Baraza

Over recent weeks there’s no doubt that rebel leader Laurent Nkunda’s and his CNDP troops have expanded their control creating even graver threat to the human population and the Virunga National Park. In this article in the International Herald Tribune describes the taking of Kibumba, formerly held by UN peace keepers and the Congolese military

“Kibumba is clearly theirs. Rebel soldiers were working with village elders on Friday to assess the damage caused by the departing government forces, who residents said picked clean dozens of homes and robbed the local bank, cracking open the safe and stealing the villagers’ savings. But Nkunda’s troops may have committed similar abuses.”

The EU has now decided not to send troops to the Congo or to reinforce MONUC but to handle the issue through diplomatic channels.

The United Nations is calling for a summit to be held in Nairobi, a neutral city. Indeed Nairobi has been the hub for peace talks for Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia and the Congo in the recent past.

But will it work?

This quote from the Special Representative of the Secretary General in the DRC says it all

“It is not the peace agreements which make peace. It is of course the will of the signatories which makes peace.”

An online vote on the Monuc website reveals that 76% of voters do not believe that the Amani program will bring about lasting peace.

While Lindsey Hilsum of Channel 4 explains the history of the conflict rooted in the Rwanda genocide and raises an issue that so far has hardly touched the agenda – the struggle for resources as the root cause of the ongoing conflict.

“In 1994, a racist government told Rwanda’s majority Hutu people to massacre their Tutsi neighbours. It was genocide.

“When a new Tutsi-led regime took power, the Hutus, many of whom had taken part in the killing, fled to the Congo.

“War followed them: Rwanda’s Tutsi-led government pursued the Hutu genocidaires, who were hiding in the Congolese bush.

“The government of Congo joined forces with the Hutus. Four million died in the subsequent conflict.

“At one point five African countries were involved in the war in Democratic Republic of Congo. Local Tutsi rebels fighting Congolese forces were backed by troops from Rwanda and Uganda.

“The Congolese government then called on Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia, all of whom sent troops.

“The result was plunder and slaughter. Until a peace deal was signed, foreign armies, local warlords and government soldiers fought for control of mines producing tin, copper, coltan and cassiterite – valuable minerals.

“As foreign armies withdrew, new local warlords emerged, including Laurent Nkunda, a Congolese Tutsi backed by Rwanda. Last year, he celebrated a peace deal with the Congolese government.

“But now, he’s breached that. He says he’s trying to defeat the last of the Rwandese Hutu genocidaires, to protect the Tutsis. Others say he just wants power and money.

“Now, UN peacekeepers fear the conflict will spread, drawing in neighbouring countries once more.”

To be effective, the proposed Nairobi summit meeting has to be different. There have been peace talks, agreements, and ceasefires in recent years, yet none seem to have brought about lasting peace.

One analyst Elizabeth Dickenson writing for Foreign Policy writes in a short well armed piece

“The DRC sounds like a basket case — a mess of groups and interests fighting over land, pushing civilians back and forth in an endless humanitarian trap. This week’s violence is part of a long story that even most historians struggle to recount, one that began with the end of colonization, erupted after the Rwandan genocide, accelerated with the fall of President Mobutu Sese-Seko in 1997, and has seen the world’s largest United Nations peacekeeping force on the ground for the last 10 years. The International Criminal Court opened its first case against a warlord from the Congo conflict.

There is just one reason this war keeps going: Congo is one of the best-endowed countries in the world, with rich reserves of gold, cobalt, zinc, uranium, copper, and yes, oil. The former Belgian colonizers, the current Congolese government, the Rwandan government, the Ugandan government, and all the rebel groups that each party supports are funded and motivated by that wealth.

This is not a war of the innocent and the evil. It is a conflict of buyers and sellers in which the world is intimately involved. “

And she closes with

“Discussion and promises of peace can only stop the hemmorhaging for a short while. Until economics are part of the mix, Congo will continue to steadily bleed to death”.

The conflict is devastating the human population, destroying the natural assets of eastern Congo as valuable minerals are stripped, as well as destroying the environment in which now one million refugees are ekeing a living off. This will leave a lasting impact that is unlikely to attract global attention.

The view about the role of minerals in the conflict is shared by Patrick Alley co-founder of resources protection organisation Global Witness, called on the United Nations to take tougher steps to confront the problem.

Demand from resource-hungry countries like China had made it easier for African nations to sidestep schemes designed to stop insurgent groups from using profits from commodities to fund wars, he said.

Alley, a driving force behind efforts to outlaw the trade in “blood diamonds”, said a much broader approach was needed which banned the use of all natural resources to fund conflict not just by rebel groups but also governments.

It would need to be backed up by the threat of U.N. sanctions, he said.

“If you look at the biggest wars in Africa over the last decade-and-a-half they have all been resource wars and they have been characterised by some of the worst human rights abuses,” Alley said, citing a decade of conflict in Democratic Republic of Congo which has killed some 5 million people.

It’s hard to imagine how our colleagues in eastern Congo can operate and keep the Virunga National Park alive through this crisis. But they are trying to defend that great world heritage and the 200 mountain gorillas that live there.   They have launched an apppeal for humanitarian support for rangers and their families on gorilla.cd and we continue to raise fund for them on the gorilla protection blog here.