http://www.blackstarnews.com/news/135/ARTICLE/8574/2012-12-02.html

U.S. Condemns M23 While New York Times Op-Ed Defends The Rwanda-backed Bandits By Milton Allimadi 12-02-12       J. Peter Pham, author of the Op-Ed calling for Congo partition and showing sympathy for M23         email it! print it! pdf it! XML VERSION      5 Stars - Excellent 4 Stars - Good 3 Stars - Average 2 Stars - Fair 1 Stars - Poor  5 / 5 (4 Votes)

[Commentary] The New York Times published a bizarre  Op-Ed  piece "To Save Congo, Let It Fall Apart," that could have as well been authored by M23 -- an apologia and rationalization for the terroristic army's invasion of Congo from Rwanda, which was accompanied by massacres along the way. M23 also occupied and pillaged the city of Goma.  Ironically, while the Op-Ed piece offers a defense for M23, in the same issue of The Times, on page A6, the newspaper's own East Africa correspondent, Jeffrey Gettleman, documents M23's litany of war crimes including:  targeted killings of Congolese officials and judges and the looting of Goma's central bank. Citing human rights organizations, Gettleman found that M23 "were now going on an assassination campaign as they prepared to leave, creating a vortex of crime and confusion."    The Op-Ed, authored by J. Peter Pham, starts off in a seemingly sober way, noting that Congo is so well-endowed with mineral resources yet is still one of the world's poorest country. "Instead of prosperity, Congo's mineral wealth has brought only an endless procession of unscrupulous rulers eager to exploit its riches, from King Leopold II of Belgium to Mobutu Sese Seko, who was allowed by the logic of the cold war to rule the same area as a private fief," Pham, correctly notes, even though Leopold's genocidal reign belongs in a league of its own.  Pham also correctly recounts Congo president Joseph Kabila's own ineptitude and the fraudulent elections that granted him another five year term last year. Yet non of this justifies the war of aggression against Congo launched by Rwanda and Uganda.  Pham's Op-Ed, to those familiar with the players in the region, reads like a smoke screen to divert focus from Rwanda's and Uganda's role, and the sanctions and criminal liability the military and political leadership in those countries may now exposed to on account of sponsoring M23. Human Rights Watch  has documented "widespread war crimes" by M23, including summary executions, rapes and forced recruitments.  "M23 commanders should be held accountable for these crimes, and the Rwandan officials supporting these abusive commanders could face justice for aiding and abetting the crimes," states the report. Pham hopes to change the narrative. It's Congo itself that's the problem, not the invaders. The country is simply "too big to succeed" Pham writes. Talk about blaming the victim. This is akin to saying Hitler wasn't at fault for invading France; the French were divided and prone to surrendering. But let's deal with Congo today: "It is an artificial entity whose constituent parts share the misfortune of having been seized by the explorer Henry Morton Stanley in the name of a rapacious 19th-century Belgian monarch," Pham writes. "From the moment Congo was given independence in 1960, it was being torn apart by centrifugal forces, beginning with separatism in the mineral-rich southern province of Katanga."  Omitted from this two-sentence recap of history is the Congo crisis of the 1960s. How about: the intervention of the Belgians even before the country's nominal independence, to encourage mineral rich Katanga to secede, leading to the conflict with the Central government under Patrice Lumumba? How about the Belgian's military presence in the Congo, to embolden and support Katanga separatism so that the breakaway region under Moise Tshombe could continue the colonial exploitative mining contracts with the former colonial power?   How about the instigation of Mobutu's coup d'etat by the Central Intelligence agency and the subsequent murder of Lumumba by Katangese and Belgian agents, and the dissolving of his body in acid? How about support of Mobutu for almost 40 years by Washington?  How about the fact that after Rwanda and Uganda ousted Mobutu in 1997, they have never left Congo alone to govern itself?  