UN tests combat brigade in Democratic Republic of Congo

Courtney Brooks, Al Jazeera

First-ever offensive force aiming to quash rebels in the volatile Central African country has made military gains

While the world's attention has been fixed on Syria over the past few weeks, the landscape of diplomacy quietly but radically evolved amid the dense green hills of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

A flock of attack helicopters descended there on Aug. 28, in a town north of Goma, in the eastern region of the beleaguered Central African nation. The aircraft were filled with armed United Nations peacekeepers, along with Congolese military forces. The first-ever U.N. peacekeeping force with an offensive combat mandate – tasked with "neutralizing" and disarming rebel forces in one of the world's most intractable conflicts – was in action.

Within two days, the peacekeepers and army had forced rebel militias threatening Goma to withdraw from the front lines. On Thursday, a rebel group known as M23 agreed to resume peace talks with the Congolese government.

Despite the military and diplomatic gains, what impact the force will have on the ground in the eastern DRC remains to be seen – the country has suffered both internal and regional strife for decades. But the impact on peacekeeping is likely to be profound.

The Aug. 28 offensive has been brewing since March, when the U.N Security Council authorized what it calls an "intervention brigade" in the DRC. The 3,000-person unit is part of the more than 19,000 troops in DRC attempting to fulfill the U.N.'s "stabilization mission," but it has a significantly different purpose.

According to Al Jazeera correspondent Malcolm Webb, the intervention brigade is better equipped than either the local rebel groups or the Congolese military, with tanks, armored personnel carriers, artillery and night vision goggles. The brigade is comprised of three infantry battalions, one artillery unit and one special forces and reconnaissance company, and is authorized to shoot first – unlike any peacekeeping mission before it.

Congo: Why UN peacekeepers have a credibility problem

Christoph Vogel, The Guardian

After 14 years, with a budget of $1.5bn a year, and employing 20,000 uniformed staff, the UN peacekeeping force in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is the largest mission in the organisation's history. Yet the force, currently known as Monusco, is struggling for credibility. On Twitter, critics have given it the hashtag #MONUSELESS.

Peacekeepers have been blamed for standing by when rebels from the allegedly Rwanda-backed March 23 movement (M23) conquered the city of Goma for 10 days last November. It has also been accused of blurring the lines between military and humanitarian activity, and for having an appalling record in protecting the civilian population – one of its two major aims. The second is to help restoring state authority, which requires engaging with politicians and public servants with sometimes dubious motives and propping up an army notorious for human rights abuses.

Monusco and its predecessor, Monuc, never had an easy task. Started in 1999 as an observer mission, a relatively small team found itself watching the gloomy reality of a conflict known as Africa's "world war", pitting nine countries and even more rebel groups against each other. The UN security council enlarged the mission, expanded its mandate and tasked it with ensuring the success of Congo's first democratic elections in 2006. But Monuc often remained toothless, depending on additional backup: during elections an EU force was called on to secure Kinshasa. Monuc was not able to prevent the siege of Bukavu by rebel commanders in 2004 or to counter threats posed by the Rwandan FDLR militia or Laurent Nkunda's National Congress for the Defence of the Congolese People (CNDP) rebellion.

Ironically labelled a post-conflict country since the 2006 election, the DRC continued to suffer from ill-conceived international intervention, insecurity, and ongoing rebel attacks in the east. In 2010 this culminated in Monuc's transition to Monusco, following growing international criticism and threats of expulsion from the president, Joseph Kabila. During the country's second elections in 2011, Monusco witnessed a rise in armed group activity in eastern Congo and the subsequent creation of M23.

Rape of the Congo

Adam Hochschild (July 15, 2009)
The New York Review of Books


As if eastern Congo had not already suffered enough, seven years ago Nature dealt it a stunning blow. The volcano whose blue-green bulk looms above the dusty, lakeside city of Goma, Mount Nyiragongo, erupted, sending a smoking river of lava several hundred yards wide through the center of town and sizzling into the waters of Lake Kivu. More than 10,000 homes were engulfed. Parts of the city, which is packed with displaced people, are still covered by a layer of purplish rock up to twelve feet thick.

Far greater destruction has come from more than a decade of a bewilderingly complex civil war in which millions have died. First, neighboring Uganda and Rwanda supported a rebel force under Laurent Kabila that overthrew longtime dictator Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997. Soon after, Kabila fell out with his backers, and later Uganda and Rwanda fell out with each other. Before long, they and five other nearby nations had troops on Congo’s soil, in alliance either with the shaky national government in Kinshasa or with a mushrooming number of rival ethnic warlords, particularly here in the mineral-rich east. Those foreign soldiers are almost all gone now, but some fighting between the government and remaining rebel groups continues. For two weeks in June, I had the chance to observe the war’s effects, with the best of possible traveling companions: Anneke Van Woudenberg, senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, whose reports have been an authoritative source of information on the country for years.

