WHEN, IN 2006, Joseph Kabila became the first democratically elected
president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, many Congolese and
international observers hoped that stability had finally come to the
country. During the previous decade, Congo had been ravaged by
widespread violence, including the world's deadliest conflict since
World War II--a conflict that involved three Congolese rebel
movements, 14 foreign armed groups, and countless militias; killed
over 3.3 million Congolese; and destabilized most of central Africa.
In 2001, the United Nations dispatched to the country what was to
become its largest and most expensive peacekeeping mission. A peace
settlement was reached in 2003, paving the way for the 2006 elections.
The entire effort was touted as an example of a successful
international intervention in a collapsing state.
Yet over two million more Congolese have died since the official end
of the war. According to the International Rescue Committee, over a
thousand civilians continue to die in Congo every day, mostly due to
malnutrition and diseases that could be easily prevented if Congo's
already weak economic and social structures had not collapsed during
the conflict. In mid-2007, in the eastern province of Nord-Kivu,
low-level fighting between government forces and troops of the
renegade Tutsi general Laurent Nkunda escalated into a major
confrontation, both playing off and exacerbating long-standing
animosity between the Tutsis, the Hutus, and other groups. Since then,
clashes have killed hundreds, maybe thousands, of fighters and
civilians and forced half a million people to relocate. Congo is now
the stage for the largest humanitarian disaster in the world--far
larger than the crisis in Sudan.
The international community has admittedly been facing a very complex
situation: all the parties have legitimate grievances, but all are
also responsible for massive human rights violations; the fighting
involves many armed groups, and these often fragment and shift
alliances. Still, the main reason that the peace-building strategy in
Congo has failed is that the international community has paid too
little attention to the root causes of the violence there: local
disputes over land and power. If anything, international efforts to
bring peace have enhanced local tensions. While it focused on
organizing the presidential, legislative, and provincial elections of
2006, the international community overlooked other critical
postconflict tasks, such as local peace building and overhauling the
justice system. Meanwhile, the electoral process fueled ethnic hatred
and marginalized ethnic minorities, making the reemergence of armed
movements all the more likely.
The international community must fundamentally revise its strategy. It
must focus on local antagonisms, because they often cause or fuel
broader tensions, and regional and national actors hijack local
agendas to serve their own ends. Until the local grievances that are
feeding the violence throughout eastern Congo are addressed, security
in the entire country and the Great Lakes region overall will remain
uncertain.
YOUR LAND IS MY LAND
TENSIONS AT the levels of the individual, the family, the clan, the
village, and the district are a critical source of instability and
violence in Congo. Control over land, especially, has historically
been a major bone of contention in rural areas because the stakes are
high and the interested parties numerous. Land matters because for
many people it is the key to survival and feeding one's family. For
many more, it is both a primary method of gaining the social capital
needed to integrate local structures and a means of securing natural
resources.
In the territories of Masisi and Walikale, in Nord-Kivu, different
ethnic groups, clans, and families are fighting over competing claims.
There are centuries-old antagonisms among native Congolese
communities, such as the Hundes, the Nandes, and the Nyangas. But the
fiercest disputes oppose them to Congolese of Rwandan descent. In the
early part of the twentieth century, Belgian colonial administrators
relocated over 85,000 people, both Hutu and Tutsi, from overpopulated
Rwanda to the sparse Kivu provinces in Congo, and in the 1960s and
1970s various waves of Tutsis fled there to escape pogroms in Rwanda.
Today, Congolese of Rwandan descent, especially the Tutsis among them,
own most of the land, but the Hundes and the Nyangas continue to claim
it as their own on the grounds that it was never rightfully sold or
given away.
These competing claims have gotten far more complicated since the
1990s, as the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and various wars, invasions, and
refugee movements caused multiple shifts in the ownership or control
of land in the Kivus. Many Tutsis in the region, in particular,
whether Congolese or Rwandan, have fled prosecution several times over
the past decade, abandoning their plots or selling them at a discount
and then claiming them back again, sometimes by force, on their
return. The provincial authorities have resolved some of these
disputes since the peace deal in 2003, but land ownership is at the
core of the current fighting in Nord-Kivu. Throughout eastern Congo,
historical grievances of this kind also fuel battles between (and
within) dozens of mini factions from different tribes, clans, and
families--such as the Hemas and the Lendus in Ituri, in the eastern
part of the province of Orientale, and the Bembes, the Holoholos, and
the Kalangas in northern Katanga--and greatly impede the peaceful
return of refugees and displaced persons.