Congo in fact has never enjoyed independence. Yet rather than defend Congo from outside invaders and demand that its people be accorded the right to determine their destiny in peace, Pham's Op-Ed calls for dismemberment, even though the violence created by the invasion from Rwanda and Uganda since 1998 has already caused an estimated 10 million deaths.  The Op-Ed blames the victims, Congolese, for the wars against them and says the solution is to slice up the country.  "Rather than nation-building, what is needed to end Congo's violence is the opposite: breaking up a chronically failed state into smaller organic units whose members share broad agreement or at least have common interests in personal and community security," Pham writes.    If dismembering an African country was the solution to recurrent violence surely the candidates would be exhaustive and include: Uganda; Kenya; Rwanda; Burundi; Nigeria; and Somalia, just to mention a few.  The most painful parts of Pham's New York Times Op-Ed is when he defends M23, the army trained, armed, financed and commanded by neighboring Rwanda and to a lesser extent, Uganda.  M23's recent assault on Goma bore all the marks of invasion by a conventional army and it was accompanied by artillery bombardment, exposing the lies by Rwanda's leadership that it had nothing to do with the invasion. The M23 marauders have also displaced almost 300,000 Congolese from their homes.  As The Times correspondent Gettleman wrote, a United Nations investigator found that Rwanda's regular army soldiers actually marched alongside M23.  Not surprising since a United Nations report which became widely available to media a few days before Rwanda's invasion of Congo found that M23's nominal leaders, Bosco Ntaganda (who is wanted at the ICC) and Sultan Makeni (who is on a current United Nations sanctions list) both take "direct military orders from RDF Chief of Defense Staff General Charles Kayonga, who in turn acts on instructions from Minster of Defense General James Kabarebe..." RDF is the Rwanda Defense Forces, Rwanda's national army. The UN report further details Rwanda's involvement: Rwandan general, Emmanuel Ruvusha, manages military ground support for M23; and, Gen. Jacques Nziza, Permanent Secretary in the Defense Ministry, provides strategic advice and oversees logistical support. The United Kingdom's Foreign Office in statement endorsed the UN report and found it "credible and compelling" as did the French government. This week the United States also took a strong position: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for the ending of outside support for M23 and its withdrawal while Senator Chris Coons, who chairs the Foreign Relations sub-committee on Africa, called for the disarming and dismantling of M23 and sanctions against its sponsors.  And on Thursday, when the U.S. Senate  voted on sanctions against M23's leaders and those who support the militia, Senator Coons and Senator Dick Durbin used even stronger language. "M23 has demonstrated an unconscionable disregard for human life and Congo's territorial integrity and seems determined to sink central Africa in another deadly, devastating war that could set the region back a generation," Senator Coons said. "The actions of M23 rebels, as well as those who aid and abet the M23, are deplorable and must be stopped immediately. These sanctions are designed to stop the illicit and dangerous support the M23 is receiving from those seeking to destabilize the region. "The rebels, known for brutal violence and led by known war criminals, have the potential to destabilize the entire nation," Senator Durbin who is a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on African Affairs, said. "As the violence continues to escalate, it is clear that the rebels are benefitting from strategic and material support from outside forces. This amendment freezes the assets and implements a visa ban for any person providing such troubling support. Our goal is to hasten an end to the violence by starving the rebels of their key lines of support." Does Pham take these developments seriously?   Here's Pham's position on this matter: "A United Nations report has accused the Rwandan government of supporting M23. Although Rwanda has denied it, this may well be true, and it is perfectly understandable given that the M23 rebels are fighting former Hutu génocidaires who still dream of invading Rwanda and finishing what they started nearly two decades ago."  