Kony hiding in Central African Republic

That is the price country pays for having failed states as neighbors. As the pressure became too great on the LRA in Uganda, they fled to South Sudan. When the fighting became problematic there they established bases in Democratic Republic of the Congo. And now that the governments of South Sudan, DRC and Uganda has jointly attacked the LRA, they have moved further northwest to CAR. If the LRA had been operating in Germany or in Malaysia, they would have had no choice but to abdicate after the pressure got too high in their country; there were simply no weak neighbors keep on fighting.

The LRA claims its whole leadership survived last week's attack. This is not too surprising given their skills at avoiding military strikes in the past. But although the guerrilla is alive and well, there is no escaping the fact that it is on the run and it is getting farther and farther from Uganda. While it is not the optimal solution for Northern Uganda, the distance between them and Kony allow reconstruction to happen and a semblance of normal life to restart. Hopefully by the time (and if) the LRA comes back, Acholi communities and the Ugandan government will be resilient enough to withstand them. As for CAR, god bless them; the last thing they needed was yet another rebel group.

Civil War to restart in South Sudan?

There has been clashes in the oil-rich Southern Sudanese town of Abyei between Sudanese government soldiers (who were violating ceasefire agreement by being in the city) and the Southern Sudanese police, causing several thousands people to flee. The Sudanese troops have withdrawn for now but this is a bad sign. Both factions want to control this oil-rich region; Khartoum is deriving most of its foreign currency from it and the Southern Sudanese government knows it can not win if the Sudanese government controls the oil fields. This might be the first step toward faltering of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement signed in 2005 in Sudan and a return to the civil war which gripped the country for over 40 years. If this is correct, this is one of the saddest news of 2008, even for a skeptic like me who never believed too much in the CPA (but I still had a bit hope).

In seemingly unrelated news, DR Congo, Uganda and Southern Sudan have attacked LRA positions over the past days, breaking the peace process. Kony (LRA's leader) did not agree to sign a peace deal because of the ICC warrant on his head, (although it might be because after decades in the bush, he can not envision living any other way) so the governments of the region decided to attempt to eliminate him instead in a coordinated strike. Although it might not look connected to Abyei, it is. If the civil war is reignited in Sudan, the LRA will once again get funding and help from Khartoum; they will be in a stronger position and more difficult to deal with, causing more violence and destruction. That is why I said it was very important to reach a peace deal with Kony before the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in Sudan fell apart.

Let's hope the region does not fall apart.

Lord's Resistance Army refuses to sign peace because of ICC

Kony, the reclusive leader from one of the worst guerrilla group in the world, the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) of Northern Uganda, has refused to sign a peace deal this weekend that he was apparently supposed to sign. "Kony says he will not sign until the issue of the ICC (International Criminal Court) is resolved, until the deferrals are made," according to Riek Machar, the vice president of South Sudan. The ICC issue is that Kony has been indicted for war crimes at the international court and it has proven to be a problem because the bureaucrats at The Hague refuse to negotiate. For them no deal is possible because Kony is a war criminal and should be brought to justice.

The LRA is one of the world's deadliest rebel groups. It has been in the field for over 20 years, mainly in Northern Uganda but also with bases in DR Congo and Southern Sudan. They have a reputation for being very dangerous and unpredictable, for raping entire villages and for forcing child to kill their family so that they can not go back in their villages before enrolling them as child soldiers. They have displaced over two millions people and killed several thousands.

So Kony IS a war criminal, there is no doubt about that. But the issue here is realism vs justice. Those who thinks western conception of justice should be imposed all over the world no matter the costs will applaud the ICC's attitude with the LRA. They think the population in the region will suffer greatly but it is all for the greater good of mankind. The logic being that when other rebel leaders see they can not escape ICC indictment, they will stop doing war crimes and the planet will be a better place (criminal law has not exactly stopped people in the west from doing crimes although it has probably reduced the number). These are very noble intentions.