Control over land is also a ticket to natural resources. Congo has
massive reserves of gold and diamonds, most of the world's
columbo-tantalite and cassiterite (essential materials for most
electronic equipment), and many deposits of rare minerals. Since the
end of the war, most of the local ethnic militias in northern Katanga,
which are known as the Mai Mai, have regrouped around mining sites
throughout the region and fought among themselves or against soldiers
of the national army for their control. In 2005, in the town of
Shabunda, in Sud-Kivu, soldiers pitted persons with competing claims
over mineral-rich areas against one another and then disarmed them
when small-scale violence broke out--only to exploit the concessions
for themselves or hand them over to third parties. Provincial and
national commanders were reportedly bribed into looking the other way.
In most cases, economic tensions feed politically motivated
hostilities, and vice versa. Access to resources means the ability to
buy arms and reward troops, and thus to secure political power;
political power, in turn, guarantees access to land and resources.
Tensions between the so-called indigenous communities and people of
Rwandan descent (who are often still considered immigrants even though
many of them have lived in Congo for generations) also influence
claims over political representation. In Nord-Kivu, the Hutus and the
Nandes, the province's two largest ethnic groups, have fought each
other over control of provincial politics. Factionalism and shifting
alliances complicate matters further. In each village, different
members of the same family or different branches of the same clan
compete to be designated chief under traditional law. In 2002, Hunde
and Nyanga elites fought large-scale battles for control of the town
of Pinga, in Nord-Kivu. Hutus and Tutsis of Rwandan ancestry, who had
combated indigenous groups together during the late 1990s and early
2000s, split apart in 2006, after a law confirmed that most of the
Hutus among them were also Congolese citizens, with rights to land
ownership and political representation, thus making the alliance less
important to them. Since then, they have tried to partner with the
Nandes, who won leadership of Nord-Kivu in the 2006 elections. As a
result of this shift, the province's Tutsis have lost hope of gaining
political representation and become both more marginalized and more
radicalized.
THE CIRCLES OF HELL
FOR DECADES, these local tensions have also fueled broader struggles
at the regional and national levels--and, at times, the other way
around. Both Congolese and foreign politicians have long manipulated
local leaders and fragmented militias to enrich themselves, advance
their careers, or rally support for their causes. Local actors have
also recruited national allies. For example, in 1963, three years
after Congo's independence, tensions over access to land and
representation in local administrations in Nord-Kivu led to tremendous
violence between the "indigenous" groups and the "immigrant" ones. To
undermine the "immigrants"' claims over land, the "indigenous"
communities contested their Congolese nationality; the "immigrants"
then turned to national politics for an alternative strategy. They won
the backing of then President Mobutu Sese Seko, who favored promoting
ethnic minorities because they could help him govern without
threatening his regime. Several people of Rwandan descent thus got top
political positions, which they leveraged to help other people of
Rwandan descent increase their own economic, political, and social
power, notably in the Kivus. Still, in the early 1980s, the
"indigenous" lobby managed to get a law passed denying "immigrants"
Congolese citizenship. The measure was not implemented, but it
jeopardized the political and economic status of people of Rwandan
descent and strongly reinforced their fear of disenfranchisement.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, tensions over land and power caused
frequent skirmishes in Nord-Kivu.
These problems exploded in the 1990s, this time with a regional
dimension. In 1994, following the genocide in Rwanda and the Tutsis'
subsequent rise to power in Kigali, one million Rwandan Hutu refugees,
including many militia members, flowed into the Kivus, bringing with
them raw rivalries from home. Indigenous Congolese groups of all
stripes organized themselves into Mai Mai forces, and many allied
themselves with the defeated Rwandan Hutus, who were thankful for any
support that would help them survive in Congo's jungle and for access
to mining resources and thus a means to buy arms. The interests of
Paul Kagame's newly empowered Tutsi government in Rwanda converged
with those of the Congolese Tutsis. Both sides originally intended
merely to protect their kinsfolk, but they quickly started using their
military might to seize land or capture political power.
