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Thursday, 29 November 2012

US Interests in Rwanda Spur Congo War [Includes Audio]

The Audio segment is on current US policy and Congo war. 
 

US Interests in Rwanda Spur Congo War

After having suffered from the ravages of war for two decades, the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo or DRC are now facing yet another brutal battle. The rebel group M23, made up of deserters from the Congolese Army have taken over the city of Goma and are refusing to leave until the democratically elected government of President Joseph Kabila is completely dismantled.
Ignoring a deadline issued by the African Union to leave the city, the 1,500 M23 rebels, who are mainly Tutsi in origin, fought back the Congolese Army as well as the 18,000 UN peacekeepers sent into the region to quell the violence. 'Colonel Olivier Hamuli, a Congolese military spokesman has called the rebel takeover a "declaration of war."
A UN finding that DRC's neighbors Uganda and Rwanda had been arming and financing the rebels since they formed 8 months ago was originally disputed by the United States which had allied in the past with Rwanda and its President Paul Kagame. Rwanda's political interests in DRC, the 2nd largest country in Africa, may be to carve out a new Tutsi led country from the Eastern half of the country. While the West backs the corrupt Kagame government, they also stayed mum as Kabila regained power in a rigged election.
The United Nations is estimating that 285,000 people have been displaced as a result of the conflict, and a Human Rights Watch report issued in September found M23 guilty of "summary executions, rapes, and forced recruitment."
DRC is replete with precious metals and minerals, many of which are used in computers, cell phones and weapons and the conflict has gained more international scrutiny as mineral production has decreased. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission finally banned companies like Apple and Intel from using metals which come from rebel controlled areas of the country this year.
 
GUEST: Claude Gatebuke, executive director of the African Great Lakes Action Network.
 
Visit www.aglan.org and www.friendsofthecongo.org for more information. Claude Gatebuke may be reached via email at claude_at_aglan_dot_org.
 

Rwandan Ghosts

 

Rwandan Ghosts

Benghazi isn't the biggest blight on Susan Rice's record.