But the other side of the argument is that the LRA, the Ugandan government, the Southern Sudan government and the people directly involved by the rebellion (Acholi in Northern Uganda being the main group) desperately want peace. The guerrilla has been operating for 20 years, making normal life totally impossible in the region, even though the rest of the country has been happy, prosperous and stable for that timeframe, growing at 6% a year. The people merely want to be able to lead normal lives and for this, they are ready to forgive Kony. Kony has repeatedly said over the past two years that he is ready for peace and that he wants a place to retire, but it is impossible because of the ICC warrants. Since the ICC has no power to arrest Kony and destroy the LRA, all this does is force the conflict to continue even though all parties involved wants it to end. In other words, the bureaucrats from The Hague have decided to make the people from this region continue to suffer for an untold number of years for their abstract conception of justice. The window for peace might be closing as the CPA elections and referendum in Sudan might reignite the civil war. If it restarts, Kony will most certainly receive heavy backing from Khartoum as he did before, and might not be amenable for negotiations for years to come.

This story has gone mostly unreported in the western world because Africans suffering and dying apparently does not make for an interesting news story. But I hope that at least the men and women working at the ICC realizes the cost they are asking the poorest people in the world to bear for their vision of justice. I hope they have trouble sleeping at night sometimes, because the people of Northern Uganda have been having nightmares for more than 20 years.

Peace in Northern Uganda?

JUBA, Sudan (Reuters) - Uganda's fugitive rebel leader Joseph Kony will sign a final peace deal at the weekend to end a two-decade insurgency that has destabilised a swathe of central Africa, the talks' chief mediator said on Wednesday.

Mediators gave Kony, head of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), until the end of November to sign the pact after he repeatedly snubbed negotiators and plunged the peace process into disarray in April when he failed to ink the deal.

The chief mediator and south Sudan's vice president, Riek Machar, told reporters Kony had said he would sign the agreement on Saturday on the remote border between Congo and southern Sudan, which has hosted the tortuous peace talks since 2006.

"Yes, he has said that, and the indications are that he will," Machar told reporters in south Sudan's capital Juba. -Reuters

I would not start dancing in the streets just yet. Kony is not the most reliable guy on earth and it would not be the first time that he lied. But he has shown signs of wanting to get out of this conflict for the past two years, I guess he is tired of living guerrilla style. Also, it will be interesting to see how the ICC reacts if a peace is signed. Will they cut a deal or will they seek "justice" despite what the Southern Sudanese government, the Ugandan government and the LRA wants? Something to follow.

Explaining the crisis in Congo Part 2: 1990 to the Second Congo War

Part 1 here.

The last post ended with a crumbling DR Congo and Rwandese Tutsi exile living in Uganda preparing to invade their "homeland" after being shown they were unwelcome to stick around in Uganda.

The early 1990s was marked by two key events. The first one was the disorder in DR Congo. After almost 3 decades of slow decay under Mobutu, things finally blew over in the early 1990s; and this time no ally would come to his rescue as the US felt no need to back such a corrupt dictator in a post Cold War environment. The early 1990s was marked by chaos, looting and the final breakdown of public order in DR Congo. But Mobutu survived. The country was in chaos and he didn't control most of it, but no one managed to topple him.

The second one was the invasion of Rwanda by the Tutsi-dominated Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) in 1990. The initial invasion was far from a frank success; the RPF leader Fred Rwigiema was killed very early and they were rebuffed, they managed to hold only a small part of northern Rwanda. Paul Kagame took over and the RPF settled in a long drawn-out guerrilla war, a sort of replay of Museveni's years in the bush. After 3 decades in exile in english speaking Uganda, RPF Tutsi were more comfortable with english than French (the colonial language in Rwanda). France, always ready to involve itself in African conflicts, saw it as a clear case of Anglo-American takeover of its "francophonie"'s sphere of interest. So they backed the Hutu government (and through them, the militias) without asking questions.

To understand what follows, it is important to remember that the massacre of 200 000 Hutus in Burundi in 1972 was still relatively fresh memory at the time, barely 18 years old. So it is understandable that Hutus were afraid of a Tutsi take over. Hutu politicians successfully stoked that fear through radio propaganda against Tutsi. They built militias - interahamwe and impuzamugambi - whose goal was to eliminate Tutsis. They were wide scale operations. It wasn't a few crazy people talking loud but with no support; they involved a significant percentage of the population. Also, coffee prices had dropped in the late 1980s, drastically reducing income. Population density had become so high that it was becoming hard for people to be able to grow enough food to be able to feed themselves, let alone make money. This precarity made people more amenable to put the blame on some external enemy. Pogroms happened with increasing frequency during those years, most often targeting Tutsi.