The fighting in the Kivus quickly evolved into a full-scale regional
and national war. In 1996, the growing unpopularity of the Mobutu
regime among Congo's neighboring countries, as well as in the West,
prompted the formation of an alliance among a Congolese rebel group
with many members of Rwandan descent; the governments of Rwanda,
Burundi, Angola, and Uganda; and southern Sudanese rebels. Within a
year, the coalition overthrew Mobutu and replaced him with its
spokesperson, Laurent Kabila. When the Rwandan army invaded Congo to
support the rebellion, it had two basic objectives: hunting down
Rwandan Hutu rebels in the Kivus and protecting the Congolese of
Rwandan ancestry there. It soon developed a third: exploiting Congo's
mineral resources.
Once in power, Kabila quickly turned on his former allies. He fired
his Rwandan advisers, ended Congo's military cooperation with Rwanda,
and began inciting the population to racial hatred toward Rwandans and
Congolese of Rwandan ancestry. With these groups feeling increasingly
threatened, in 1998 the governments of Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda
helped engineer a new rebel movement led by Congolese Tutsis. This
alliance was less successful than that of 1996 because it met with
opposition from the governments of Angola, Namibia, and Zimbabwe,
which sided with Kabila. The conflict quickly turned into a stalemate,
with a fierce guerrilla war raging in the eastern provinces. Kabila
managed to contain Rwanda and its allies for several years thanks to
local proxies, the Mai Mai and Rwandan Hutu militias. In the meantime,
however, people of Rwandan descent and Rwandan elites developed
lucrative networks for trafficking resources. The Rwandan army
officially withdrew from eastern Congo after the peace deal in 2003,
but part of the Rwandan establishment has continued to unofficially
provide financial, logistical, and military support to Congolese
fighters of Rwandan origin there.
Over the past few years, these long-standing local disputes in eastern
Congo have also been exacerbated by political developments at the
national level. For example, many experts argue that Hema and Lendu
factions from Ituri have been violently asserting themselves partly in
reaction to their having been excluded from the lengthy peace process
that ended the last war in 2003. Similarly, the highly selective
fashion in which national actors picked Mai Mai representatives to the
transitional assembly that ran the country until the 2006 elections
created widespread infighting among Mai Mai forces in the Kivus and
northern Katanga.
These tensions could have been managed peacefully, but the 1998-2003
war destroyed the existing institutional means to do so. Congo's
justice system has collapsed, like much of the state at large. The war
dislocated many communities, disrupting the operation of traditional
conflict-resolution mechanisms. The government's all-around poor
performance, especially its failure to reestablish the rule of law in
the eastern provinces, has perpetuated a culture of impunity, which
has facilitated the use of violence, and the widespread availability
of small arms has made force an easily accessible option for almost
anybody. The national security forces cannot be relied on to maintain
stability, because the utter lack of economic development in the
eastern provinces means that belonging to an armed group is one of few
profitable occupations.
Today, most of the Mai Mai in Nord-Kivu remain allied to Rwandan Hutu
militias, support President Joseph Kabila (the son of and immediate
successor to Laurent Kabila, who died in 2001), and continue to oppose
the armed Tutsi groups--all because doing so is still the best way for
them to consolidate their claims to ancestral land rights and
positions of authority. The Tutsis, for their part, have recently
rallied around Nkunda, who belonged to the Rwanda-backed rebel
movement that fought the Congolese government during the last war. He
refuses to disarm and integrate his troops into the national army in
order to better protect his ethnic community, which he believes is
once again threatened by various local and national Congolese groups.
In keeping with Congo's history since independence, the dispute
between the Mai Mai and the Tutsis has a regional dimension, too:
Nkunda is said to be recruiting fighters and obtaining arms from
Rwanda.
