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| Africa Subsaharan |
| Rwanda's Arrest of Congolese Rebel Leader Marks a Key Shift |
| 2009-01-25 |
| The arrest of renegade Congolese Gen. Laurent Nkunda by his former Rwandan allies portends a dramatic shift in a complex conflict that has raged and simmered across the region since 1994, when the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide spilled across the border into eastern Congo. The Rwandan troops moved against Nkunda late Thursday during a joint military operation with Congolese forces whose main purpose is to dismantle the Rwandan Hutu militias that organized in Congo after the genocide and have remained. The operation is part of a wider political and economic deal to smooth over the perennially caustic relationship between Congo and Rwanda, which has fueled a conflict estimated to have taken as many as 5 million Congolese lives and displaced more than a million people over the past decade. Nkunda, a brash leader fond of sharp suits and gold-tipped canes, began his rebel career by declaring that he was protecting Congo's minority Tutsis from the militias, known as the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, or FDLR. He was supported by Rwanda, who shared his complaint that the Congolese army had failed to disarm the militias. But in recent months, Nkunda began to speak of "liberating" all of Congo, and after striking a deal with the Congolese on a variety of issues, his Rwandan backers finally turned on him. "He was becoming a liability for the Rwandan government," said François Grignon, Africa director for the International Crisis Group, a research organization. Rwanda has a history of brutal military interventions in eastern Congo, and the joint operation poses serious political problems for Congolese President Joseph Kabila. But diplomats and other observers nonetheless cast the move against Nkunda and the FDLR as a potentially positive step toward repairing a relationship that is key to stability in the region. "It's hugely significant," said Alan Doss, the United Nations envoy to the region. "I hope it will result in now putting to an end this chapter -- dealing with the FDLR problem and ending a rebellion and putting the country back on the road to peace." In New York, U.N. officials said the U.N. peacekeeping operation in Congo had been caught off guard by the joint offensive and expressed concern for civilians who might get caught up in a potentially messy operation. "We fear that any additional conflict now is going to drive even more people from their homes," said Ron Redmond, a spokesman for the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, noting that at least 250,000 people had fled recent months of fighting between the Congolese army and Nkunda's forces. The presence of about 5,000 FDLR militiamen in eastern Congo has long been a source of tension between Rwanda and Congo, which has promised and failed many times over the years to disarm them. Though many rank-and-file FDLR fighters were barely teenagers when they fled into Congo, they remain under the command of leaders who allegedly participated in the Rwandan genocide, when Hutu extremists killed 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 100 days of well-planned violence. Those leaders have disavowed any former ambitions to invade Rwanda and are now entrenched in Congo's lucrative mining business. They have set up what amounts to a parallel government across areas of eastern Congo, where their hardened militiamen have made a way of life out of preying on villagers. The existence of the FDLR gave Rwanda a reason to back the Tutsi-dominated rebellion led by Nkunda. Both Rwanda and Nkunda have accused the Congolese military of collaborating with the FDLR instead of disarming them. In recent months, however, Nkunda's well-trained forces advanced across a swath of eastern Congo, creating a humanitarian catastrophe, humiliating the notoriously incompetent Congolese army and ultimately threatening Kabila, Congo's first democratically elected leader in decades. Their advance, plus a recent U.N. report that exposed Rwanda's support for Nkunda and Congo's collaboration with the FDLR, apparently pushed the two sides to agree to a wide-ranging deal, according to a U.S. official familiar with its details. According to the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve his relationship with both countries, Kabila agreed to allow Rwandan troops onto Congolese soil to help disarm the FDLR, while Rwanda agreed to deal with Nkunda. The economic component includes Congo's cooperation in a regional economic group that will ease trade between the massive mineral-rich nation and the tiny but mighty Rwanda, which has big economic ambitions. The two nations are also supposed to resume diplomatic relations that have been severed for more than a decade. |
| Posted by:Fred |