General Laurent Nkunda’s armed challenge to the Congolese authorities stokes ethnic hatred in a highly sensitive border area, with valuable natural resources also at stake

The recent fighting in the eastern Congo, which re-started last July and soon began to reach disastrous proportions, seems like a hideous afterthought. Over 2,000 people have been killed and 250,000 displaced, half of whom have been cut off from outside help.


Things had seemed to be going fairly well in putting the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) back together. Following the years of civil and foreign wars between 1996 and 2003, peace had finally been achieved and, after navigating the dangers of a complex transition between 2003 and 2006, most of the fighting groups had been disarmed before the elections of July 2006.


If the eastern Congo has refused to heal, this can be attributed in part to causes that predate the last war. The two eastern provinces of the former Zaire, now the DRC, have a large, ethnically Rwandan population. But like the Volksdeutsch in pre-World War II Central Europe, they have been both an economic asset and a political headache. As a result of events in the first post-colonial civil war (1960-1965), the ethnic Rwandans in the east were, rightly or wrongly, perceived as supporters of the Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. This did not endear them to the eastern Congolese who were generally hostile to the dictator.


Heroes become suspects


Mobutu’s fall in 1997 put the DRC’s Rwandans in the ambiguous position of being both heroes (they had collaborated with Rwanda in overthrowing the dictatorship) and traitors (this collaboration, although beneficial, had put them in the role of agents of a foreign state with which they shared the same ethnic origins). In addition, the idea of Rwanda had become an ambiguous proposition: it was both the horrific image of the genocide now associated with the Hutu population, and the angelic and progressive identity brandished by the Tutsi victors.


By 1998, the images had flipped over for the rest of the DRC: the Tutsi ‘liberators’ from Kigali had tried to colonise the country they had previously ‘liberated’ and, in trying to defend itself against them, the Congolese government had entered into an unspoken and unholy alliance with the former génocidaires. Both sides found ready-made allies among local ethnic groups. It was between 1998 and 2002 that General Laurent Nkunda gained his first notoriety as an anti-government rebel allied with Rwanda. 


The 2006 elections were supposed to put an end to all this, but they did not. The former Tutsi rebels found it difficult to integrate into the new ‘national’ army while the former Hutu ‘allies’ went on with their anti-Kigali campaign, hoping that with some of their friends now in positions of power in DRC, they could take their fight into Rwanda itself. 


Exploiting DRC’s weakness


Nkunda, for his part, was incensed that some of his non-Tutsi former comrades-in-arms now had good positions in the new ‘national’ army while the International Criminal Court (ICC) threatened him with action for some of the atrocities committed when he was still a rebel. 


To these issues, more have been added over recent months. The government of President Joseph Kabila has begun to look increasingly stagnant and rudderless. After the resignation of his octogenarian prime minister, Antoine Gizenga, the long delay in putting a new cabinet together indicated weakness and indecision. 


And, even if Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame has been trying to turn a new leaf and drive his tiny country into the unlikely role of a new development hub and high-tech beacon for East Africa, some of his close associates thought it a mistake to abandon the mining wealth of the DRC from which they had richly benefited during the war. This gave General Nkunda a role to play in Rwanda’s quasi-colonial control over the hundreds of artisanal mines scattered across eastern DRC.


Congolese Tutsi businessmen began to finance Nkunda’s re-armament with the discreet support of Kigali, while demobilised Rwandan army soldiers were encouraged to cross the border and help their Congolese cousins, the indirect nature of the help enabling Kigali to create conditions of plausible denial. Given the continuing guilt felt by the international community for not having helped the Rwandan Tutsis in their hour of need in 1994, Nkunda and his backers had an implicit window of opportunity. All the more so since several of the Africanists close to Barack Obama are old Africa hands from the Bill Clinton administration and who came into office shortly after the genocide. As a result, they are very pro-Kigali. Susan Rice’s nomination as US ambassador to the UN was very good news indeed for Kagame. 


Countries that were former combatants in the Congo war are watching the situation closely. Angola has a small military mission in North Kivu, keeping Luanda abreast of the latest developments. South Africa, as the DRC’s peace broker and one of its main future mining partners, is also watching closely.

Rifts in the rebellion


Things have not deteriorated to the level of the 1998 implosion. The DRC now has a democratically-elected government, its army is perhaps a disaster but it is at least not rebellious. Its economy, although unhealthy, is slowly on the mend, and the UN, which was practically on the run ten years ago after its Rwandan debacle, now has a serious force of 17,000 men in the country. 


However, the situation in eastern Congo became all the more complex in early January when one of General Nkunda’s rivals – and an ICC indictee – Bosco Ntaganda claimed to have deposed Nkunda from the leadership of the Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple, signalling rifts in the rebel group that will affect the prospects for peace in the region. 


The situation is volatile. Even if General Nkunda is unlikely to march his men across the country to Kinshasa as his Rwandan mentor James Kabarebe did in 1997, he could be trying to carve out a kind of Kigali-sponsored ‘vice-royalty’ in the Kivu provinces. Its unacknowledged aim would be to bring the eastern Congo’s mining resources under indirect Rwandan control, a dangerous game that could rekindle the embers of ethnic hatreds in the area and stoke the fires of further conflicts in the future.