Thus, for much of the 1990s and early years of this century, local
tensions in the Kivus have repeatedly prompted outbreaks of ethnic
violence, with so-called indigenous groups forming alliances with
Rwandan Hutu militias and, in response, the Rwandan government
supporting Congolese fighters of Rwandan ancestry and intervening in
the name of national security. And the situation, which shows that
local troubles in eastern Congo jeopardize the entire country's
stability, is consistent with recent academic research about civil
wars. The Yale political scientist Stathis Kalyvas, among other
scholars, has shown how in many conflict environments, land disputes,
social antagonisms, professional jealousies, family feuds, and
romantic rivalries become the fodder for tensions at the regional and
national levels. Local leaders learn to couch their feuds in the
rhetoric that dominates the national discourse--be it about ideology,
ethnicity, religion, or class--in order to enlist support from
government actors. Conversely, national politicians use local players
to find the recruits, resources, and information they need to pursue
their own objectives. Local violence may be fueled by regional and
national antagonisms, but it is above all motivated by distinctively
local tensions.
SEEING THE TREES FOR THE FOREST
DISTINCTIVELY LOCAL agendas motivate a large part of the ongoing
violence in Congo, yet diplomats, UN officials, and journalists have
focused almost exclusively on the regional and national problems. To
ease economic and security tensions between Congolese and Rwandan
actors, for example, diplomats and UN officials have organized
numerous dialogues and conferences in the region and elsewhere,
including some with the Congolese, Rwandan, Burundian, and Ugandan
governments to discuss their support for various rebel groups, the
repatriation of Congolese refugees, and developing a code for the
exploitation of Congo's natural resources. In times of crises, the UN
leadership and African and Western states, such as South Africa, the
United States, and European Union countries, have put pressure on the
Rwandan government, in some cases by threatening to withdraw
international aid, in order to prevent it from invading Congo again.
After the 2003 peace agreement, former warlords were continuing to
fight one another politically and militarily, while Congolese military
leaders at all levels were diverting funds destined for the national
army. African and Western diplomats from the 15 states and
organizations involved in Congo's postconflict transition endeavored
to convince the warlords to integrate their soldiers into the army,
supervised the disbursement of soldiers' pay to prevent the diversion
of funds, and trained a few integrated brigades.
But this effort overlooked the critical fact that today local
conflicts are driving the broader conflicts, not the other way
around--and with counterproductive effects. Most notably, the
international community's insistence on organizing elections in 2006
has ended up jeopardizing the peace. There was no outbreak of violence
on the day of the polls; many Congolese were enthusiastic about voting
for the first time in their lives. But the elections cemented Kabila's
strongman government, which is bent on harassing the opposition and
carrying on Mobutu's legacy of corruption--two destabilizing factors.
The election process itself was also damaging. After the calm that
immediately followed the voting, many provinces experienced renewed
tensions along ethnic lines because of candidates who had propagated
hatred during their campaigns in order to boost their popularity. The
campaign was marred by major intimidation and fraud, which
significantly tipped the balance of power at the provincial level. In
Bas-Congo and Kasai-Oriental, the contest further marginalized
minorities. The Tutsis of Nord-Kivu could not get any representatives
into the provincial assembly because some 40,000 of them are refugees
in Rwanda and cannot vote. The National Assembly, moreover, now counts
many radicals bent on cleansing Congo of people of Rwandan descent.
The Tutsi minority's renewed fears that an ethnic-cleansing campaign
may be in the offing was a major reason for Nkunda's popularity late
last year and, indirectly, for the renewed fighting in Nord-Kivu.
Instead of focusing solely on large-scale peacekeeping and elections,
the international community should have also taken on other critical
postconflict tasks, such as institution building. But since 2003,
diplomats and UN officials have left it up to Congolese authorities,
Congolese religious leaders, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOS)
to conduct bottom-up peace-building work. And with only a few
exceptions, Congolese authorities and religious leaders have been
unable or unwilling to conduct peace building locally--when they have
not been involved in fueling the violence outright. A handful of NGOS,
Congolese and international, have implemented local
conflict-resolution projects, but their numbers have been too few, and
they have faced too many challenges to make much of a difference.