The civil war went on between the RPF and the government, displacing several hundred thousands people. In 1993, a cease-fire was agreed which was planned to lead to a power-sharing government. The Hutu government was ready for a compromise, but the Hutu hardliners would have none of it. On April 6th 1994, while the negotiations were still on going, the president's plane was killed. There are no proof on who did it, but most signs point out in the Hutu hardliners' direction.

In any case, the Hutu militias wasted no time. Within hours of his murder the genocide was underway. All over Rwanda, the militias massacred by hand hundreds of thousands of Tutsi, along with moderate Hutus. Also, lots of people used the chaos to kill people they didn't like to settle scores, like in The Terror in France. As I mentioned before, a very significant portion of the country was involved in the militias; so almost everyone was involved or had a family member involved in the killing. It takes a lot of work to kill 800 000 people by hand. The international community did nothing. What saved the Tutsi was the RPF. After 4 months of fighting they managed to end the genocide. RPF did do some counter massacres but nothing close to the scale of the genocide.

France wanted to help the Hutus against those anglophone Tutsi, but they feared an international backlash. However, when it was clear the Hutus were losing, they volunteered themselves for a "UN-backed" operation to establish "humanitarian corridors". Why? Well when the Hutu militias realized they had lost, they decided to exile themselves to DR Congo where they could regroup in refugee camp and retake the country, forcing more than a million people to go with them. France's operation Turquoise was planned to make it safe for the Hutu militiamen to retreat to Congo while doing almost nothing for the genocide even though they successfully marketed it as such (they never went in the areas most affected by the genocide and reports from french soldiers clearly show that they were told to help Hutus). François Mitterand's career started in a regime that supported genocide (Vichy France) and it ended with another one.

It is interesting to note that thorough the genocide, NGO and government kept calling on the RPF to stop the civil war so they could establish "humanitarian corridors", they didn't understand and most probably still don't understand that this would have only led to a more complete genocide. The lessons that was learned from this crisis was clear. When the world said "Never Again", what they meant was that you'd have to enforce it on your own, because the world would certainly not move an inch for that slogan. The Tutsi learned that lesson the hard way and would not forget it.

More than a million Hutu were massed on the other side of the border in DR Congo. The Western countries desperately wanted to be seen as if they were doing something about Rwanda, but the country seemed too unstable to send aid there. So the Hutu refugees would do. Mobutu saw this crisis as an opportunity. He agreed to let Western countries help the refugees and the money poured in DR Congo (with Mobutu taking a cut, of course). Every NGO, every celebrity and politician that wanted to improve its image went in Eastern DR Congo to be seen helping those poor Rwandan refugees. Very few understood that they were helping those that had committed the genocide, that they were still armed, they were still killing Tutsi in DR Congo, that the camp leaders were artificially inflating the numbers and were selling surplus at a profit to buy weapons and were using the camps as a base to raid RPF controlled Rwanda. A few courageous NGO, most notably MSF, decided they didn't want to fund an invasion and withdrew from the camps. But most were desperate to be seen with Rwandese refugees to keep money pouring from westerners who didn't understand the situation.

The situation remained like this for two years. Rwanda was not happy with instability along its border which could explode any day and Hutu extremists in the refugee camps were killing Congolese Tutsi. The lessons of the past few years were clear, the international community would do nothing to protect those Tutsi, if the RPF wanted them to be safe they would have to take care of it. Uganda was in a similar boat; Mobutu didn't like Museveni who was happy to let rebel groups such as LRA and ADF use DRC to stage attacks on Uganda. But they couldn't officially invade a sovereign country like this, it would have been a PR disaster. After a South-Kivu official declared an order for all Tutsi living in DRC to leave the country or be killed, they found a low life thug named Laurent Kabila, which I talked about in part I and who had been fighting a small guerrilla war against Mobutu for decades, boosted his army with Rwandese/Ugandese soldiers and attacked. That was the First Congo War. The rot was so deep in DRC that the country fell within a year with almost no serious armed resistance from the government. Hutu forces were chased from their camps. Many decided to head back to Rwanda but several tens of thousands headed further in DR Congo.

