Round up on conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo
Though a ceasefire has been established in the eastern city of Goma, aid agencies still fear a humanitarian disaster.
“The humanitarian situation at the moment is terrible,” said Jaya Murthy, the spokesperson for the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF in the eastern DRC. “We have about between 40,000 and 50 000 people that are in a couple of small camps five kilometres outside of [the provincial capital of] Goma.”
UNHCR also reported that many Congolese were heading towards Uganda looking for safety. Its team at the border said that on Thursday, some 8,000 entered Uganda at the Busanza border crossing….
Many aid agencies have quit Goma, and facilities are overwhelmed at several villages on the border as Congolese refugees stream into Uganda.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has been
heavily engaged in discussions with leaders in Africa, the European Union (EU) and the United States in an effort to stabilize the situation in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), while calling for a continued halt to the fighting which has uprooted hundreds of thousands of people.
Characterizing the situation on the ground in North Kivu province as “very threatening,” Mr. Ban told reporters in the Indian capital New Delhi that he has been in contact with DRC President Joseph Kabila, Rwandan President Paul Kagame, Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete, who is also the President of the African Union (AU) and French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
George Clooney (who is a United Nations Messenger of Peace as well as a cool actor) is calling for greater international efforts to end the DR Congo conflict.
A meeting has been called next week at the Great Lakes to discuss a resolution of the DRC conflict.
International Crisis Group page in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Global Voices collects D.R. of Congo: Blogging From the War Zone (and more bloggers here).
More African news over the next few days (as I attempt to take a break from US election blogging).
UPDATE: OK, I just did links, not really any background as to why there’s been a longstanding conflict in DRC or why it should erupt now. For a quick background, you can check Ethan Zuckerman’s take on the conflict. Or go to the International Crisis Group page I linked; it has a short summary of the background, and lots of links to longer pieces.
The DRC was the site of “Africa’s first world war” – a war in which several neighboring countries were involved and which was intertwined with, among other things, the genocide in Rwanda. Though that war ended in 2003 and free elections were held in 2006, the conflict never really fully ended. There’s still an ongoing UN peacekeeping force in the country, and they, not the Congolese army, are actually facing the rebels now.
Among other things, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), rebels linked to the 1994 Tutsi Genocide are still hiding out in the DRC, as is, last I read, Joseph Kony, head of the Lord’s Resistance Army, which has fought the Ugandan government for years, kidnapped many Ugandan children. The DRC being a “failed state,” with very weak internal structures, multiple armed bands are able to operate there. The DRC borders the Central African Republic and Sudan on the North; Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi on the East; Zambia and Angola on the South; the Republic of the Congo on the West; and is separated from Tanzania by Lake Tanganyika on the East. Sudan, of course, has the Darfur conflict, which, if you’ll recall, interlinks with ongoing wars in Chad and the Central African Republic. There has also been an ongoing publicity effort about the use of rape as a tool of war in the DRC.
That’s what I know of the background. What I don’t know, since I was preoccupied with the US election when the latest conflict erupted, is why things suddenly took a turn for the worse in the DRC now.