The UN-led peace process also did almost nothing to promote good
governance or reinforce Kinshasa's administrative hold on the eastern
provinces. This was a major flaw, because the reestablishment of the
rule of law could have deterred some human rights abuses, assuaged
resentment over past communal violence, and brought to all Congolese a
level of personal and material security that might have lessened their
dependence on armed groups. Instead, rivalries were left to fester.
The result, besides a return to major violence, has been the worsening
of the underlying problems. The conflicts have become increasingly
decentralized, and the parties have fragmented--meaning that the basic
issues have become even more localized than before. Journalists and
policymakers often talk of the Rwandan Hutu militias, Tutsi
dissidents, and the Mai Mai as if these were coherent groups, but none
has a unified command structure. In the past several years, the
Rwandan Hutu militias have increasingly fractured; now, factions fight
one another over the spoils of looting, leadership antagonisms, and
whether to return to Rwanda. Subgroups among the Tutsis in the Kivus
have distinct and sometimes inconsistent agendas. Although the Tutsis
in Nord-Kivu are currently aligned with Nkunda, relations between them
can be tense. In Sud-Kivu, the Tutsis are divided between rich and
poor clans, with the rich reportedly supporting the local dissidents
sometimes called the Group of 47 and the poor backing the Kabila
government. Meanwhile, there is no hierarchy controlling the Mai Mai,
not nationally and sometimes not even within a single city. Some Mai
Mai groups are allied with government troops (especially in
Nord-Kivu), but others are fighting against them and among themselves
(especially in Sud-Kivu and northern Katanga). The factions are so
subdivided that many brigade commanders do not control their own
battalion commanders. Even the national army cannot rein in its
soldiers; both officers and members of the rank and file regularly
loot, rape, and commit other human rights violations or strike deals
with the militias they are ostensibly fighting in order to gain access
to resources.
THINKING LOCAL, ACTING LOCAL
GIVEN THE recent clashes, it is clear that more work is urgently
needed to deal with the violence at the regional and national levels.
Western and African governments must intensify diplomatic pressure on
the Kabila government and on Nkunda in order to stop the fighting
immediately. Disbursing more humanitarian and development aid would
help prevent many deaths by providing much-needed medical and
nutritional assistance, which the Congolese health system cannot do.
The UN Security Council should request that the UN use its
peacekeeping troops to protect those populations in immediate danger
rather than focusing on protecting UN buildings and equipment. And the
U.S. government must drastically change its Rwanda policy, threatening
to sanction Kigali unless it prevents cross-border activities in
support of Nkunda.
But far more important, international actors must radically rethink
their peace-building strategy if they want to accomplish more than yet
another temporary cease-fire. Since 2003, most diplomats and UN staff
members have been held back from getting involved at the local level
by four widespread assumptions: they have treated Congo as a
post-conflict situation, they have assumed that violence is pervasive
throughout the country, they have relegated intervention to the
national and international realms, and they have acted as though
holding elections is an effective tool of peace and state building. In
fact, Congo today is in the midst of a civil war, violence is not a
normal feature of life there, local peace building is a legitimate
task for international actors, and elections do little to stabilize
countries or build institutions, and they sometimes hurt. Treating
only the consequences of the ongoing conflict without addressing its
underlying causes is absurd; the situation in Congo must be approached
from the bottom up.
The very first priority must be resolving land disputes in eastern
Congo. For starters, the Congolese government must enact new land
legislation that upholds the rights of vulnerable people (such as
women, minorities, and returnees) and clarifies exactly when and how
legal or traditional ownership rights apply. Throughout the country,
but especially in the eastern provinces, the new legislation must
mandate a review of all land property deeds. Local NGOS and judicial
employees must be sent to rural areas to explain property law to the
population there, which generally knows little of its rights. The new
law must also include a special provision for resource-rich lands.
Mining contracts for Katanga and Kasai-Oriental, among other places,
are currently being reviewed; the process must be extended to all of
Congo, especially to the Kivus and Ituri, where control over resources
is an especially volatile issue.