BY JASON K. STEARNS | NOVEMBER 29, 2012

GOMA, Democratic Republic of the Congo — Televised comments made by Amb. Susan Rice shortly after the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi have dominated the debate over her probable nomination for secretary of state. This is a bit surprising, since it's clear that she played only a marginal role in the affair and appears to have just been reading from the briefing notes provided. It's also unfortunate that the "scandal" has crowded out a healthy discussion of her two-decade record as U.S. diplomat and policymaker prior to Sept. 2012 -- and drawn attention away from actions for which she bears far greater responsibility than Benghazi.
Her role in shaping U.S. policy toward Central Africa should feature high on this list. Between 1993 and 2001, she helped form U.S. responses to the Rwandan genocide, events in post-genocide Rwanda, mass violence in Burundi, and two ruinous wars in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
She did not get off to an auspicious start. During her first year in government, there was a vigorous debate within the Clinton administration over whether to describe the killing in Rwanda as a "genocide," a designation that would necessitate an international response under the 1948 U.N. Genocide Convention. In a now infamous incident from that April, which was reported in her now State Department colleague Samantha Power's book, A Problem from Hell, Rice -- at the time still a junior official at the National Security Council -- stunned her colleagues by asking during a meeting, "If we use the word 'genocide' and are seen as doing nothing, what will be the effect on the November [congressional midterm] election?" She later regretted this language, telling Power, "I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required." And she has indeed emerged as one of the more forceful advocates for humanitarian intervention in U.S. foreign policy. Unfortunately, she has also often seemed to overcompensate for her earlier misstep on Rwanda with an uncritical embrace of the the country's new leaders.
Rwanda was the most compelling, moving story out of the bunch. After a cataclysm of Dantean proportions -- 800,000 people massacred in a hundred days -- Paul Kagame's Rwandan Patriotic Front was able to reduce crime in the country to the lowest levels anywhere in Africa; rebuild its economy, making it the one of the easiest countries on the continent to do business; and pioneer new ways of managing health care and dealing with genocide-related crimes. The word "phoenix" often comes up in conversations about Rwanda, and deservedly so.
It was in this context that Rwanda's invasion of its much larger neighbor should be seen. In 1996, with the support of Uganda and a slew of other African countries, Rwanda invaded the Congo (then called Zaire) to root out the the Hutu militias that had attempted to exterminate the Tutsi population of Rwanda two years previously from the refugee camps where they had fled and were reportedly regrouping. After dismantling these camps, Rwandan forces along with Congolese rebels pushed all the way to the capital and overthrew longtime strongman Mobutu Sese Seko in May 1997.
Laurent Kabila, the president put in power by the rebellion, quickly fell out with his Rwandan backers -- when he asked them to leave, they launched a new rebellion in the East, while Kabila recruited the very rebels that Rwanda had initially invaded the country to crush. On the face of things, Rwanda once again had good justification for its actions -- who could begrudge them the protection of their borders and citizens?
This facile truth, however, obfuscates the messy reality of the Rwandan intervention. Earlier in 1996, Rwandan troops had carried out vicious revenge massacres against civilian Hutu refugees who fled into the Congolese jungles, killing thousands, according to a detailed U.N. investigation and reports in the U.S. press at the time. But the United States, along with other governments, focused its opprobrium on Kabila, withholding aid to Congo and demanding an investigation. There was no official sanction of Rwanda. During this period, Susan Rice was first senior director for African affairs at the National Security Council and then assistant secretary of state for Africa. When a U.N. investigation into these massacres was concluded in 2010, Susan Rice tried to block its publication. According to a senior official involved in the report, "she didn't see how opening up old wounds would help."
Perhaps the most damning anecdote -- told by French academic Gérard Prunier and confirmed by New York Times journalist Howard French -- was of a private converation Rice had after her first trip to Central Africa around this time: "Museveni [of Uganda] and Kagame agree that the basic problem in the Great Lakes is the danger of a resurgence of genocide and they know how to deal with that. The only thing we [i.e., the United States] have to do is look the other way."
Rwanda's means-justifies-the-end logic also led it astray during the second Congo war, which began in 1998 when Laurent Kabila fell out with Rwanda, asking them to leave and eventually allying with some of the troops who had carried out the Rwandan genocide. Increasingly, as the war -- the deadliest in modern African history -- became more costly, Rwandan commanders became more interested in the spoils of the eastern Congo. Three consecutive U.N. reports have documented their profiteering. As Kabila pumped weapons and ammunition into various armed factions in eastern Congo -- including to the anti-government Rwandan rebels who hadn't been dislodged by the first intervention -- Rwanda responded with a brutal counterinsurgency operation that killed thousands of Congolese and plunged the region into a humanitarian disaster that probably killed millions. Kabila doubtless deserves a fair part of the blame for the catastrophe, but given its generous bilateral and multilateral aid, the U.S. government was in a good position to exercise pressure on Rwanda. Yet, as one official in the administration told me: "The [Clinton] administration never officially condemned Rwandan actions in the eastern Congo. Not once." When asked what role Rice played in this decision, he simply said: "She was assistant secretary of state for Africa."
Rice has repeatedly been on the record rejecting allegations of favoritism. In testimony before Congress several weeks after the 1998 war began, she said: "Mr. Chairman, let me be clear: the United States in no way supported, encouraged, or condoned the intervention of Rwandan or Ugandan forces in the Congo, as some have suggested. This is a specious and ridiculous accusation that I want to lay to rest once and for all." To be fair, while she had applauded Kigali for its economic and social progress, she had also admonished it for its internal political repression.
The question is not whether Rwanda is the Beelzebub or the savior of Central Africa; it is neither. But given the gravity of the crisis, and the significant support the United States was providing to the Rwandan government, simply giving Kigali a pass for repeated mass abuses was unacceptable and sent the wrong signal. To suggest, as Howard Wolpe, the U.S. special envoy to the region did to me, reflecting on this period years later, "We just didn't know what was going on, most of the reports about abuses were coming from the Catholic Church and we didn't know what to make of them," is not convincing. A complex tragedy deserved a nuanced response.
Until recently, proponents of constructive engagement with Rwanda could brush aside these concerns by spinning a plausible success story. But when it comes to Rwandan domestic politics, it is clear that Rice feels the positives outweigh the negatives. In a speech at the Kigali Institute of Technology last year, she said: "Over time, you have implemented enlightened gender policies, advanced new development models, insisted on clean government, and made forward-looking investments. To many Americans and other foreigners, what you have achieved in 17 short years is impressive. It gives us hope and new models."
Even in Rwanda's relations with its troublesome neighbor, one might have forgiven Rice for detecting a promising trend. After all, in 2001, Rwandan leaders withdrew all of their troops from the eastern Congo, while their Congolese rebel allies joined a power-sharing government in Kinshasa in 2003. This fragile arrangement took a hit in 2006 when a new rebellion, the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP), swept across the region, but almost as soon as Rwanda was accused of backing the rebels by the United Nations, a peace deal was struck between Kinsasha and Kigali, integrating the rebels into the national Congolese army. The region appeared to be inching toward stability.
However, events this year have shattered this already shaky narrative. Since April, another rebellion has bared its teeth in eastern Congo. With hefty backing from Rwanda -- as has been documented by U.N. investigators, Human Rights Watch, and my own research -- the so-called M23 have expanded their area of control, taking control of Goma, the largest trade hub in the region, in October. Over 700,000 people now have been displaced by this fighting.
If it was difficult before, now it is almost impossible to justify this belligerence from Kagame's government. The threat of Rwandan rebels -- the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), who seek to overthrow the government in Kigali -- is vastly diminished now, and the M23 has less support locally, even among the Congolese populations of Rwandan descent, than previous rebellions. And while there is no doubt that the Congolese government is corrupt and short on vision and leadership, there is little evidence that an armed rebellion will change that.
And yet, some officials in the U.S. government, led by Rice, continue to give Rwanda the benefit of the doubt. When a United Nations investigation submitted its report on the conflict to the U.N. Security Council in June, providing copious evidence of Rwandan involvement, the ambassador blocked its publication, insisting the Rwandan government be given a right of reply first (the investigators say they had tried to provide this, but had been rebuffed by officials in Kigali). It was eventually published, but Rice had signalled her sympathies in the matter. Several months later, Rice allegedly removed language from a Security Council resolution explicitly citing Rwanda and Uganda's well-documented support to the M23, replacing it with the anodyne phrase, "outside support."
According to some of her colleagues, Rice continues to weigh in on policy toward the region, questioning how much the administration should pressure Rwanda -- according to former colleages, she feels that more can be achieved by constructive engagement, not public censure. An official in the government familiar with the internal debates told me, "Her questioning of the proof of Rwanda's support for the M23 has likely diluted any tough message from other senior U.S. diplomats against Kigali. The Rwandans are paying attention to this, and feel with her support any criticism will be minimal."
The diplomats and officials interviewed for this article left no doubt that Rice is bright, ambitious, and extremely hard-working. But in her reluctance to criticize the Rwandan government's involvement in the Congo, she has also demonstrated critical lapses in judgment. Senators would do better to scrutinize this history, rathering than focusing on the Benghazi attacks.

