nuba
Mountains of Sudan. Yet the network of problems gripping the easternmost
quarter of the DRC -- "war" seems like lazy shorthand in a place with
30 armed groups -- isn't about competing visions of the country's future or
about the fate of nations or ideas. Capitalism isn't fighting communism; there
are no Sunnis fighting Shiites, or Kurds fighting Turks; no philosophical,
religious, or national destinies in clash. Violence isn't a means to a higher
end in DRC, but the expression of a deeper social, political and historical
rot. Here, it's possible to witness how war can become systemic and normal,
even in the absence of some broader, national-level struggle -- how a region
can become trapped in violent tension and mistrust.
Eastern
DRC calls into question nearly every notion of what wars are fought over, and
what they even consist of. Global decision makers should keep this in mind as
the international community launches a landmark regional peace effort. The UN
is currently taking the unprecedented step of deploying a peacekeeping force
with a specific counterinsurgency mandate, an "intervention brigade,"
consisting of special forces from three of the most professional militaries in
Africa. It will be empowered to go on the offensive against the DRC's roster of
armed groups, and a militia called M23 will be high on its list of targets. The
Rwanda-backed rebel movement launched a destructive insurgency in March of 2012
and then swept through Goma eight months later.
The
rebellion sparked an international crisis that convinced the world's leaders of
the necessity of finally ending the conflict. In February, 11 African
countries, including Rwanda, signed a framework agreement that some observers
believe could mark be the beginning of a serious peace process. UN Secretary
General Ban Ki Moon appointed former Irish president Mary Robinson as his Great
Lakes special envoy two weeks after the agreement was finalized. He even
visited Goma on May 23, just a day after the city's outskirts were rocked by
deadly skirmishes between M23 and the Congolese army. In a brief speech
at a hospital for victims of sexual violence, Ban made the UN's intentions
clear: "[The peace deal] aims to address the roots, the fundamental
underlying causes of this crisis. The intervention brigade...will address all
this violence and will try its best to protect human life, human rights, and
human dignity."
But
it might not be enough to "protect human life," or go after
"fundamental causes." The DRC's problems go beyond civilian
protection, or armed groups, or the revenues that those groups draw from the
region's lucrative and unregulated mineral trade. The situation grinds away at
ideals that are hardwired into democratic political culture. It is a place to
observe things through their absence: There are many soldiers, but no state;
over 19,000 UN peacekeepers, but no peace to keep; countless armies and
militias groups, but no single, unified reason for their existence. From the other
side of the Atlantic, these absences seem like a void-like reflection of the
political order that reigns over the democratic world -- that idea of a
consensual relationship between citizen and state, with a mutually agreed-upon
slate of rights and responsibilities to keep it in place. Peel back this order,
and its opposite is an environment where the conditions for conflict appear to
be cemented into place. Democracy is a human and constructed thing, and in DRC,
its absence has nurtured a conflict so fully encompassing that everything seems
to sustain it, whether it intends to or not.
The road from Rubaya to Goma, with Lake Kivu in the
background, on April 23, 2013. (Armin Rosen)
Rubaya,
a town in the Masisi Territory of North Kivu three hours northwest of Goma, is
a place to observe one of the sources of the conflict's endurance: the
Congolese government, its capacity sapped by decades of kleptocracy and 20
years of conflict, is capable of doing little more than making things worse.
When it doesn't prey on its citizens, it outsources its power to those who do,
and even when it behaves like a government, it highlights its own failures and
entrenches the region's problems.
Though
superficially calm, the town has been profoundly impacted by violence in other
parts of the region. Thanks to the M23 threat, there are now as many as five
FARDC brigades in the lowland forests and hardened lava fields west of the
Nyrigongo volcano. The government is convinced that M23's best chance of taking
the city is through sneaking behind the volcano and marching east. Foreclosing
on this scenario has meant pulling soldiers out of parts of Masisi, where the
army's presence was once unusually strong. Now, after you pass an FARDC base
perched on a cliff overlooking a bend in the road -- just before ascending into
a God's-eye view of the volcano, the lava fields, the lake, and the rolling
green carpet of the East African Rift -- the soldiers, and the government,
disappear.
Except
they don't really. The FARDC recently deputized a faction of the Nyatura, a
Hutu militia, to keep order in Rubaya and the surrounding villages. "It is
a temporary measure," FARDC spokesperson Olivier Hamuli claimed when I
asked him about this decision. "The Nyatura are not against FARDC. That's
why there's a bit of collaboration." So in the city itself, the difference
between FARDC and gun-toting thugs is meaningless: they all wear the same
standard-issue, dark-green military uniforms. Some have shoulder patches
depicting the Congolese flag. Others don't. The difference between the
patch-wearers and non patch-wearers is technical and meaningless, so when
Nyatura harass motortaxi drivers or steal food from refugees, it is the
government that is enabling and engaging in these behaviors as well.
The
area's problems have an ethnic component, and this is where the state's
decisions begin to feed into tendencies that are potentially volatile. Rubaya
and its environs are traditionally the domain of the Hunde ethnic group. But
much of the best land is owned and cultivated by Hutu, who are relatively
recent arrivals. The Hutu now comprise a majority of the area's population, and
they do not always get along with their Hunde neighbors, whose leaders harbor delusions
of recovering the land they've sold to Hutu outsiders over the years. Small
incidents have turned explosive. Last November, a Hunde and Hutu motortaxi
driver collided in a village in central Masisi. Soon their families started
disputing responsibility for the accident. So did the Nyatura and a local Hunde
group. "From a little thing, it became a community war," a Congolese
NGO employee in Rubaya recalled. An absent state is partly at fault, explained
James, my Congolese fixer: "If there's an ethnic conflict in Masisi, it's
because there are no police," he said. "There's no sense of the role
of local authority."
Compounding
these problems is Rubaya's population of internally displaced persons (IDPs),
refugees from elsewhere in DRC, about 15,000 of whom live in a crowded and
anxious camp on the outskirts of town. Overwhelmingly Hutu, about half of them
fled from M23 after the group's emergence in mid-2012. The others were victims
of the Raia Mutomboki, a notoriously violent militia that began as a self-defense
network after the FARDC temporarily pulled army divisions headed by former
rebels from the CNDP, M23's predecessor organization, from parts of nearby
South Kivu. The government wanted to separate the ex-rebels from their local
networks on the ground. The Raia were an unintended consequence of this
perfectly logical policy.
The
Rubaya IDPs are no longer at the mercy of ravening armed groups. But in DRC,
safety is a tight cluster of cramped wood-frame tents, a teeming colony rutted
with steep, narrow gullies and creeks. Children have a tendency to plummet into
them -- one had died this way the week before.
The
absence of violence isn't the absence of conflict, and in the IDP camp, the war
was still bleeding its survivors. I met a thinning man with patches of missing
hair and teeth, who told a convoluted story of his displacement: the Nyatura
had begun fighting a Tutsi group, lost, fled to Raia Mutomboki territory, and
then lost to them as well -- but not before the Raia had started burning villages,
believing that all local Hutu were bandits and thieves. The man's companion, a
younger fellow with two fingers missing from his right hand, believed that
"ethnic leadership" was to blame for these troubles. "They don't
understand how to make peace between groups," he said. Like most IDPs I
met, the men had been farmers, making their cramped, coffin-sized living
arrangements seem all the more cruel.