Most recent news accounts acknowledge that the criminal Hutu militias capabilities have been diminished and that Rwanda has often played the "Hutu card" to justify intervention in Congo mostly inspired by the desire to plunder the country's resources. It's estimated that trade from Congo flowing into Rwanda is about $100 million a year; no surprise that Rwanda, bereft of mineral resources, wants to control this lifeline.  Pham on the other hand treats M23's leaders almost like a bunch of frat boys; noting that they have been referred to as "warlords" by some critics.  "But warlords, even if they do not acquire power through democratic means, tend to provide some sort of political framework, often based on kinship ties or ethnic solidarity, that is seen as legitimate," Pham writes in the sorry apologia.  "They also tend to provide some basic security — which is more than the questionably legitimate Kabila government in Kinshasa provides for most Congolese."  One wonders whether Pham would also extend this accommodating observation to a warlord such as Joseph Kony of the LRA, whose crimes surely pales in comparison to M23's. In any case, Pham's sympathetic perspective on M23 is of small comfort to the relatives of Congolese massacred or assassinated by M23; or the women, girls, and infants raped.   Moreover it's absurd for Pham to downplay the abuses in Congo attributed to the Rwanda and Uganda regimes since there are in fact several UN and Human Rights Watch reports documenting them, dating back years. In 2010 a United Nations "mapping" report found that Rwanda's army, which had pursued Hutu militias into Congo in the 1990s, went out of its way in exacting retribution for the 1994 genocide, killing even unarmed Hutu children, women and the elderly. The accounts of the killings, referred to in the UN report as amounting to "genocide" was earlier documented in "Kagame's Hidden War In The Congo" a book by a former New York Timescorrespondent, Howard French.  As for Uganda, in 2005, after Congo referred alleged crimes by Uganda's military and allied militia to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the court ruled in Kinshasa's favor -- it found Uganda liable and awarded Congo $10 billion. Not a dime of which has been paid. The case was so strong that when the International Criminal Court itself launched its own investigation, Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni himself contacted then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and asked him to block the case; this is according to a story in The Wall Street Journal   on June 8, 2006.  Since the ICC investigation never led to an indictment -- even though the ICJ found Uganda liable -- it's possible that either the U.S. or U.K. did block that investigation. Had Western countries that support Uganda and Rwanda militarily and financially, including the United States and the U.K., sanctioned these two hostile neighbors for the earlier crimes, it's unlikely that they would again today be sponsoring atrocities in Congo so that they could continue ransacking the country.  What are Pham's own motives? He is the director of the Michael S. Ansari Africa Center, at The Atlantic Council and an article about his appointment in AllAfrica.com  may hint at something: "Dr. Pham has served on the Senior Advisory Group of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) since its creation." Obviously this wasn't noted when his bonafides were provided at the end of the Op-Ed. This is what Congo needs: the ejection of outside invaders and prosecution of those who've sponsored the crimes since 1998.  Recall that Liberia's former president, Charles Taylor was convicted by a Special Tribunal for sponsoring violent insurgents in Sierra Leone and is now serving a 50 year prison term. And the evidence against Taylor was much weaker, and circumstantial, compared to what's been assembled tying Presidents Kagame and Museveni to the atrocities in the Congo.  And how to explain why The Times' Op-Ed editor, in light of all the evidence about M23's crimes, including the article on page A6 of his own newspaper, agreed to publish such a spin job?  Was he not aware of the UN reports and the one by Human Rights Watch?   It's difficult to conclude that anyone would wish external-supported genocide upon Congolese women and children.  Enough is enough. "Speaking Truth To Empower."