Rwanda : la vache et la lance

 
C'est du Kagamé pur jus, du Kagamé dans le texte, tout de colère glaciale. Vendredi 23 novembre, alors qu'il venait d'apprendre que le dernier rapport des « experts » de l'ONU mettait directement en cause la hiérarchie militaire rwandaise dans le soutien aux rebelles congolais du M23, l'Iron Man de Kigali a puisé ses références dans ce que son peuple considère comme le bien le plus précieux : la vache. « Nous ne sommes pas un troupeau de vaches que l'on conduit à l'aveuglette. Nous sommes les maîtres des vaches. Nous sommes un petit pays, mais nous ne sommes pas un petit peuple. Nous sommes pauvres, mais nous sommes riches de notre intelligence. Personne ne nous empêchera d'exercer nos responsabilités, sans peur, sans reproches. » La rhétorique est implacable, tout comme est inexorable la volonté du Rwanda de faire des deux Kivus une zone de souveraineté de facto partagée, à la fois glacis sécuritaire face aux désirs revanchards des ex-génocidaires, espace économique offert au dynamisme des entrepreneurs rwandais et terre d'élection pour les Tutsis congolais, ces frères de la diaspora que le pouvoir en place à Kigali ne saurait abandonner à leur sort au risque de se tirer une balle dans l'âme.
Rarement le fossé culturel entre ces deux voisins, le géant aux pieds d'argile et le nain aux bottes de Goliath, aura paru aussi profond. Car côté congolais, où la chute de Goma le 20 novembre a produit les mêmes effets que celle de Tombouctou pour les Maliens, l'heure n'est pas à l'union sacrée mais à la résignation sur fond d'autodénigrement. On chercherait en vain les prémices d'un sursaut patriotique, alors que la résignation, le défaitisme parfois, mais aussi la colère sont omniprésents. Une colère que les Congolais dirigent avant tout non pas contre « l'ennemi », mais contre les Casques bleus de l'ONU et surtout contre leurs propres dirigeants. Difficile de ne pas éprouver une forme de compassion pour Joseph Kabila, ballotté entre Charybde et Scylla. Négocier avec les mutins et se trouver aussitôt accusé de traîtrise et de bradage par une opposition féroce, qui trouverait là l'occasion de ressortir ses arguments les plus douteux sur la rwandophilie subliminale du président. Ou poursuivre la guerre avec une armée corrompue jusqu'à son état-major, au risque de tout perdre, voire de pratiquer la fuite en avant en appelant l'Angola à la rescousse. Ce n'est pas un choix, c'est l'alternative du diable.
Une fois de plus, alors que la RDC donnait ces derniers temps quelques signes de renaissance et de mise en ordre, reviennent à la une des médias les images de chaos d'un pays maudit des dieux. On aurait tort de croire, comme le pensent les Belges et les Français, que les clés d'une solution à la tragédie des Kivus se trouvent toutes à Kigali. Même s'il a sur le M23 une influence certaine et s'il peut trouver un avantage à une forme d'autonomie de l'est du Congo, le Rwanda n'en a aucun à la poursuite d'un conflit qui lui est nuisible en termes de réputation et d'investissements. Encore moins à la chute de Kabila et à l'arrivée au pouvoir à Kinshasa d'un régime xénophobe et belliciste. Quant aux rebelles, ils ont leur logique et leurs exigences propres, dont le niveau varie avec la fortune des armes, au point d'entrer en contradiction avec les intérêts de leurs tuteurs : on l'a vu, en 2008, avec Laurent Nkunda, on le reverra sans doute demain avec Sultani Makenga. Reste qu'il s'agit là de Congolais, issus de ce melting-pot ethnique qu'est la RD Congo. Tant que les autorités de Kinshasa ne reconnaîtront pas cette réalité avec tout ce qu'elle implique, la tragédie des Grands Lacs n'aura pas de fin. 