"Our
village is now a forest," one IDP told me. "Even if we had any crops
left, the Raia Mutomboki or Nyatura probably ate all of them. We are not eager
to go back home." The man was Hutu, as was nearly ever inhabitant of the
camp. I asked him why the Nyatura, a Hutu group, had preyed on its own base of
support. "That doesn't mean they'll protect other Hutus," he replied.
"They're thieves -- all they want is power. The ethnic connotation came
later." As if to prove this, the group charges a 1,000 franc ($1) fee to
IDPs who want to cross the bridge out of town, which is more than most can
afford.
I
walked past a child climbing a rotting, branchless dead tree and entered a hut
blackened with smoke, where a woman who said she had lost four children in the
recent violence despaired of her prospects. "The war still
continues," she said. "I don't think it will end. There is no sign of
improvement or peace in our own villages." I asked her if she could
explain what the fighting was about. Her friend, a younger woman, said
something about minerals and tensions between Tutsi and Hutu which had then
created tensions between Hutu and Hunde. But the woman who had lost four
children said that she didn't even know.
A general view of Rubaya. (Armin Rosen)
Rubaya
is comprised of close-built wooden shacks, dust-caked clapboard and tin hugging
steep hills that are rich in minerals. The smell of cook-fires and burning
garbage is never quite enough to overwhelm the green of its surroundings. The
land is generous, and under the circumstances its inhabitants work it
heroically. In every town, women peddle wax-wrapped wheels of a soft white
cheese, delicious and filling and hardly the only good village street food. I
ate crushed cassava root boiled in banana leaves, a heavy and sweet paste
that's always served with a bag of salty peanuts on the side. I wolfed down
dried plantains and skewers of barbecued goat meat.
In
Rubaya -- as in the entire eastern DRC -- there is a jarring discrepancy
between the abundance of one's surroundings and the insecurity of daily life.
This, like so many of the country's problems, can be partially traced back to
the Belgians, who imposed a uniquely brutalizing model of colonialism
(described in Adam Hochschild's best-selling King
Leopold's Ghost) that left the country hobbled when it finally won
independence in 1960. The DRC had only
30 native-born university graduates when the Belgians left; since then, it
has never been stable or competently-governed enough to make its wealth work to
its advantage. "Since the colonialists left, there wasn't any thought to
creating a good state," explained Innocent Nyirindekwe, the rector of a
Catholic college in Goma. "All roads in DRC were colonial. There were few
new high schools, or public universities." With all of the country's
subsequent travails, "it is really difficult to move forward."
The
east has gold, tungsten, uranium, oil, natural gas and coltan -- just feet
beneath the surface of the earth are enough minerals to keep the global
technology and defense industries humming. Dearth and plenty can be embodied in
single individuals: outside the IDP camp, I met a miner returning home, a solid
young man with dust-stained hands, a pair of cheap rubber boots, and a small
pickaxe looped through his belt. He had finished a day of sweltering labor in
one of Rubaya's coltan mines, whose runoff gives the town's waterways the
uncanny appearance of rushing, liquid clay. He worked six days a week, and made
decent money -- $20-30 over a good three days. "It is not an easy job, but
it's not too hard for us," he said. "It's the only job we have
here."
I asked
several people about the process for obtaining a mining concession, but their
answers were vague: you'd have to purchase them through a government office,
which is time consuming since all the minable land belongs to politicians in
Kinshasa or to FARDC generals. So a prospective developer can give into the
predations of the state, or they can just start mining illegally, hence eroding
the authority of the state. There's no legal or governmental framework for a
mining sector that can provide more than day wages, or that isn't dominated by
thieves and warlords -- the result of ongoing conflict fed by a total absence
of government authority, which is itself a result of conflict. The causality is
dizzying; the government's lack of capacity is an outgrowth of war, and visa
versa. But its consequences are clear: in Rubaya, the Congolese government is
worse than useless. It acts without considering the implications of its
decisions, often in a way that seems designed to sabotage its own authority.
It's
given up on law on order by handing the city over to the Nyatura, although it
didn't seem to have the capacity to govern it in the first place. In a town
with an official population of 32,000 (not counting the refugees) there is no
centralized electricity or water, no internet, no paved roads, and only
intermittent cell phone service. NGOs provide healthcare and even some basic
infrastructure, like water pumps. There are only five secondary schools in
town, and they are all run by religious organizations. Their place in Rubaya's
social fabric is precarious. "If you work in a mine, you might make $50 in
a day -- more than if you're a teacher," the head of a local Catholic high
school told me. "So sometimes the teachers leave. And when the children are
unable to pay their school fees, they go work in the mines as well." His
school had 1100 students, eager children in spotless white uniforms. Just
fifteen had graduated the year before.
No
one is really in charge of Rubaya, but the theater of state authority endures. One
of the city's largest buildings is a freshly whitewashed structure behind high,
barbed-wire capped walls. At least theoretically, the region's mines are
regulated from the building, whose lobby was featureless, aside from a small
bulletin board with architectural charts of the building itself. It had
lighting fixtures and light switches, but no electricity. Rooms were empty; I
saw no filing cabinets or papers, and only a single desk. "This is a fake
office," said James.
We
met an earnest man named Francoise, the secretary for the department
responsible for overseeing the area's "small mines." The process
works like this: some time recently, NGOs, and, he claimed, the U.S. Agency for
International Development, had conducted a survey of mines in the Rubaya area,
to determine which were exploiting their employees and kicking their profits to
militant groups. "After an investigation, they determined Rubaya minerals
are clean," he said. Well, not really: several mines were labeled
"blood sites," including one connected to Bosco Ntaganda, a career
militant and the former leader of M23. Prior to March 23, 2009, he had been a
leader of a Tutsi insurgency called the CNDP. Thanks to the treaty signed on
that date -- the day that M23 is named after -- he became a high-ranking
general in the Congolese army, despite being under an International Criminal
Court indictment for his use of child soldiers during an earlier chapter of the
DRC conflict. He had recently appeared
at the U.S. embassy in Kigali after the group began to violently fracture,
and the Americans promptly transferred him to The Hague.
Ntaganda's
enterprise was unbothered, and five local mines were deemed "clean."
They had each been assigned a regulator from the secretary's office, even
though it wasn't clear what this regulation consisted of. Yet by
"regulating" only the "clean" mines, the government had
essentially given up on the vast majority of mining activity, in which minerals
flowed into the global economic system to the benefit of the DRC's militant
groups. The really bad stuff wasn't any of this office's concern. And then
there was the issue of "blood mines" run by the FARDC itself, a
problem that Francois readily copped to. "It needs a big
investigation," he said. "Kinshasa and the international community
know about that traffic." A colonel might simply put a relative in charge
of a mine -- "regulated" or no -- and reap the income himself. By
awarding certificates of legality to mineral shipments from the clean mines,
Francois's office made it seem as if any regulation was occurring at all,
reducing law and order to a sham.
A man
named Emile Ntabwiko is professionally obligated to at least pretend Rubaya is
under the government's control. He is what Congolese call the chief d'post --
the government's top representative in town. His duties, which were still vague
even after he carefully explained them to me, are discharged from a mud hut
whose only adornment is a portrait of Joseph Kabila, DRC's doughy and unpopular
young president, and the son of the late president Laurent Kabila, who was
assassinated in 2001. Clad head to toe in khadi, Ntabwiko was youthful-looking
and serious. "Rubaya is not really an old town," he explained.