By 1997, Kabila had overthrown Mobutu and installed himself in Kinshasa. Rwanda and Uganda had achieved many of its objectives: they had their man in Kinshasa, the Hutus/LRA/ADF were severely weakened, Congolese Tutsi were relatively safe and they controlled several very profitable resources in Eastern DRC such as coltan. But things didn't remain that way for long. Kabila felt safe in Kinshasa, far away from the Great Lakes. So in summer of 1998, he decided to kick all Rwandese and Ugandese advisers out of Kinshasa and the Second Congo War started shortly thereafter. This was to be the deadliest conflict since World War 2.

I think I'll cut here for part 2. Part 3 will follow from the start of the Second Congo War.

Explaining the crisis in Congo part 1: From colonies to 1990

As explained in the introduction, this isn't by any stretch of the imagination an attempt to write an exhaustive history of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC or Congo from this point), Uganda and Rwanda. It is merely an attempt to give the minimum amount of information to be able to understand the crisis in eastern DRC to a level higher than “primitive tribal hatred make them hate and fight each other”.

Let's first start with Rwanda and Uganda, two countries from the Great Lakes region of Central Africa. When the first European explorers arrived in the region, they were stunned to find highly organized kingdoms, seemingly lost in the middle of the continent*. The British claimed Uganda, which they ruled with a relatively soft hand (compared, let’s say, to its neighbor to the north or the west); although they planted the seeds that would lead to chaos after they left. They attempted to govern through local chieftains because it was easier and cheaper. But not all of the kings from the different kingdoms that now comprise Uganda were equally friendly to the British. So they decided it would be simpler to have the friendly Bugandan monarchy and its bureaucracy deal with the whole country (I'll let you guess where the name of the country came from). That didn't go too well with the rest of the country. This would be like if a superpower had colonized Europe and had decided to rule all of it with French officials.

At the same time, the British Army somehow decided that they preferred to recruit among people from Northern Uganda because they were felt to be better fighters. Needless to say that when independence came in 1962, having a monarchy that was hated everywhere (but the old Bugandan kingdom, a small part of the country) and a military that was drawn from the poorer northern provinces, wasn't the best recipe for stability. Within a few years, the military took over and dissolved the monarchy. But before we finish that story let's look at Rwanda.

A bit to the south, the small kingdom of Rwanda was claimed by the Germans. They didn't have time to do too much as they were driven out in WW1. The country, along with its southern neighbor, Burundi, was given to Belgium. Both German and Belgian officials noticed that the country was divided in what appears to be two ethnic groups; the cattle-herding Tutsi that were felt to have a more "European" built (taller, slender nose) and the Hutu farmers that were thought of as more "Bantu" (shorter, wider nose). The Tutsi had historically been in charge of most of the country, but the boundaries between the group was fluid. It was possible for a Hutu to "move up" to Tutsi if he became rich enough to buy cattle and Hutu had responsibilities in Tutsi rule.

The Belgian administration gave to every citizen of the country an identity card with their "ethnic group" on it; thus officializing and sclerosing the identity dichotomy. This is an important nuance to understand. Belgian officials didn't invent the ethnic differences, but they recorded it officially and thus froze the boundaries between the two groups. At the same time, they taught in school their racial theories on how the Tutsi and Hutu differed and how superior the Tutsi were. The Tutsi were favored by the colonial administration and received a better education. So when the nationalist tide started blowing on the continent; it was Tutsi who were the most vocal about independence, since the educated were disproportionately represented in nationalist movements. The Belgian administrators saw this as a treason from the Tutsi who they felt they had given every advantages. They started favoring Hutu in local elections and giving them more power. At the same time, virulent Hutu nationalism began to form in reaction to Tutsi rule.

Long story short, things turned violent and by independence in 1962, Hutu were in charge in Rwanda. There had also been widespread massacre of Tutsi, killing several thousands and forcing tens of thousands of other into exile into Uganda and Eastern Congo. Both of those exile groups are playing a key role in the current crisis, so keep them in mind. Those exiles attempted to retake the country a few times, without much success. It is also worth noting that in Burundi, a country with similar ethnic group as Rwanda, the Tutsi monarchy managed to stay in power. They fought hard against Hutu, the worse case, but by no mean the only one, being the 1972 massacres in which at least 200 000 were killed. That only increased Tutsi hatred among Hutu in Rwanda. The Tutsi exile in Uganda eventually gave up trying to retake their homeland, but they found they weren't welcome in Uganda either. The country was in constant chaos and the other groups believed they were foreigners, stealing precious resources.