RDC:le Rwanda tenterait un nouveau front vers le Sud-Kivu

RDC:le Rwanda tenterait un nouveau front vers le Sud-Kivu

direct.cd, le 1er décembre 2012

+ l'article original de BBC News Africa signé Gabriel Gatehouse (voir msg 198607 sur DHR) 

« Selon la BBC, le soutien du Rwanda aux rebelles de la République démocratique du Congo pourrait être de plus grande ampleur qu'on ne le croyait.

Gabriel Gatehouse, correspondant de la BBC Afrique de l'Est, a parlé à deux anciens combattants rebelles à Bukavu, ville qui se trouve à l'extrémité sud du lac Kivu, à 200 km de Goma.

Ces anciens rebelles sont originaires de la minorité Tutsi de la RD Congo et ils ont déclaré qu'ils avaient rejoint, en juillet, le groupe rebelle « Mouvement Congolais pour le changement » afin de combattre pour assurer une vie meilleure à la population de l'est.

Ils avaient passé plusieurs mois dans la brousse luttant contre l'armée, pensant qu'ils faisaient partie d'un mouvement d'origine locale.

« Puis, le président de notre mouvement est venu avec une délégation du gouvernement du Rwanda, en disant que le mouvement a été changé et que nous devions suivre les instructions du gouvernement du rwandais », a déclaré le capitaine Okra Rudahirwa à la BBC.

Le capitaine a aussi dit que lui et ses hommes recevaient des sommes mensuelles – allant parfois jusqu'à $ 20.000 dollars, avec lesquelles ils achetaient la nourriture, des uniformes et des médicaments.

Ces deux hommes ont affirmé avoir décidé d'abandonner la rébellion après avoir pris conscience de l'ampleur de la participation du Rwanda. Le gouvernement rwandais a refusé de commenter ces allégations.

Mais la plupart des détails de ce récit, y compris les dates et les noms des intermédiaires, correspondent à une autre enquête bien distincte menée par l'ONU, a déclaré M. Gatehouse… »

http://direct.cd/2012/12/01/le-rwanda-tenterait-nouveau-front-vers-le-sud-kivu.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-20542846

http://www.salem-news.com/articles/december012012/congo-grief-jf.php

A People Betrayed: Democratic Republic of Congo

Jennifer Fierberg, MSW Salem-News.com

Experts report that Rwanda is unequivocally involved in the destabilization of the DRC.

(Washington, D.C.) - Another report... another investigation... more women raped... more horrific deaths... more displaced people…more children starving. Welcome to the Democratic Republic of Congo.

It has been labeled the most dangerous place in the world to be a woman and has been the victim of a 15 year war waged by Rwanda that started as an alleged hunt for people accused of committing genocide to now being a war for minerals, power and money.

The DRC is one of the largest countries on the African continent and holds resources beyond minerals and wealth; the land could feed the entire continent if allowed and the water resources could provide electricity far beyond its borders. Yet, this natural wonder remains a war zone and much of her residents traumatized beyond what any human on earth should ever experience. Although through all this the strength and determination of the Congolese people is unmatched.

The residents of Goma have gone a weeks without power or water. Food resources are very low and many are starving from hunger and thirst. The city is overrun with rebels back by the Rwandan Government who call themselves the M23. They have looted the city of it resources including banks, food and personal property.

Congo refugees

The fighting has caused the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people who have fled to neighboring areas in order to stay alive. No person anywhere should have to live this way and no child should ever have to know what it is like to live in a war zone.

Report after report have all stated the same facts. Credible agencies like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Oxfam and the Group of Experts to the United Nations Security Council have all reported that Rwanda is supplying weapons, directives, communication equipment and soldiers to the M23 rebel group that is currently terrorizing eastern DRC.

The latest Group of Experts report to the UNSC increased their verification methods with the accusations in the latest report on the situation in the DRC stating that Rwanda is unequivocally involved in the destabilization of the DRC. Yet with all of these reports nothing is being done. Nothing. The ICGLR, International Conference on the Great Lakes Region, met last week without the presence of President Paul Kagame of Rwanda in order to find a regional solution to the ongoing crisis in the DRC. Yet, the main members, Uganda and Rwanda, both stand accused of aiding and abetting war crimes in the DRC as well as in their own country. How can the countries currently destabilizing the region be trusted to find a solution?

The latest report that has not been as widely reported on as it should be is the most recent Oxfam report entitled Commodities of War (http://www.oxfam.org/en/policy/commodities-war-drc).

Reading this report should anger any reader and urge them to take action. This reports clearly states how betrayed the people of the eastern DRC are and who is behind the atrocious acts being committed. The DRC military, FARDC, are not visible and are not protecting the people of Goma and the surrounding areas as there are required to do.

The local police, PDC, who are also in place to protect the citizens, are causing instability and corruption on a daily basis. The Oxfam report states that the local police will not even begin to investigate crimes or even assist victims until they have been paid a requested sum of money. In most places this behavior is called corruption.