"People came to settle here within the last 15 years because of the
minerals, and it's a strategic place because it's quiet." The biggest
issue he had to deal with was the arrival of the IDPs. "There's
insecurity, and food is getting expensive," he said. He was grateful that
the Nyatura were keeping order, but mindful of the fact that they hadn't been
paid or fed yet.
Later
that day, I sat under a different and even more ironic portrait of Kabila in a
village seven kilometers up the road, straddling a high and narrow ridge. The
town was a sort of unofficial headquarters for the faction of the Nyatura that
had joined the FARDC. I met with the traditional Hunde chief, an older fellow
whose responsibilities included tax collection for the same government that
theoretically paid the salary of the Nyatura colonel whose base was barely 300
yards from his office.
"There's
no official FARDC. Just militants who were given combat fatigues and guns,"
he told me. "They rape, kill and steal." He reserved his worst scorn
for a Nyatura-turned-FARDC colonel named Kigingi. "He's very bad. He
recruits even children. Today, I've received the message that when the Colonel
catches me, he will imprison me for three months." This intimidation had
not fazed him. "The dog barks, but cars pass without stopping," he
said.
Kabila's
portrait seemed like an absurdity, and not just because it depicted a man whose
office was over 1,000 impassable miles to the west, in a part of the DRC that
was at peace. Kabila's father had been a washed-up Marxist exile when the
Rwandan government recruited him as the local figurehead for a 1996 invasion
force that toppled Mobutu Sese Seko, a U.S.-supported dictator who had ruled
DRC for the previous 30 years. In the aftermath of Rwanda's 1994 ethnic
genocide, nearly 1 million Hutu refugees settled in neighboring DRC. Some of
them were armed genocidaires plotting against Rwanda's post-genocide
government. Rwandan president Paul Kagame, a Tutsi, accused Mobutu of
sheltering members of the former Hutu government responsible for the country's
slaughter -- although it's possible that the invasion was ethnic revenge under
the guise of national security, considering the appalling number of Hutu
refugees the invaders killed en route to Kinshasa. Laurent ended up as an
accidental president after the success of the initial military campaign,
although disagreements with his Rwandan backers, suddenly unwilling to pull
their army and military advisers out of Congolese territory, touched off a
second round of fighting (Jason Stearns's Dancing
in the Glory of Monsters is an excellent popular history of this period).
The
younger Kabila has shown little enthusiasm for even pretending to be in charge
of a difficult country of nearly 70 million people. He has done practically
nothing during his 12 years in power, other than steal the 2011 presidential
election, convince international backers of his indispensability, and secure
the loyalty of the presidential guard -- which is likely the only thing
standing between a supine and unspectacular dictatorship, and a military coup.
Kabila
is almost never seen in public. He is the least interesting kind of enigma, a
secretive mediocrity who has managed to stick around for reasons that make
sense individually, but are bewildering if viewed on the whole. Over French
food in Goma, an expat hypothesized that Kabila could easily turn things
around. If he gave a few rousing, populist speeches, if he rolled out new
infrastructure programs, if he brokered a solution to a few of the country's
more solvable ethnic and land-related disputes, or fired a couple of his more
corrupt deputies, or appeared to be in charge of something, Congolese
might start believing in him. They wanted to feel that someone was running
things, even if it was the nepotistic empty suit that so many of them despised.
Sure enough, when I asked Congolese to pinpoint the cause of their country's
problems, I would often hear about the failure of the political leadership, or
a certain ethnic group's leadership, or just of leadership in general.
In
the chief's office, Kabila's portrait was just a reminder of a government that
could do almost nothing right, when it decided to do anything at all. The chief
said that his community had requested that the army -- Kabila's army, at least
in theory -- pull out of his village. Instead, the integrated Nyatura imposed a
head tax, forcing each household to provide a quantity of corn to feed their
alleged protectors.
The
militia had only raised resentments within the chief's community. He believed
that the Hutu don't exactly want to live with the Hunde, but weren't natural
enemies. "The tension is caused by leaders who are extremists, who don't
want people to get along. But the people want to live in peace together."
This
guarantees nothing. Events in DRC can take on a logic that's apparent only when
it's too late: it wasn't obvious that a local military reorganization would
lead to the rise of the bloodthirsty Raia Mutomboki, or that the government's
reinforcement of the area west of Goma would empower an ethnic militia hours up
the road. But that's the logic of a vacuum: absent an authority capable of
isolating thorny and usually hyper-local issues, those issues are pulled into
the larger ecosystem of conflict, where they fester and grow, until they drift
into each other and explode. DRC's conflict continues because no one is capable
of stepping in and halting the process, and the people who could be capable are
uninterested in doing so.
A central avenue in Goma. (Armin Rosen)
Back
in Goma, an NGO employee described a situation that perfectly illustrated the
relationship between government and citizen in such an incompetent and
predatory state.
Years
earlier, a foreign donor realized that one way to improve law and order in the
DRC was by building prisons. Prisons mean that there are laws to be broken as
well as consequences for breaking them; without them, criminal cases end in
impunity or violence -- in more criminality. The new prisons were
cleaner and more humane than what few facilities they replaced. But they
sometimes deepened the problem they had set out to solve: local despots could
use them to ransom or kidnap their opponents; guards would demand bribes from
families delivering food to prisoners, since the state was incapable of feeding
them. Worst of all, innocent people would rot in brand-new jails while war
criminals like Bosco Ntaganda served as generals in the national army. Building
more prisons had arguably eroded rule of law.
There
was a similar principle at play in Goma, where the municipal government had
recently banned motorbike taxis at night, out of fears that M23 would use them
as a covert means of attack. After dark, the streets are a ghostly husk of the vibrant,
overstuffed city that inhabited them just hours earlier -- in the downtown
of a city of one million people, foot traffic is almost non existent after
dark, and the most common vehicles are armored trucks belonging to UN military
police. But this isn't because drivers respect the dictates of the local
authorities. They know that if they're spotted after dark, the underpaid and
maybe even unpaid traffic cops, who are corrupt almost by necessity, will use
the new rule as an excuse to shake them down. Something that seems to indicate
the existence of the rule of law -- the force of the state, the legitimacy of
its rules and of the officers who enforce them -- indicates its opposite.
In
North Kivu, the citizenry's alienation is so total that every transaction
serves as a grim reminder of the state's failures. At my hotel, at restaurants,
with shopkeepers and women selling phone cards on the street, I paid in U.S.
dollars. I never exchanged money -- such a transaction would produce an
unwieldy and worthless stack of bills, and you might be laughed or glared at by
the wait staff if you tried to pay for a $20 (18,000 francs, roughly) cote
d'beouf with them.
The
primacy of the dollar puzzled me. It is impossible to obtain dollars, which are
backed by the most powerful government on earth, in exchange for francs, which
are hardly backed by anything. Every dollar had to travel thousands of miles
before it arrived in the DRC -- they didn't print them in Kisangani, after all.