No one has been harder hit than Congo’s women, for almost all the warring factions have used rape as a calculated method of sowing terror. An hour and a half southwest of Goma on bone-jolting roads stand several low buildings of planks and adobe; small bleating goats wander about and a cooking fire burns on one dirt floor. There is no electricity. A sign reads Maison d’Écoute (Listening House). The office of the forty-two-year-old director, whom I will call Rebecca Kamate, extends from the side of one of the buildings; its other three walls are of thin green tarpaulin with a UNICEF emblem, through which daylight filters. The floor is gravel. Kamate pulls out a hand-written ledger to show to Anneke, her colleague Ida Sawyer, and me. Ruled columns spread across the page: date, name, age of the victim, and details—almost all are gang rapes, by three to five armed men. Since the center started, it has registered 5,973 cases of rape. The ages of the victims just since January range from two to sixty-five. On the ledger’s most recent page, the perpetrators listed include three different armed rebel groups—plus the Congolese national army.

“What pushed me into this work,” says Kamate, speaking softly in a mixture of Swahili and hesitant French, “is that I am also one who was raped.” This happened a decade ago; the rapists were from the now-defunct

Kagame’s Hidden War in the Congo

Howard W. French, New York Review of Books

Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe
by Gérard Prunier
Oxford University Press, 529 pp., $27.95                                                  
The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa
by René Lemarchand
University of Pennsylvania Press, 327 pp., $59.95                                                  
The Congo Wars: Conflict, Myth and Reality
by Thomas Turner
Zed Books, 243 pp., $32.95 (paper)                                                  

     

Although it has been strangely ignored in the Western press, one of the most destructive wars in modern history has been going on in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa’s third-largest country. During the past eleven years millions of people have died, while armies from as many as nine different African countries fought with Congolese government forces and various rebel groups for control of land and natural resources. Much of the fighting has taken place in regions of northeastern and eastern Congo that are rich in minerals such as gold, diamonds, tin, and coltan, which is used in manufacturing electronics.

Few realize that a main force driving this conflict has been the largely Tutsi army of neighboring Rwanda, along with several Congolese groups supported by Rwanda. The reason for this involvement, according to Rwandan president Paul Kagame, is the continued threat to Rwanda posed by the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a Hutu militia that includes remnants of the army that carried out the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Until now [2009], the US and other Western powers have generally supported Kagame diplomatically. And in January [2009], Congo president Joseph Kabila, whose weak government has long had limited influence in the eastern part of the country, entered a surprise agreement with Kagame to allow Rwandan forces back into eastern Congo to fight the FDLR. But the extent of the Hutu threat to Rwanda is much debated, and observers note that Rwandan-backed forces have themselves been responsible for much of the violence in eastern Congo over the years.

Rwanda’s intervention in Congo began in 1996. Two years earlier, Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) had invaded Rwanda from neighboring Uganda, defeating the government in Kigali and ending the genocide of some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. As Kagame installed a minority Tutsi regime in Rwanda, some two million Hutu refugees fled to UN-run camps, mostly in Congo’s North and South Kivu provinces. These provinces, which occupy an area of about 48,000 square miles—slightly larger than the state of Pennsylvania—are situated along Congo’s eastern border with Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi and together have a population of more than five million people. In addition to containing rich deposits of minerals, North and South Kivu have, since the precolonial era, been subject to large waves of migration by people from Rwanda, including both Hutus and Tutsis. In recent decades these Rwandans have competed with more established residents for control of land.

Following Kagame’s consolidation of power in Rwanda, a large invasion force of Rwandan Tutsis arrived in North and South Kivu to pursue Hutu militants and to launch a war against the three-decade-long dictatorship of Congo (then known as Zaire) by Mobutu Sese Seko, whom they claimed was giving refuge to the leaders of the genocide. With Rwandan and Ugandan support, a new regime led by Laurent Kabila was installed in Kinshasa, the Congolese capital. But after Kabila ordered the Rwandan troops to leave in 1998, Kagame responded with a new and even larger invasion of the country.

The Origins of War in the DRC: How the region became overrun by warlords and lacking any kind of functional government

Armin Rosen, The Atlantic

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.

Only the Congolese people can save Democratic Republic of the Congo

Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja
The Guardian

M23, the 23 March movement, is the fourth incarnation of Paul Kagame's proxy group for Rwanda's territorial expansion and looting the natural resources of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

The wily Rwandan strongman has perfected this game, first posing as Congo's liberator from the Mobutu dictatorship through the Alliance des Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération du Congo in 1996-97 under Laurent-Désiré Kabila, and then establishing the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie in 1998 to fight Kabila when he did not turn out to be the kind of puppet president Kagame wanted in Kinshasa.

Unlike these groups, however, which were established out of the blue by Rwanda and Uganda as rebel groups against the Congolese state, M23 emerged as a Tutsi unit within the Congolese army this year, as its predecessor, the Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple (CNDP), did in 2006. Since the outbreak of the inter-African war for DRC resources following the invasion of the Congo by Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi, Kagame learned it would do no good for Rwanda to be so openly involved in invading, occupying and looting its giant neighbour.

The very name M23 is a clear indication of the umbilical cord tying it to the CNDP, since the group claims its rebellion is in retaliation to the non-respect of the peace agreement between Joseph Kabila – Laurent's son and president of Congo since 2001 – and the CNDP on 23 March 2009. Despite its diplomatic language, that agreement represents the capitulation of the Kabila government to the strategic interests of Rwanda, incorporating into the Congolese army a militia group composed of Congolese Tutsi and Rwandan soldiers, and loyal to a foreign army.