The article in Slate by Michael J. Kavanagh starts with the unnerving title:
Five Million Dead and Counting: The disaster in Congo is all the more tragic because it was utterly avoidable.
That should get your attention, especially if you work in security and you believe, or have experience, in preventable disasters.
Earlier this year in Goma, U.N. official Phil Lancaster told me, “As much as the international community can feel responsible for Rwanda, it should feel even more responsible for what happened here in Congo.” Lancaster knows what he’s talking about. As a U.N. soldier, he watched the 1994 genocide happen in Rwanda. And until September, he led the U.N. program that encouraged Rwandan Hutu rebels who’d been living in Congo since the genocide to go home.
This has all been unfolding right in front of our eyes, but my guess is that most people are distracted by the US Presidential election, the financial meltdown, football season, and so forth. The core of the problem, in brief, is rooted in a simple list of events:
- After the Rwanda crisis of 1994, more than a million Hutus, many of whom were accused of killing hundreds of thousands of Tutsis, fled across the border to a part of the Congo called the Kivus
- The Tutsi-led army of Rwanda then initiated a war with the support of other countries, against the Hutus in the Congo, including invasions of the Kivus in 1996 and 1998
- A Congolese Tutsi, Laurent Nkunda, who served as a general in Congo’s army, also created a “liberation” war against the Hutus in the Kivus.
- The Congolese Army, supported by the international community, has only made things worse. Rather than take on Rwandan Hutu rebels as well as stop Nkunda’s rebels to calm the region, they have been accused of attacking the same groups as Nkunda and raping, looting, and pillaging civilians.
Only 5,500 U.N. peacekeepers currently patrol North Kivu, a mountainous region with more than 5 million inhabitants and at least 40,000 heavily armed soldiers and militia. Compare this with Chicago on the night of the U.S. presidential election, where 13,500 police patrolled a city of about 3 million that, as far as I can tell, hasn’t had a militia since the 1860s.
Although it is the biggest U.N. mission in the world, the MONUC mission in Congo has never received the full troop allotment it has asked for, and the civilian section is chronically and disastrously understaffed.
Ironically, the current head of the U.N. mission in Congo, Alan Doss, was hired to wind down the $1 billion-a-year operation. Instead, he’s asking for reinforcements. To put it kindly, Doss’ first 11 months in Congo have been inauspicious. He has stood by as massacres have taken place in Bas Congo and Ituri provinces and now he has permitted a rebel movement backed by a foreign country to essentially take over North Kivu.
The answer, according to Kavanagh is to mobilize the EU rapid-reaction force (the former French RDF based in Djibouti?) to intervene. I suspect this will have no more effect than when the French deployed forces to Rwanda in 1993. On the other hand, clearly the conflict is spreading into Angola (who back the Congolese army) and Rwanda (who support Nkunda), with the potential to draw in Uganda and Zimbabwe. As these preventable disasters continue to unfold, something must be done by international leadership.