Uganda was lead by corrupt and violent dictators for two decades, including the famous Idi Amin who was recently portrayed in a movie. He overstretched his hand by attacking Tanzania in 1978 and was quickly pushed back. A new government was voted in 1980 to chose Amin's successor. But the voting was marked with several irregularities which led to one of the man who lost the election, Yoweri Museveni, to take the bush and start a guerrilla war. He elicited the support of various ethnic groups, like the Tutsi; with several of them rising to high ranks. In 1986, Museveni took power in Kampala, marking the beginning of stability for most of Uganda. Insurgencies have continued in the north, where all the previous dictators came from (remember that the British had trained mostly northerners in the military). But overall, the country has been remarkably stable for the past 22 years.

But Museveni had a problem. He was friendly with Tutsi as they had fought hard with him in the bush for more than five years and had several of them in the upper echelon of his government. But they were deeply unpopular in the country. He tried to protect them at first, but slowly he bowed to political pressure. They were removed from the military, and the government recognized them as foreigners with basically no rights. In this environment, the Tutsi in Uganda started dreaming about taking back the "homeland" of their parents, by force in necessary.

Now we turn to the history of the country that was alternatively known as the Congo Free State, Belgian-Congo, Republic of Zaire and now Democratic Republic of the Congo. Congo was the vision of a very ambitious man: King Leopold II of Belgium (who actually owned the country personally for several years, before transferring it to Belgium government). He managed to grab this huge country because other Great Powers preferred that tiny Belgium have it instead of one of their rival. The story of colonialism in DRC is heart wrenching, even for a period of history that wasn't known for being rosy for Africa. The country was full of rubber just at the time that rubber demand was increasing worldwide, but before plantations were established to satisfy it. So prices were high and Belgium found itself sitting on a gold mine; and they made sure not to miss the opportunity. They forced the Congolese to gather huge amounts of rubber for them threatening to kill villagers or cut their arms if they didn’t comply.

This brutal practice was only stopped because an international outcry eventually shamed the Belgians into stopping, or at least slowing, what amounted to mass murder. More than 4 millions were killed and a government report found that half of the Congolese died during this period**. Things eventually stabilized, transport infrastructure was built, but almost nothing was done for the local people. By independence, the number of high school graduate was less than a hundred.

Following independence there were some crisis like the assassination of leftist nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba (with the help of the CIA and Belgian secret services, who feared he would align the country with the USSR), the crushing of an independence movement in Katanga and a low-level guerilla in the east by a fellow named Joseph Kabila (who was helped at one time by Che Guevara and several other Cubans – also keep in mind this man, he’ll be an actor in Part 2).

But soon enough a fellow named Mobutu Sese Seko took power and the story of post-independence DRC can be summed up from this point in two words: corruption and decay***. He was a staunch US ally, which he used shamelessly to secure funding for himself; and the US were ready to pay because they wanted to keep Congo in the “free world”. He basically let the country crumble while he lived the high life. He also had no qualms about using his country as a base for various armed movements. The country was too big for him to be held accountable by the population but big enough to give him enough money to secure a strong base using patronage. The story of post-independence DRC is basically one of slow decay with an infrastructure that collapsed in ruin, so much so that today even relatively short trips (200-300 km) have to be made by planes because the roads are unusable.

But in the early 1990's, the fall of the Soviet Union lead the US to question its backing of such a corrupt dictator which weakened Mobutu's grip on power. DRC was a unified country only from the corridors of Turtle Bay, the reality on the ground was totally different although it hadn't exploded yet. The colossus of Central Africa was standing as strong as a house of cards. So when Tutsi decided to invade Rwanda, they set into motion a chain of event that would lead to the deadliest genocide and the deadliest war since World War 2. To be continued…

* Jean-Pierre Chrétien: The Great Lakes of Africa: Two Thousand Years of History
** Adam Hochschild: King's Leopold's Ghost: A story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
*** Michela Wrong: In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu's Congo