Wednesday, 28 November 2012

Security Council extends sanctions on DR Congo rebels, condemns latest attacks by M23

 
Security Council extends sanctions on DR Congo rebels, condemns latest attacks by M23
 

Security Council extends sanctions on DR Congo rebels, condemns latest attacks by M23

MONUSCO peacekeepers evacuate children following the capture of Goma in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) by M23. Photo: MONUSCO
28 November 2012 – The Security Council today extended the arms embargo and other sanctions imposed against armed rebel groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), while expressing its intention to consider additional targeted sanctions against the leadership of the M23, the rebel fighters that recently occupied the eastern provincial capital of Goma.
In a unanimously adopted resolution, the Council extended until 1 February 2014, the sanctions that were first introduced in 2003 as the DRC reached the end of a brutal civil war that engulfed the vast country on and off for five years and is estimated to have killed as many as five million people.
The sanctions comprise an arms embargo against armed groups that are not part of the Government's integrated army or police units following the end of the civil war, and also a travel ban and asset freeze against individuals or entities that have violated the embargo or are otherwise designated.
The Council also requested Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to renew the mandate of the group of experts monitoring these measures until 1 February 2014.
The resolution also contained strong condemnation of the M23 soldiers, who mutinied from the DRC national army in April, and which occupied Goma, the capital of North Kivu, last week after launching a new wave of attacks that have uprooted more than 140,000 civilians.
The Council demanded that the M23 and other armed groups "cease immediately all forms of violence and other destabilizing activities" and reiterated its demand that any and all outside support to the M23 stop without delay.
It also expressed its intention to consider additional targeted sanctions against the M23 leadership, those providing external support to the group, and those who violate the sanctions regime and the arms embargo.
Last night the Council was briefed in a closed-door session by Chef de Cabinet Susana Malcorra and Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations Hervé Ladsous on the latest developments in eastern DRC.
Mr. Ban sent Ms. Malcorra to the region last week as his personal emissary to maintain contact and dialogue with key actors. With the agreement of the leaders of the DRC, Rwanda and Uganda, she met Sultani Makenga, the head of the M23's military wing, to convey the Secretary-General's concerns about the deteriorating humanitarian situation as well as reported human rights violations. She encouraged him to stop the fighting and pursue his objective through political dialogue and lay down the arms.
Mr. Ladsous told reporters after the Council session that there are "indications" that M23 elements were possibly starting to withdraw from Goma, but that these reports still needed to be confirmed. Meanwhile, the UN Organization Stabilization Mission in the DRC (MONUSCO) is still in control of the airport in Goma and continues daily patrols throughout the city.
MONUSCO reported today that there are signs that the M23 are preparing to withdraw from Goma, in accordance with terms of the communiqué from the weekend meeting of the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR).
"However, the Mission reports that there is not yet any major movement by M23 out of Goma," UN spokesperson Eduardo del Buey told reporters, adding that the situation in the city is relatively calm.
The UN today dispatched its chief military adviser, General Babacar Gaye, to the Great Lakes region to discuss with stakeholders a number of issues that came out of the recent ICGLR meeting, such as the implementation of the 20-kilometre Neutral Zone to which the M23 is supposed to withdraw and the concept of the International Neutral Force.

Congo, Mali to Dominate US-AU Talks in Washington

Congo, Mali to Dominate US-AU Talks in Washington

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton walks out with then African Union Chair-Designate Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma after their meeting in Pretoria, South Africa, Aug. 7, 2012.
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-“The root cause of the Rwandan tragedy of 1994 is the long and past historical ethnic dominance of one minority ethnic group to the other majority ethnic group. Ignoring this reality is giving a black cheque for the Rwandan people’s future and deepening resentment, hostility and hatred between the two groups.”

-« Ce dont j’ai le plus peur, c’est des gens qui croient que, du jour au lendemain, on peut prendre une société, lui tordre le cou et en faire une autre ».

-“The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.”

-“I have loved justice and hated iniquity: therefore I die in exile.

-“The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”

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