Land reform must also establish formal mechanisms for resolving
disputes through the local courts, to be staffed with both judicial
employees and representatives of the affected communities, or through
ad hoc arrangements. Whenever necessary to ensure fairness or prevent
creating new resentments, people whose property is being taken away
should be compensated with money or in kind. For example, the
beneficiaries of redistribution could be required to help the former
owners build another house or to share their harvest with them. All
adjudications should be handled free of charge so that the most
disenfranchised people have a chance to claim what is theirs.
In areas where many families, clans, or ethnic groups are deprived of
the land they need to survive (such as in Masisi, in Nord-Kivu, or
Kabare, in Sud-Kivu), the new legislation must also create provincial
commissions to design a fair redistribution policy. These should
include representatives from every local community and social group,
Congolese experts on land issues, and neutral observers. They should
focus on redressing injustices and on finding sustainable solutions.
As the International Crisis Group suggests, for example, in the
territories of Masisi and Walikale, in Nord-Kivu, such a commission
should cancel all the title deeds for estates and ranches issued since
Congo's independence. It should also compensate the former owners of
expropriated land and assign some of it to landless families (notably
among the Hundes, the Hutus, the Nyangas, and the Tutsis, who are the
main groups living in Masisi and Walikale) for individual or
collective use based on whether it is fit for agriculture or animal
grazing. Broad land reforms such as these would prevent new disputes,
improve intercommunal relations, and help extend state authority to
the mining sites in the region. It would also go some way toward
ensuring that the return of Tutsi refugees to the Kivus does not
trigger another major crisis.
It is important that these efforts target all the communities in the
Kivus, not just the population with Rwandan ancestry and its
traditional enemies. Even more broadly, it is also important that all
local actors have a chance to air and resolve their grievances, be
they about land, sharing traditional and administrative power, or
anything else. To ensure a lasting peace, NGOS should help recreate
social links between communities in conflict. The most effective
strategy is to create enterprises, health centers, markets, and
schools in whose success all the parties have a stake. A similar
approach has worked in parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cambodia, and
Tajikistan. Combined with land reform, such a broad reconciliation
program could help stem violence, address most of the grievances that
gave rise to the Mai Mai, shrink the pool of local recruits for
regional and national warlords, reintegrate refugees and displaced
persons, and start rebuilding state institutions.
THE SUPPORT GROUP
IDEALLY, THE Congolese would lead these initiatives. But the
government in Kinshasa is weak and corrupt, and Congolese NGOS and
civil-society representatives often lack the funding, logistical
means, and technical capacity to implement effective peace-building
programs. International actors can help, but only if they make
resolving local conflicts a top priority instead of concentrating only
on humanitarian programs or macro issues such as elections (as most
groups currently based in the eastern provinces are doing). Diplomats
and UN staffers have little experience developing and implementing
comprehensive programs addressing local violence. They should urgently
build up their capacity by hiring experts on Congo and Rwanda and
local conflict resolution, sharing those specialists' knowledge with
all existing staff, and creating specialized offices or departments in
these areas.
Since last year, international actors have taken tiny steps in the
right direction. The United States and the United Kingdom have opened
consulates in Goma, the capital of Nord-Kivu. The UN peacekeeping
mission in Congo (known by its French acronym MONUC) redeployed troops
to the eastern provinces, mostly to Nord-Kivu, and is setting up
buffer zones to separate the main combatant groups. The few existing
NGOS that focused on local conflict resolution in the region are more
active than ever. The NGO Initiative pour un Leadership Coh?sif en
RDC, for example, has organized several workshops with local and
national elites in order to help them work out their differences, and
the Life and Peace Institute has intensified the funding, as well as
the teaching and logistical support, it gives to those Congolese NGOS
that do the best work promoting conflict resolution in the Kivus.