Kabilla

The UN Group of Experts has provided unequivocal and detailed proof that no rational mind can refute yet the UNSC refuses to hold Rwanda responsible for their part in destabilizing the DRC. In a cursory move the UNSC placed sanctions on a leader of the M23 limiting his travel and freezing assets yet these sanctions will have no effect on stabilizing the region. For example this leader, Sultan Makanga, traveled to Uganda last week to meet with President Museveni for talks on the situation in Goma. So much for that travel ban!

The UNSC has met and "condemned" the actions of the M23 but what exactly does that do to support the people of the DRC? A verbal warning is worth nothing when a community has no water, no power and is starving.

MONUSCO troops are also on the ground in one of the world's largest contingent of peacekeeping members from the UN but the Oxfam report is very clear that MONUSCO is not protecting the citizens as they have been commissioned.

Further and most devastating is the fact that the people of the DRC have been betrayed by their President, Joseph Kabila. President Kabila has a duty to direct the army, to protect the citizens and to rise up against those who seek to destroy his country and he has done none of that.

He has turned his back on his people in order to appease the powers around him; namely Paul Kagame of Rwanda who installed Kabila as president after ordering the assassination of his father Laurent Kabila in 2001.

These bed-fellows have wreaked havoc on the DRC with over 5 million people killed. At what point does this war become severe enough to warrant major media attention? How many innocent lives have to be lost in order for the international community to take notice and act?

This last week the UK made their decision to suspend the aid that was due to be dispersed to Rwanda in December. A payment of over $33 million USD will not be released to Rwanda due to their direct involvement in aiding and abetting the M23 in Congo. Many nations have already cut their aid and the UK and US are the last two to make their decisions.

As of press time of this article the US has finally made a decision to impose sanctions on those who are supporting the M23 and have named Rwanda specifically in their report.

_________________________________

To Save Congo, Let It Fall Apart - NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/01/opinion/to-save-congo-let-it-fall-apart.html?_r=1&

To Save Congo, Let It Fall Apart

By J. PETER PHAM

Published: November 30, 2012

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THE Democratic Republic of Congo, which erupted in violence again earlier this month, ought to be one of the richest countries in the world. Its immense mineral reserves are currently valued by some estimates at more than $24 trillion and include 30 percent of the world's diamond reserves; vast amounts of cobalt, copper and gold; and 70 percent of the world's coltan, which is used in electronic devices. Yet the most recent edition of the United Nations Development Program's Human Development Index ranked Congo last among the 187 countries and territories included in the survey.

Related News

• Dire Scene in Congolese City as Rebels Prepare to Leave (December 1, 2012)

Related in Opinion

ROOM FOR DEBATE

How to Stabilize Congo

Congo has been poorly governed throughout its post-colonial history, and is chronically prone to violence. What is the secret to stabilizing the resource-rich country?

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For Op-Ed, follow@nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow@andyrNYT.

Instead of prosperity, Congo's mineral wealth has brought only an endless procession of unscrupulous rulers eager to exploit its riches, from King Leopold II of Belgium to Mobutu Sese Seko, who was allowed by the logic of the cold war to rule the same area as a private fief. And last year, the current president, Joseph Kabila, who inherited the job from his assassinated father more than a decade ago, awarded himself another five-year term in elections that were criticized by everyone from the European Union to the country's Roman Catholic bishops.

If some enterprises, public or private, can be said to be "too big to fail," Congo is the reverse: it is too big to succeed. It is an artificial entity whose constituent parts share the misfortune of having been seized by the explorer Henry Morton Stanley in the name of a rapacious 19th-century Belgian monarch. From the moment Congo was given independence in 1960, it was being torn apart by centrifugal forces, beginning with separatism in the mineral-rich southern province of Katanga.

The international community has repeatedly dodged this reality by opting for so-called peace deals with shelf lives barely longer than the news cycle. Rather than nation-building, what is needed to end Congo's violence is the opposite: breaking up a chronically failed state into smaller organic units whose members share broad agreement or at least have common interests in personal and community security.