Even so, the American currency brought in by expats and foreign businessmen had
simply re-circulated over the years, until it blotted out the Congolese franc,
along with much of its practical value. A basic form of sovereignty -- the
ability to mint money and affect nationwide economic policy -- had faded, and
even the small act of purchasing a bottle of water had the effect of condemning
the state to irrelevance.
The
disintegration of the state's moral and legal authority plays itself out in
ways that are deeply insidious and directly connected to the region's violence.
One Goma-based humanitarian professional explained how something like
ICC-indicted warlord Bosco Ntaganda's integration into the military might
pervert everything else in the eastern DRC. "Ntaganda got a good deal.
What incentive are you giving people here to be good, or to follow the law, or
to not take up arms? None," he said. "Are you going to be a teacher
or a warlord? You're going to be a warlord. Because it would be crazy to be a
teacher."
The
night I returned from Rubaya, I met young men who had made exactly that
decision. Their names were Henri, Wolf and Chris, and I spoke with them in a
discrete corner of a hotel courtyard in Goma. They were budding warlords from
M23-occupied territory, leaders of fledgling Hutu militias that were fighting
the mostly-Tutsi rebels. Chris was a thin and intense man who drew invisible
maps on the table with his forefinger as he spoke. He had been a math teacher
before he became a militant. The quiet and muscle-bound Wolf brought along a
fancy notebook with the MONUSCO logo embossed on the cover; he had been
studying to become a teacher as well. Henri was president of a group called the
Movement for Popular Self-Defense; the other two belonged to a militia called
the FDIPC, whose meaning I never learned. Between them, they claimed to command
about 400 fighters, and they volunteered responsibility for various battlefield
successes over the course of our conversation, including the killing of eight
M23 the week before.
"For
a long time, nobody understood our suffering," said Chris. "As a Hutu
living in Rutshuru [M23's capital], no one can help us." Certainly not the
state. "The government is unable to end armed groups," Chris said
with no apparent irony. "Inside the government, there are people creating
armed groups."
He
took a conspiratorial view of his country's problems: "The Tutsis now have
11 [FARDC] generals. Nine are in faction, working together. There are 45 Tutsi
colonels, who continue to create problems. Why do they do that? The Tutsis
already have many things here. Other ethnic groups don't have the same
advantages as them."
This
is a bigoted train of thought, but it hints at a painful history: during the
1996 invasion, Rwanda and its proxies massacred over 100,000 Hutu refugees who
had fled into DRC, a round of reprisal killings too systematic and too
ferocious to be justified by Rwandan national security alone. Later, the CNDP,
the forerunner of M23, had largely been integrated into the Congolese armed
forces after the 2009 peace agreement -- Rwandan-supported insurrectionists
hadn't been punished but rewarded with high-ranking positions in the military
as the rest of the region suffered. Even before that, Rwandan meddling had led
many in the DRC to think of the country's Tutsis as a kind of fifth column,
sleeper agents for the ruthless and brilliant Paul Kagame, whose tiny country
had a preternatural ability to wreak havoc in its much larger neighbor.
Hundreds
of thousands of people have died in DRC because of attitudes like these,
suspicions that can quickly morph into violent paranoia and hate. The three
junior warlords were convinced of an anti-Hutu conspiracy that went all the way
to the White House, which was suspiciously willing to accommodate Kagame's
every whim. Their sense of abandonment was absolute: "Hutu are not against
Tutsi," said Chris. "We are ready to live with them. And Congolese
society is not against Hutu. The problem is Kagame. Here in the DRC, we have
approximately eight million dead, a genocide. Why does no one publish this? The
Hutu arrived in the Congo during the [Rwandan] genocide. The international community
gave them permission to enter. Why don't they do anything to help them
now?" The world had instead sided with Kagame, Chris said, a man who, in
his opinion, "hates, hates, hates Hutu. It's not even a question."
He
believes the U.S., a friend to countries that had sown violence and chaos in
DRC, had abandoned the Hutu as well. "When there was a report about the
Congo, Susan Rice refused it," said Wolf, referring to the American UN
ambassador's cautious public treatment of evidence that Rwanda, a U.S. ally,
was aiding M23. "And when there's a woman raped in India, she says there's
been a rape."
It
was the absence of the state, and of an army capable of defeating M23, that had
turned these young men into fighters. But they were animated by grievances that
ran far deeper than state failure, and that hinted at cycles of victimization,
dispossession, and bitterness that no government could be expected to break.
But violence couldn't break these cycles either -- 400 bush soldiers were
incapable of creating a region where all wounds were healed, and where rational
politics, or a sense of democratic citizenship, could be possible.
Wolf,
Chris, and Henri were M23's enemies. But it is this psychic vacuum, the hidden
corollary to the eastern DRC's political and security void, which the rebel
movement seeks to occupy and exploit. I met scores of people in the DRC, and
members of M23 provided some of the most cogent and comprehensive
interpretations of the country's problems. The people with perhaps the clearest
view of their nation's tragedy were also violent hypocrites: ethnic militants
who talk about national unity; armed thugs miming platitudes about democracy
and human rights, projections of another country's foreign policy -- Rwanda's
-- that insist on their Congolese character. They don't embody the schisms that
drive the conflict forward so much as wield them like a blunt instrument, as if
insisting on the ugliness of Central Africa's ethnic and historical divisions,
and the vanishingly tiny space for resolving them nonviolently.
M23
represents the lack of a viable alternative to the current disorder, and the
seemingly chronic perversion of the entire region's civic life. This, like the
predation and constant bungling of the Congolese state, is a critical
ingredient in the DRC's logic of conflict.
MONUSCO personnel ride through Rutshuru on April 24, 2013.
This picture was taken outside of the local government complex, where M23's
senior leadership was meeting at the time. (Armin Rosen)
M23
traces its origins to the CNDP, the earlier Rwandan-supported group that was
integrated into the FARDC under a treaty signed on March 23, 2009. After the
truce, the Congolese government was mindful of the potentially violent
consequences of exerting any sort of real command over the ex-rebels, who were
allowed to continue their mafia-like reign over areas they controlled before
the peace treaty. In early 2012, there were rumblings that this arrangement was
about to change, and even hints that the Congolese government intended to turn
Bosco Ntaganda, the CNDP leader who became an army general under the 2009
treaty, over to the ICC. Some of the ex-CNDP, and probably some of their
Rwandan backers, decided that the 2009 treaty had worn out its usefulness. The
rebellion began with mass defections in March of 2012, and still hasn't ended.
In
November of 2012, M23 marched on Goma, violating an unspoken international red
line. Well-trained and heavily armed Rwandan commandos reportedly joined them.
The FARDC was overmatched and fled, and in the absence of the national
military, the UN made only tacit
attempts at stopping the onslaught. This was widely criticized, but what
looked like failure might actually have saved large sections of the city: M23
just waltzed into Goma without the costliness and destruction of an urban
street battle, sued for peace, and retreated 11 days later after a round of
frantic international diplomacy -- but with their negotiating position
enhanced.
MONUSCO
actually did engage M23 with attack helicopter gunships early in the crisis --
but that was before the FARDC emptied out of Goma as the rebels advanced,
putting the peacekeeping mission in an impossible situation. "[The FARDC]
withdrew from the front lines late last year, as M23 advanced on Goma,"
says Kieran Dwyer, a spokesperson for the U.N.'s Department of Peacekeeping
Operations. "There was then a decision point of how far do we go
unilaterally in using force against M23. As they advanced further, do we fight
in the streets of a city with hundreds of thousands of civilians? There was an
ultimate call that we would have put civilians at more risk if we had allowed
the fight to be taken inside of Goma than if we had resisted the advance."