But this is not enough. Furthermore, even well-intentioned initiatives
are often ill conceived. In January 2008, for example, the Congolese
government, with strong diplomatic and UN support, organized a peace
conference in Goma to find a solution to the specific problems of the
Kivus. Participants did have a chance to discuss their grievances over
local political power, land expropriation, and mining resources, but
these topics were not a priority. The conference focused instead on
neutralizing the most prominent warlords, such as Nkunda and the major
Mai Mai chiefs. A cease-fire agreement was signed. But the gathering's
main accomplishment, a nonbinding "act of engagement," proposed no
concrete solutions for local antagonisms. And the fighting never
stopped, not even during the conference.
Donors would do better to expand the funding available for local
conflict resolution by increasing their aid budgets or shifting their
assistance priorities away from elections. They should focus on
helping the Congolese government and representatives from all the
eastern communities work on land reform and the review of mining
contracts by providing independent experts on land and judicial
matters. Donors should also fund the training of local Congolese NGOS
and justice officials so that they can be deployed as observers to the
land-redistribution commissions or sent to villages to educate the
rural population. And they should provide the NGOS with the funds to
compensate the parties who will lose land. To ensure that any
additional money goes to efficient programs, donors should ask the
experts on local conflict resolution and the specialists on Congo and
Rwanda in their consulates to identify reliable local peace builders
in the eastern provinces. They should offer financial support to the
Congolese NGOS that organize peace talks and reconciliation programs,
such as Plate-forme des Associations de D?veloppement de Bunyakiri,
which brings together military, political, business, and ethnic elites
of the territory of Bunyakiri, in Sud-Kivu, and Arche d'Alliance,
which helps victims of human rights violations in Sud-Kivu and
promotes the reform of existing human rights legislation.
MONUC has an important supporting role to play. Although some of its
troops have been involved in resource trafficking, sexual violence,
and some brutal joint operations with Congolese army personnel, the
force's presence has had a positive impact overall. If nothing else,
it has so far prevented the conflict in Nord-Kivu from escalating into
a regional or national war. Going forward, MONUC should start working
on resolving local conflicts and distributing its resources
differently than it does now. (New directives from the UN's Department
of Peacekeeping Operations and MONUC's leadership would allow for
this, but a Security Council resolution emphasizing the dangers of
local tensions and MONUC's responsibility in local peace building is
preferable, as it would help overcome any resistance by UN staffers on
the ground.) In the eastern provinces, MONUC should deploy more
military police and special operations forces and fewer traditional
troops, because the former are better trained for action at the local
level, especially in logistically difficult environments. In their
daily work, military and civilian UN staffers should help provincial
authorities develop the capacity to oversee the exploitation of mining
sites. In addition, MONUC should recruit well-trained local peace
building officials for deployment in the eastern provinces, downsizing
its staff in Kinshasa if necessary. MONUC should also send civilian
staffers with the authority to draw on military, diplomatic, or
development resources to monitor local tensions and suggest how best
to broker peace. The existing Congolese NGOS are ill equipped to
address the local tensions caused by military antagonisms or
manipulated by regional and national actors, and so international
donors and UN agencies should step in to assist them. Such
interventions would help address the broader dimensions of the
violence by both deterring local warlords and offering them the
possibility of development assistance.
In the long term, local peace will be sustainable only if the
Congolese state is stable and its institutions are built up at all
levels. To that end, the Congolese government must develop ways to
integrate all the armed groups, including Nkunda's troops and the Mai
Mai, into the national army; rebuild its justice system (an essential
step toward ending impunity and thus deterring violence, assuaging
communal resentment, and promoting good governance); and solve the
security problem posed by the Rwandan Hutu militias (by resettling
those Rwandan Hutus who are not guilty of war crimes and launching a
campaign with MONUC to capture any perpetrators of atrocities on the
Congolese population and the few Rwandans guilty of genocide still
present in the Kivus). These would be extremely difficult tasks
anywhere, and Congo, with its weak state, fragmented political arena,
refugee flows, and poor infrastructure, is a particularly challenging
environment. But with over a thousand people still dying there every
day and the Kivus in the midst of a conflict that could easily engulf
the Great Lakes region again, something must be done. The best
approach is to make a priority of treating core problems at the local
level, especially long-standing land disputes, rather than focusing
exclusively on managing their broader consequences. When it comes to
Congo, international actors should work, quite literally, from the
ground up.