In recent weeks, a rebel group calling itself the March 23 Movement, or M23, has stormed through eastern Congo, scattering poorly trained units loyal to the government and reducing a huge United Nationspeacekeeping force to a helpless bystander as M23 seized control of Goma, the capital of the resource-rich North Kivu province. The rebel advance rekindled fears of a renewal of the bloody 1998-2003 Second Congo War, which drew the armies of a host of African countries as well as countless local militias into what was aptly dubbed "Africa's world war."

The M23 rebels appear indistinguishable from the several dozen other armed groups lurking in or around Congo, but in many respects they are quite different. Many M23 members are veterans of an earlier insurgent group, the National Congress for the Defense of the People, known by the French acronym C.N.D.P., which consisted largely of ethnic Tutsi Congolese who had banded together to fight the former Hutu génocidaires who fled to Congo following the end of their killing spree in Rwanda in 1994.

In a peace deal that was reached nearly four years ago, the Kabila government promised to facilitate the return of more than 50,000 Congolese Tutsi refugees, to integrate C.N.D.P. fighters into the national army, and to share power with the group's leaders. Mr. Kabila's failure to honor these commitments led to the current M23 revolt.

A United Nations report has accused the Rwandan government of supporting M23. Although Rwanda has denied it, this may well be true, and it is perfectly understandable given that the M23 rebels are fighting former Hutu génocidaires who still dream of invading Rwanda and finishing what they started nearly two decades ago.

Others have dismissed the M23 leaders as "warlords." But warlords, even if they do not acquire power through democratic means, tend to provide some sort of political framework, often based on kinship ties or ethnic solidarity, that is seen as legitimate. They also tend to provide some basic security — which is more than the questionably legitimate Kabila government in Kinshasa provides for most Congolese.

Whatever else Congo's various armed groups may be, they are clearly viewed by large segments of some communities as de facto protectors — a point underscored by the several hundred government soldiers and police officers who recently defected to M23 and publicly swore allegiance to it after the fall of Goma.

If Congo were permitted to break up into smaller entities, the international community could devote its increasingly scarce resources to humanitarian relief and development, rather than trying, as the United Nations Security Council has pledged, to preserve the "sovereignty, independence, unity, and territorial integrity" of a fictional state that is of value only to the political elites who have clawed their way to the top in order to plunder Congo's resources and fund the patronage networks that ensure that they will remain in power.

Despite its democratic misnomer, Mr. Kabila has repeatedly delayed holding local elections since 2005. For years, every last mayor, burgomeister and neighborhood chief in the entire country has been appointed by presidential decree.

Given the dysfunctional status quo and the terrible toll it has exacted in terms of lives and resources, the West should put aside ideological dogmatism in favor of statesmanlike pragmatism and acknowledge the reality that, at least in some extreme cases, the best way to break a cycle of violence is to break up an artificial country in crisis and give it back to its very real people.

J. Peter Pham is director of the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on December 1, 2012, on page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: To Save Congo, Let It Fall Apart.

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The Controversial Africa Policy of Susan Rice

http://m.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/11/the-controversial-africa-policy-of-susan-rice/265752/

The Controversial Africa Policy of Susan Rice

America's potential next secretary of state was involved in a major policy shift in Washington's approach toward Africa. But was it a positive one?

Allison Joyce/Reuters

On November 14, President Obama vigorously defended U.N. ambassador Susan Rice during a press conference in the White House's Rose Garden, perhaps signaling that he was unworried by the possibility of a drawn-out battle with Republicans looking to block Rice's possible nomination as secretary of state. Rice, who has been criticized for her promoting a now-disproven explanation for the deadly attack on an American diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, apparently has the full support of the president that could nominate her for the highest diplomatic position in the land.

Things are not quite as amicable at U.N. headquarters. As the conflict in the Eastern DRC escalated, and as two U.N. reports provided extensive evidence of official Rwandan and Ugandan support for the M23 rebel group, Rice's delegation blocked any mention of the conflict's most important state actors in a Security Council statement. And in June, the U.S. attempted to delay the release of a UN Group of Experts report alleging ties between Rwanda and M23.