MONUSCO evacuated civilians at risk of being targeted by M23 and continued to
patrol the city even as it was under the militant group's control. This was
arguably in keeping with the mission's purpose: after all, the main objective
of the peacekeeping force is to protects civilians, and it isn't really
oriented towards traditional -- not to mention politically-sensitive --
war-fighting activities.
Yet
in taking Goma, M23 and its Rwandan backers had proven their point, without the
messiness of a long occupation: They were capable of seizing Goma if they
wanted to, and the Congolese state and the international community were
unwilling to stop them. The red line was no red line at all.
M23's
return to Goma is unlikely, but it's a possibility that both the UN and the
FARDC are obviously taking seriously. The Goma airport is ringed with UN bases.
Armored personnel carriers full of Uruguayans and UN-labeled Egyptian army
jeeps patrol its streets, and the feeling of a warzone begins well south of M23
territory.
The
last government checkpoint appeared just as the city gave way to fields of
volcanic stone, a collection of plastic chairs where bored policeman hissed
perfunctory questions at any driver with the gall to exit their domain. It was
the first of three checkpoints before entering M23 country. The second was
manned by the UN mission, called MONUSCO, which made an overwhelming display of
force: six emplaced tanks, gun-toting soldiers, pickup trucks with machine guns
in back. The Indian battalions sport tough-sounding names like the "Deccan
Devils," but at least two people closely involved in the UN's Goma
operations told me that the Indian army's main objective in the DRC was to
avoid losing a single additional soldier. For one checkpoint, at least, MONUSCO
seemed like a formidable army, the type of modern force that no one would want
to gamble on having to shoot through (setting aside the questionable
applicability of battle tanks to a guerrilla war in a volcanic forest).
About
a half-kilometer up the road were soldiers in fresh jungle camo, with shiny new
machine guns that made a mockery of the wooden rifles carried by the FARDC, and
high-end walkie-talkies sticking out of their pockets. There is no reason for
an outsider to fear them: M23 has a "humanitarian coordinator" named
Dr. Alexi, an ex-UN physician who makes sure that the group respects NGO
activities and adheres to international law. This neatly encapsulates M23, a
group that terrorizes civilians and recruits children, but still understands
the public relations benefit of appearing to care about humanitarianism. At the
checkpoint, and at dozens of subsequent checkpoints, our car, which had large
signs reading "PRESSE" taped to each side, was waved through.
By
the best estimates, M23 is down to its last 1500 fighters, and we might have
passed the bulk of them during the drive to Rutshuru. There were M23 on the
back of pickup trucks, young teens toting jet-black rifles that looked like
they had barely been fired. There were M23 in matching green rain slickers
standing over bends in the road -- even soldiers who looked like they had
barely entered their teens wore clean, well-fitting uniforms. I saw M23
harassing commercial trucks; credible word had it that the rebel movement's
grunts hadn't been paid in weeks.
We
also passed hundreds of MONUSCO troops even after we had crossed into M23
country. In one town, our jeep cowered by the side of the road while ten
high-clearance trucks passed, with blue-helmets crowded into their hoppers and
Indian tanks following close behind. M23 and MONUSCO know that they have
nothing to gain from a shooting war; in lieu of open conflict, they stare at
each other with looks of undisguised violence and contempt. I was sure that an
especially angry-looking Indian tank commander would exchange words with one
basilisk-eyed militant and was relieved when he drove off in silence.
Two
armies occupy M23 territory, and they are content with leaving the other alone,
for now. It turns out M23 and their Rwandan supporters actually had violated a
red line in seizing Goma -- in early 2013, the UN Security Council authorized
the deployment of the 3,000-troop "intervention brigade," consisting
of special forces from South Africa, Tanzania, and Malawi. In a break with
standard peacekeeping practice, the brigade's force composition and rules of
engagement will allow them to go on the offensive in order to protect
civilians. The UN is dabbling in modern counterinsurgency methods for the first
time in its history.
The
force will be deployed over the course of the summer, and by late June, 2,000
soldiers were already in DRC. In a best-case scenario, the force will both
protect Congolese and recuperate some of the credibility that MONUSCO lost
during a difficult year. Sometime in 2012, members of an armed group called Mai
Mai Cheka summarily executed the local chiefs in a town called Pinga, and then paraded
their heads in front of the nearest MONUSCO base. If the brigade succeeds,
MONUSCO -- and, by extension, the UN -- can transcend these earlier issues, and
the international community's commitment to protecting Congolese civilians will
be harder to question. (The U.S. has a stake here: America provides 27 percent
of the UN peacekeeping budget, including $519 million for MONUSCO over the last
fiscal year).
But
in the DRC, even the definition of "success" is an open question --
especially given the recent history of foreign interventions in the country's
east. In 1996, Paul Kagame and Ugandan dictator Yoweri Museveni's campaign
against Mobutu was thought of by some as the continuation of the remarkable
events in South Africa just a couple years before -- part of a larger movement
to transform a troubled continent, and reverse a legacy of conflict and
misrule. Mobutu belonged to a class of post-colonial leader that needed to be
expunged: a vapid kleptocrat who spewed old-line pan-African nonsense; an
illegitimate president-for-life who would even tolerate Rwanda's genocidaires
if it would increase his chances of retaining power. In its violent aftermath,
which included brutal reprisal killings against Hutu refugees (recounted in in
Howard French's A
Continent for the Taking), and a war between Uganda and Rwanda,
the campaign ended up mocking whatever higher ideals it might once have stood
for. The DRC wound up with the Kabila clan, a dictatorship just as sclerotic as
that of the leopardskin enthusiast who had ruled Congo -- or Zaire, as he had
renamed it -- since 1965. And it wound up with 15 more years of war.
The
intervention brigade will be much smaller than the '96 invasion force, and its
goal will be to strengthen, rather than overthrow, the sitting government. And
it isn't the result of adventurism, but of a 20-year policy failure that the
international community is finally confronting. Yet within the vacuum of the
eastern DRC, even the greatest of charities -- and the defeat of M23 qualifies
-- could have worrying consequences. Will the brigade opt for a light footprint,
and wage targeted, special operations-style strikes on militia leaders? Will it
clear territory for the FARDC, which has a human rights record as troubling as
some of the armed groups the brigade is empowered to fight? Olivier Hamuli, an
FARDC Lieutenant Colonel and army spokesperson, told me that the brigade was
being deployed for his military's benefit: "It is coming to support the
FARDC. They will have good equipment, such as drones along the border, which
will be necessary to control the armed groups." In Hamuli's mind, the
brigade is there to help them fight the Rwandans.
"American
soldiers are well-paid and well-equipped," Hamuli said, after pointedly
asking me to name a military that would remain as disciplined as the FARDC
under the difficult circumstances that it faced. "They have everything.
But they still tortured and raped in Iraq," he said. Given the FARDC's
dismissive attitude towards the army's crippling command and control issues, it
isn't surprising that some analysts doubt whether a UN military victory over
M23 will change much of anything. "No one's saying the offensive part of
it won't work," says one Goma-based expert. "It will work. These are
14-year-olds with AK 47s. Of course they're going to get flattened by South Africans
with tanks and helicopters...the problem is that the brigade is not going to
stay. They're going to move on to the next armed group."
From
Kinshasa's perspective, the brigade comes with few strings attached, and little
added pressure on security sector or governance reform. Some experts I spoke
with told me the UN hasn't really thought about what will fill the vacuum left
behind by the armed groups it defeats. Dwyer says that the intervention
brigade should be viewed in terms of parallel developments in the political
sphere, like the 11-country peace initiative, Mary Robinson's appointment as
special envoy, and increased international pressure on Kinshasa on security
sector reform and other matters. "The idea is that if the political
framework is effective," he said, "any armed groups that have any
legitimate concerns will have an avenue to be addressed at the regional and
local level."
But
even then, the brigade signals the further erosion of the state: "The
Congolese state has outsourced its monopoly on violence to the UN," said
one Goma-based analyst.
Like
Rubaya, Rutshuru would prove that this wasn't really the state's to outsource
in the first place.
The Ngunga 1 internally displaced persons camp outside of
Goma, on April 25, 2013. (Armin Rosen)
Rutshuru
sits north of the lower slopes of Nyiragongo and is insulated by uninhabitable
expanses of hardened lava. On the morning I visited, M23 leader Sultani Makenga
was hosting a summit with his lieutenants and bush commanders. They were
meeting inside a stately government building painted a light shade of orange,
with a Congolese flag out front. It was part of a larger government campus
where daily life seemed to ignore the scores of heavily armed and clearly bored
M23 milling about -- men with gleaming black machine guns and sniper rifles who
would enter into stare-downs with UN tanks passing just feet away from where
the entire M23 leadership was meeting.
We
were there to meet M23 colonel Vianny Kazarama, who would not leave his meeting
with Makenga under any circumstances. For the next two hours, I got a taste of
M23's respect for discipline: no one would talk to me unless Kazarama gave them
permission. No one would even tell me their name.
M23 would scarcely exist in its current form if it weren't
for the support of non-democratic Rwanda, but the group is more than happy to
turn the accusation around.
As
the hours dragged on, Kazarama's two deputies -- unarmed men in fatigues who
seemed as if they were under strict orders not to evince any sort of emotion --
attempted to convince my driver to join their cause. He was a stylishly-dressed
man with an almost brand-new Toyota Prado entrusted to his care. By
appearances, he was a hopeless candidate. They tried anyway.
"It's
the Congolese people who are responsible for these problems," one deputy
told him. "There's no awareness that if they work, they are capable of
actually changing the country." The Congolese people's own passivity had
doomed them, in his view: "With this government, even to get something
very simple done becomes a prayer," one of the men said. "To get
water is a problem in a country with so many rivers and lakes." Compare
the DRC to Rwanda, Uganda, or even Burundi, he said. This is why they fought.
And
they were right, to an extent. "The people who support them are
hypocrites," Pascal, my interpreter for the day, told me. "What
they're asking, their agenda -- people support these ideas. They're saying that
the government can't organize the country, and it can't. The trouble is that
people are tired of the war." But the trouble was also that in a political
culture so warped by conflict, there would be no reason to listen to anything
M23 had to say if they weren't heavily armed. I met their leaders not because
of the sensibleness of their ideas, but because of the guns they commanded.
Kazarama
eventually emerged from the orange building. He was dressed in U.S. army desert
camo, with exposed Velcro where the nametags and insignia should be and the top
collar of the uniform Velcro'd shut, in what would actually be a violation of
the U.S. Army's dress standard. The uniform, along with his tendency to shift
weight between his feet and stare at his phone in the middle of questions, gave
him an awkward and bored affectation, as if even he had tired of spouting
conscious and transparent lies to any journalist who showed up in Rutshuru.
Some of his talking points at least had the benefit of being true, even if they
were intended to mislead: "There is total impunity in the DRC today,"
he said. "There is corruption. There is no democracy. The country is rich,
but the population is very poor. You have seen how the roads are. Even in Goma,
you have seen how awful the roads are. They can't pay teachers or soldiers.
There is practically no government...there are no human rights."
M23
would scarcely exist in its current form if it weren't for the support of non-democratic
Rwanda, but Kazarama was happy to turn the accusation around: "There are
many armed groups of foreigners, which are not local groups...there is the
FDLR," he said, referring to a Hutu militant group consisting of former
members of the genocide-era government and army, "which are Rwandan, and
arrived in 1994. They are terrorists. There's the FNC, from Burundi. There's
the Bororu, from Chad." (One noted DRC expert I consulted in the U.S. said
that she had never heard of the latter group).
This
was an embarrassing subject for M23, which isn't really a Rwandan proxy in the
strictest sense - the leaders of the group are actually Congolese, even if
their weapons and occasional fighting companions are not. But the group still
extends Rwandan influence into an area where Kagame's government has a complex
network of interests. Chief among them is resource expropriation: minerals
represent 28 percent of the country's official exports, even though Rwanda has
few deposits of its own. It is believed that the unacknowledged mineral trade
that's trafficked through Rwanda totals in the billions of dollars. Rwanda
needs access to minerals, and support for Congolese Tutsi militants is one way
to protect their supply lines.
There's
another, even more fundamental reason for Kagame's machinations. Less than 20
years after its genocide, Rwanda is an authoritarian marvel: Flat tarmac
connects the capital to the Goma border three mountainous hours to the west. In
Rwanda, all motor taxi drivers wear helmets, as do their passengers; there are
public clocks in every town, and they are accurate. Outside of Gisenyi, near
the Goma border post, there is a freshly built prison surrounded by high, tan
walls, despairing to look upon and angled conspicuously towards the highway. Opposition
leaders are in jail, the government brings cryptic charges of "genocide
ideology"-- or just plain genocide -- against its opponents, and Kagame
won the last presidential election with over 90 percent of the vote. Still,
Kigali is a city of clean streets and shiny glass office buildings, with
incorruptible police officers and traffic lights that people obey. This is a
function of Kagame's famously discipline-oriented leadership style: when he was
commander of the insurgent Rwandan Patriot Front during the genocide -- the
group that would overthrow a Hutu supremacist government and end one of the
worst atrocities of the 20th century -- he is said to have executed
subordinates for offenses as trivial as arriving late to meetings.
Kagame
has purchased stability in his own country by exporting its problems to
Rwanda's much larger neighbor -- there's no violent Hutu-Tutsi conflict inside
Rwanda, because it's been safely transferred to the other side of the Congolese
border. Kagame thinks strategically: give the Tutsi a veto over regional
stability, he figures, and the chances of a 1994-like hecatomb are dramatically
reduced. Of course, this calculation only proves that the Hutu-Tutsi conflict
still festers, even if Rwanda is superficially at peace. "This is a
cyclical crisis, because the issue of Rwanda has not been tackled," one
Goma-based expert told me. "The issue of the Tutsis and their contentions
with the other groups hasn't been addressed."
Inside
Rwanda, Hutu killers still live next door to the Tutsis they victimized in
1994, while Hutus and even some Tutsis have chafed under Kagame's tough rule.