Peter Rosenblum, a respected human rights lawyer and professor at Columbia Law School, says that the U.S.'s reticence in singling out state actors is significant, especially at the U.N. "It shows [Rice] is willing to expend political capital to cast something of a shield over Rwanda and Uganda," he says. "These are the things that in diplomatic settings, they are remarked upon. People see that the U.S. is still there defending the leaders of these countries at a time when many of their other closest allies have just grown sort of increasingly weary and dismayed."

Sarah Margon of Human Rights Watch agrees that the U.S. should be more active in naming potential obstacles in resolving the eastern DRC conflict. "It's unacceptable for Rwanda to be violating UN Security Council resolutions and meddling in international peace and security," she says. "I think the U.S. government has a very powerful voice and they need to use it."

For some, Rice embodies a period in American policy in which U.S. influence was not put to particularly effective use in Africa. Rice served as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs during Bill Clinton's second term as president. As Rosenblum explained in a 2002 article in Current History [$], the second Clinton administration began with a full-fledged pivot to Africa, with Madeline Albright undertaking a high-profile visit to the continent early in her tenure as secretary of state. It was a substantive trip -- Albright gathered some of Africa's most dynamic newly-installed heads of state in Entebbe and Addis Ababa, where she articulated America's intention to change its relationship with the continent.

But Rosenblum explains that this approach meant embracing now-problematic leaders like Rwanda's Paul Kagame, Ethiopia's Meles Zenawi, Uganda's Yoweri Museveni, and, to a lesser extent, DRC's Laurent Kabila and Eritrea's Isais Afewerki. Under Clinton's Africa policy, these leaders -- all of whom were former rebels who had taken power through violent means -- would serve as a vanguard for the social and political transformation of the continent. Above all, they would be treated as normal allies of the United States, regarded as equal partners and autonomous actors, rather than countries that were only important insomuch as they could be exploited or ignored. Redefining and strengthening Washington's relationship to Africa was a laudable aim that arguably presaged the much greater degree of engagement that followed under George W. Bush and Obama.

Yet Rosenblum believes Rice helped usher in a policy that counted very few successes, even if he says that he has been "very impressed" with her tenure as UN ambassador. "Rice was a major force in this new, very personalized engagement with a group of leaders who had come to power through military means but who represented, for the Clinton policy people, something new and admirable," he says. "The group they bonded to included leaders who were eventually at war with each other within a period of two or three years." By the end of Clinton's presidency, Afewerki and Zenawi had fought a war that killed between 70,000 and 100,000 people; Kagame and Museveni fought Kabila in the eastern DRC, and then turned their guns on each other. Many, including the author and former U.N. investigator Jason Stearns, believe that Clinton's policy enabled both Rwandan and Ugandan adventurism in Eastern Congo, prolonging a conflict that still reverberates.

Perhaps more jarring is this anecdote in an essay by Howard French in the New York Review of Books that directly relates to Rice:

In allowing the Rwandan invasion of Zaire, the United States had two very different goals. The most immediate was the clearing of over one million Hutu refugees from U.N. camps near the Rwandan border, which had become bases for vengeful elements of the defeated Hutu army and Interahamwe militia, the agents of the Rwandan genocide. In [Gerard] Prunier's telling:

"When Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Susan Rice came back from her first trip to the Great Lakes region [of East Africa], a member of her staff said, '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 U.S.] have to do is look the other way.'"

The gist of Prunier's anecdote is correct, except that participants have confirmed to me that it was Rice herself who spoke these words.

Was this actually a reflection of policy -- did the U.S. really expect nothing of their allies on the human rights front? This is debatable, but it is clear that the U.S. considered many of the biggest problems in the region to emanate from Kinshasa. Jendayi Frazer, who held the assistant secretary for African affairs position during George W. Bush's second term and is now a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, notes that "the Clinton administration had become very antagonistic with the Congolese government -- for many good reasons, but nevertheless, they had become very antagonistic."