The Hutu who committed the genocide, as well as their descendants, live just
next door, in DRC. Kagame might privately be wondering whether his country is another
Syria -- whether even the most skilled mixture of canny leadership, shrewd
regional policy, and internal oppression can make a nation forget the horrors
of its recent history, and the contradictions of its current order. Read one
way, Rwanda's policies in DRC reflect a strategic prowess that masks deep
insecurity.
In
Kazarama's telling, M23 wasn't there to help enforce Paul Kagame's particular
vision of regional peace. They were solving Congolese problems, combating
foreign armed groups and bringing democracy to their failed state. They would
even do something about the DRC's rape crisis. "There were 126 women raped
by the FARDC in Minova," he said. In another town, 90 had been raped. The
commander alone had raped 16 women in another. The Minova incident actually
happened, yet somehow this made Kazarama appear even more cynical than if he
had been inventing his facts. Perhaps he understood his partial responsibility,
and the responsibility of every militant, for weakening the state and the
country to the point where its army could go on a rampage of sexual violence
without anything changing as a result. Perhaps this status quo is exactly what
M23 and the Rwandans were trying to preserve.
Kazarama
had adopted more than just human rights language: he also showed hints of the
conspiratorial thinking of other factions in the DRC. The intervention brigade
was authorized because "some countries on the Security Council have been
corrupted by the Kinshasa government. Now, they are bringing Africans here to
kill each other, instead of finding a durable solution." He promised
retaliation if the brigade moved against M23. "If the brigade attacks, we
will chase them into Goma...We have to defend ourselves."
In
May, M23 actually did threaten Goma in a series of skirmishes around the city,
and even managed to fire a mortar on the downtown. But talk of retaking it is
pure bravado. There had been a fracturing of M23 just a month or so earlier,
when Makenga and his supporters violently purged Bosco Ntaganda's faction from
the militant group. Aid cuts from the U.S. and various European donors had
shamed Rwanda into scaling back its support for M23, and Kagame's government,
which has a seat in the UN Security Council, even voted in favor of the
deployment of the intervention brigade. The winds had shifted, and Kagame's
calculations had shifted along with them. "The M23 has a young soldier set
that's tired of not being paid, and tired of being unpopular," one
Goma-based security consultant told me. There's a high rate of defection, and
very low morale. He sketched out two possible futures for the group: "soft
targeting," which would involve a campaign of assassinations and
kidnappings, or strategic contraction and even voluntary disappearance. M23
could bury their weapons, take off their fatigues, and wait until the winds
changed yet again.
Kazarama
continued, unbowed by reality: "we represent all of the Congolese people
who are suffering, the 96 percent who are against the Kinshasa
government." "The DRC people support M23. They are saying that it is
a sign of the disease in the Kinshasa government." He claimed that M23
hadn't created any new refugees: "There are even people in government
territory who fled into M23 territory for security reasons."
I
heard the same assertion from an M23 administrator named Benjamin Mbonimpa, a
friendly man with a professorial air and a veteran of two of M23's predecessor
movements. His office had an immense Congolese flag and a calendar from the
International Rescue Committee, a relief NGO. "There are no refugees from
the territory controlled by M23," he said. "We have records of the
number of people who were here before M23 took over. They're still there. No
one has gone away."
Did
either of these men actually believe this? Did they expect me to believe it?
The next day, at the Ngunga IDP camp on the outskirts of Goma, I met some of
the people who Kazarama and Mbonimpa said did not exist. There are a lot of
them: at the beginning of 2012, there were only 2,200 IDPs in the Goma area,
mostly people who were too old or sick to return home after the last round of
fighting. Now, there were more than 200,000, and 50,000 of them live at Ngunga.
The camp is strewn with volcanic rock, which the IDPs use to anchor their
tarp-and-wood frame homes. Ngunga is an island of poverty set in an ocean of
verdant green, bounded by a tree stump-covered mountain where women are often
raped while out collecting firewood. Overflowing latrines and infrequent food
distributions characterize life there, and the IDPs get enough grain or corn
for maybe two weeks of every month.
In
one tent, I met four women who were weaving handbags out of colored plastic
strips, a skill they had acquired through an NGO training program. They made 50
cents per bag, and their faces were dressed in a weariness too deep for an
interloper to access. "We saw houses burn, and had a neighbor
killed," one of the women replied when I asked why she thought M23 had
attacked her village. "How do you have time to ask what happened? You just
have to run away." These women had been homeless before, back when the
CNDP was fighting the government in the mid-2000s. Their second displacement
was a bitter homecoming -- they'd fled to an earlier iteration of the Ngunga
camp during the CNDP conflict as well. "This is too hard to us," one
of the women said. "We tried to rebuild our lives when we went back home
-- to farm, and raise chickens and goats. We've lost all of those things
again."
Monotony
was one of the camp's chief cruelties. "Imagine having to eat this morning,
midday and night," said one IDP, who was sorting maize on a tarp spread
out over the floor of his tent. "And there isn't even enough...we are
suffering here. There's nothing to eat, or to do."
"This
camp is like a jail," a young woman added.
A main avenue of the Ngunga 1 internally displaced persons
camp on April 25, 2013. (Armin Rosen)
"We
have a democratic ideology," Mbonimpa told me. "You can see that
other political parties are not disturbed in this area. People can say what
they want without any problem. Even international organizations go wherever
they want to."
The
space for political and civic action in the DRC has been so distorted by 80
years of Belgian colonization, 50 years of dictatorship, and 20 years of
conflict that this kind of nonsensical politics is virtually all that remains.
M23's rhetoric of democracy and humanitarianism consists of fake offices with
hanging portraits of a fake president, or militants complaining about the
government's failure to restrain the growth of militant groups, or Indian
peacekeepers driving tanks that they'll never use, and which are useless anyway
-- the conflict survives because it generates such absurdities while muzzling
any real alternative to them. And even extreme alternatives, like the UN
intervention brigade, might not be enough to end it for good.
The
recent peace effort, a new UN Great Lakes envoy, and the MONUSCO intervention
force all mean that a resolution could be closer than it appears. But the logic
of conflict must first be broken at ground level, and peace, when it comes,
will be a local accomplishment. At the moment, the country lives only in the
minds of its citizens: the best doctors, teachers and engineers all work for
NGOs. Oxfam provides water for over 200,000 people in North Kivu alone, and the
Catholic Church operates over 650 schools nationwide -- NGOs and religious
organizations have supplanted the core services of the state. In the east, the
state has been whittled down to a currency no one uses, and to uniforms that no
one trusts. The idea of a Congolese polity has become fatally abstracted: The
state had given up on local-level engagement and institution building and
retreated to a distant capital. "This fragmentation," one Goma-based
expert told me, "lack of communal dialogue, and lack of engagement in the
political process means that everything is centralized in Kinshasa, that
corrupt people are lining their pockets, and that people on the ground are
resolving their problems with the only means they have, which is through
arms."
A
solution is beyond the purview of armies or politicians. A future peace likely
rests in those quantum-level pockets of conflict that stain the region --
through the exhausting and unglamorous business of resolving local-level
disputes, through reconciling feuding communities and rebuilding a broken
polity. When peace arrives, there will likely be grand bargains between
powerful enemies -- the Rwandans will have to be secure in the knowledge that
they have nothing to gain from meddling, and the Congolese government will have
to be strong enough to take control of the entire country. But the solution isn't
photogenic or even particularly exciting: it lies in teachers deciding not to
become warlords, in the honesty of traffic cops, in citizens beginning to live
in an environment where the gun is no longer the surest or most logical means
of getting what they want.