Laurent Kabila, whom the Clinton administration had pressured in response to massacres of Hutu refugees in the eastern Congo in the years after the 1994 Rwandan genocide, was assassinated just days before George W. Bush's inauguration in 2001. Frazer says that the Bush administration used the elevation of his son Joseph to the presidency as an opening for pursuing a regional peace agreement, which was eventually signed in 2003. Because of the change in leadership, "we were able to position ourselves in a more neutral fashion vis-a-vis Congo and Rwanda and Uganda and not be painted as being on one side or another," she said. She emphasized that this is not intended as a criticism of Clinton's policy, and adds that there is nothing in Rice's record that she considers disqualifying for secretary of state.

Frazer was, however, critical of the Obama administration's current approach in Central Africa. She says the U.S. could have pushed for MONUSCO, the U.N. peacekeeping force based in the eastern DRC, to take a more active role in the conflict, or it could have taken the lead on figuring out how or whether a multinational force agreed to by regional governments in July would be deployed. "I think the Obama team has been anemic in its Africa policy," she said. "And that is also expressed in the DRC and the Great Lakes region. They basically haven't been present. They haven't shaped events to the point where these problems that they're seeing today wouldn't be there." 

Frazer notes that Rice hasn't even been officially nominated yet. Because Obama has strongly implied that she might be nominated without officially committing to her as his choice for the next secretary of state, Rice's candidacy has been debated among partisans and pundits rather than by the members of the Senate who have to confirm her. "Susan Rice finds herself getting vetted in public in the worst way," Frazer says, "without even the benefit of a nomination."

* * *

The past four years of American policy in Africa, and the larger tendency toward trusting, cooperating with, and even shielding troublesome governments, cannot be pinned on Rice alone. And Clinton, Albright and Rice were merely pursuing a policy that made sense at the time, and that might still make sense today. Since the outbreak of the conflict in the mid-1990s, American policymakers have assumed that it was impossible to make peace in the eastern Congo without the cooperation of Museveni and Kagame, especially given both Uganda and Rwanda's legitimate national security interests in the region (a heroes-and-villains-type dichotomy in a conflict as complex as the eastern DRC's would be counterproductive in any event). Frazer rejects the idea that Clinton should not have closely engaged with these governments. "I think the Clinton administration tried to structure regional approaches to address the peace and security challenges in Africa," she said. "There are times where it advances things, and there are times where it doesn't advance things as much as we like."

The real-world results of any policy are inherently unknowable, especially in a situation as dizzying as the eastern DRC in the late 1990s. This uncertainty should hardly exempt policymakers from accountability, and according to Rosenblum's article, it was unclear whether Rice really understood the consequences of the U.S.'s close relationship with Kagame, or the impact of running interference for a government that might have been working against regional stability and peace:

On September 15 [1998], Susan Rice addressed the growing perception of complicity in testimony before the Congress. "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." But these statements did little good. Nearly four years later, an official in the new Colin Powell State Department told me, the United States had gotten to the point where the French 'no longer believe that the United States is funding the war.' But that was about it.

Has anything changed since the early days of the 1998 crisis? Back then, Rosenblum notes, "The official State Department statements ... show[ed] a new concern for human rights problems in Congo balanced against tepid anti-war language." Today, the weeks since the escalation of the M23 crisis have played out in an eerily similar fashion. On November 20 and 21, 2012, State Department spokespeople wove their way through questions about Rwanda's role in the M23 crisis, and made an apparently conscious effort to avoid singling out Kagame's government. And there's the Security Council statement on the escalating crisis, which obliquely calls for "an end to any and all outside support" without sayingwhose support, exactly.

In 1998, the U.S. government believed it could use its existing close relations with Kagame's government to push for a negotiated solution. There was none to be had for another three years, and that was only after the leadership of the United States and the Congo had changed. Despite the failure of this strategy, this seems to be the Obama administration's plan of action today. The wars are broadly similar. The U.S. policy approach to ending them is similar. And at least one of the people at heart of American diplomacy in Africa is the same -- a gifted and respected diplomat who might be the U.S.'s next secretary of state.