War,
like any political order, is a constructed thing. It's human. No natural law
commands it, and there's nothing about it that's immutable or permanent.
Conflict isn't wired into the organs or the bones, and there is a covert
bigotry to the idea that war is the only possible destiny for certain people in
certain places, or to the notion that there are societies incapable of breaking
out of their own deadly logic of conflict. However enormous it may seem, the
conflict in DRC is as inevitable as any other. There is nothing inevitable
about it.
A MONUSCO convoy on the road between Sake and Kitchanga on
April 27, 2013. (Armin Rosen)
On
the road to Kitchanga, the rear wheels of trucks slid in the earth as if
driving on ice. In a single five-kilometer span, we passed an over-laden pickup
buried to the grille in a dirt crater, a second broken-down truck with its
payload and passengers huddled by the side of the road with no obvious means of
rescue, and another truck tugging a car from a dust trap with a fraying rope. Even
the vehicles that were surviving the journey were bruised and belching hulks,
their chassis rattling and their rusted tailpipes wheezing thick smog. The
traffic on the road was heavy and slow -- James said that drivers now feared
the taxation that M23 imposed on commercial trucks, and preferred to take their
chances with the Kitchanga route if they had to drive to the Ugandan border.
But the road can barely accommodate one truck at a time. Passage of two-way
traffic was a skilled negotiation, a dialogue of monsters inching backwards and
forwards, then honking in greeting or warning, then tacitly agreeing to a tiny
leeway buffered with a mountain-sized drop, then huffing in opposite directions
billowed in clouds of dust and exhaust.
More
certain of their passage are the motorbikes and bicycles, the latter of which
are usualy piled high with bushels of charcoal, and then slowly wheeled to
Goma, 20 or 30 miles to the southwest. This was a lucrative enterprise, James
said: FARDC soldiers, who were barely paid or fed and who live in roadside
bases that looked like refugee camps, pillage local forests and sell charcoal
and timber to the bicycle men, who then sell their wares in Goma at a markup.
But I'd spent the morning watching men push bicycles in the hot sun, with the
city still hours or even days in the distance. I'd seen their vehicles propped
up with logs by the side of the highway, their minders crouched in the shade of
their heavy payload, looking as if mere survival were exacting an impossible
price.
In a
nondescript single-story building in Kitchanga, we met a nervous local
administrator who locked his office door while he was speaking with me and
refused to tell me his name. The terror that had gripped Kitchanga in February
still hadn't lifted, and his account was tinged with a certain anti-Tutsi bias.
He spoke of the "Rutshuru" side of town, infiltrated by seditious
Tutsis who he believed were in league with M23, and the "Masisi" side
inhabited by Hutu and Hunde. He gave his accounting of events: "The APCLS
[a Hunde militia] was called here by the government, so that all of them could
be integrated into the army," he said. They weren't the only ones:
"Even the Nyatura were everywhere around Kitchanga...They were supposed to
support the FARDC in their fight against M23."
A
powder keg had been lit. "When the government integrated the CNDP, the
commanders refused to go elsewhere. They asked to stay here and control this
area. When the FARDC asked the APCLS and the Nyatura to come to town for
integration, the ex-CNDP commanders were in contact with M23," he said.
Who knows if this is true -- the important thing is that the APCLS, and some
percentage of the local Hunde and Hutu community, thought it was true.
The
shooting began when an APCLS fighter was killed in the "Rutshuru"
side of town. A posse of his comrades attempted to recover his body, which
invited a predictable response. "That's when the fighting started,"
the man said. That tiny fire, kindled over months of escalating tension, was
enough to ignite a violence that destroyed the entire city enter -- that
resulted in the hospital getting shelled, apparently by the FARDC, and in IDP
camps being attacked, apparently by the APCLS.
According
to one Goma-based observer who visited Kitchanga a couple of weeks before it
exploded, the disaster unfolded with little intervention from the UN and the
government. "The Kitchanga area has 100,000 people. Everyone was aware of
the problem. Not a single emissary was sent. The UN and the government did
nothing. There was no effort made to get people to the table and have them
talk." (Dwyer says that "MONUSCO was involved in efforts to try to
diffuse this situation," but did not go into additional detail.) The
tensions hadn't abated: the terrified district administrator said that some
people suspected a nearby IDP settlement was actually a military encampment for
M23 sympathizers.
Ruined buildings in Kitchanga on April 27, 2013. (Armin
Rosen)
Kitchanga's
IDP camp is crisscrossed with streams. The city's most vulnerable residents
live atop a rocky swamp, where water rushes and pools and crawls, invading the
alleys between tents and accumulating in every unoccupied wedge of space.
"Everyone is afraid to talk," James said. "There isn't really
peace." The sky glowered, full with the rain we both dreaded.
We
found a tent where two withering women, who might have been 20 or 40 or 60
years old, sat and killed time. They had first arrived in Kitchanga six years
ago, when they were fleeing the CNDP. "In March, when the fighting broke
out here, we had to run away again," one of them told me. Much of the town
had joined them in taking refuge in the forest. "When we came back,
nothing was left. Everything was stolen. Even the brush on the roof of our hut
was stolen."
The
storm began as a hum, as the suggestion of rain, droplets whispering on a tarp
roof. And then it became loud enough to silence our conversation and any
worries I had about the conditions of the road -- to overwhelm even the most
natural thoughts and fears. Our voices faded into the static roar of the deluge,
imposing total silence upon us. The onslaught showed no signs of passing, and
the roof did not leak, even as heavy raindrops shattered overhead.
Then
tiny, clear marbles began skipping trough gaps in the bottom of the tarp, ice
like mancala beads, smooth frozen disks dumped from the raging sky. It seemed
impossible in a hot equatorial country, a place with palm trees and tropical
birds, as if an ice storm in Kitchanga was some deliberate final rebuke to the
idea that anything here, or anywhere else, needed to make much sense. Ice
skipped across the ground like firm glass pills. Even at a touch they would
barely sweat. This was strong and resilient ice -- brilliant, opalescent,
dangerous to our purposes. "We have to go," James said. Before we ran
into the storm, I asked one of the women if it rained like this very often.
Every day, she replied.
The
center of town sat deserted. By emptying the city, the ice and rain had
revealed the extent of the devastation. The blackened trees and lumps of
concrete went further back from the road than I'd realized; the men selling
shoes and dress shirts, now sheltering under flimsy tin ledges, had hidden the
empty frames, the piles of rubble and ash, flat reservations patterned with the
footprints of destroyed buildings.
Weather,
like war, is a situation from which no one is wholly immune. And this rain
seemed possessed with a conscious rage: the sky heaved with force and violence,
pounding Hutu and Hunde and Tutsi, pounding FARDC and APCLS and M23, slamming
into refugee tents and army bases, into bicycle pushers and NGO trucks,
pounding the rocky earth, pounding the empty gray spaces where a city once
stood.
This reporting was sponsored in part by Oxfam America.
Armin Rosen is a former
writer and producer for The Atlantic's Global channel.
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