On 16 November Congolese “rebel” leader Laurent Nkunda — self-declared protector of the minority Tutsi population in Congo — agreed to a ceasefire with Joseph Kabila’s government. This ends weeks of fighting in eastern Congo between Nkunda’s group, the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP), and the central government army backed up by UN troops. 250,000 have fled their homes, to makeshift shelters and camps away from the fighting. They are now at risk of death from diseases such as cholera.
This recent round of fighting is rooted in the historical and ongoing conflict between Rwandan and Congolese Tutsis and the Hutu militia responsible for the genocide in Rwanda, and the civil and regional wars this sparked off after 1997. The Congolese wars have by 2008, according to some estimates, caused the deaths of 5.4 million people from the fighting and from the disease and hunger which follows.
Laurent Nkunda says he wants to track down the Rwandan Hutu militia who now harass and murder Tutsis in Congo; these people fled to the Congo, along with many other Hutu people, when the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front took power. When most ordinary Hutus returned to Rwanda, the hardcore militia, people still wanted for war crimes, did not. However this recent conflict and the wars which preceded it are about at least four other things.
1. The Rwandan and Ugandan governments backing proxy militias in order to pursue their own internal enemies. Rwanda’s goals are relevant here — they back Nkunda. The fact that they want to pursue the former genocidal Hutu militia, is on one level reasonable. The Hutu militia reduced to around 7,000 fighters, is now called the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR). From the south Kivu province it has attacked the Rwandan border and native and (long-time) migrant Rwandan and Burundian Tutsis. It is responsible for looting, killing and raping.
The Rwandans and Congolese Tutsis have the right to defend themselves. But the Rwandan government have backed this latest offensive because they are annoyed with the Congolese government stopping its own offensive against the FDLR; they believe the government is supporting the FDLR.
That the Rwandan government pursues its own goals is one thing. That the actions of its proxy leads to a quarter of a million people terrorised to flee their homes is quite another.
2. The militia and political organisation of Laurent Nkunda is a reactionary force. Nkunda is, as one journalist put it, a “well-armed megalomaniac”. He is a 7th Day Adventist who calls himself a Rebel for Christ; a man who has created a cult around himself. For Nkunda tracking down Hutu the militia is an excuse to also terrorise, and more to the point to establish a warlord’s quasi-state in eastern Congo. Among other things he uses child soldiers to fight his cause.
3. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is misruled by an entrenched political elite. When Joseph Kabila was elected President in July 2006, this was seen as progress in the west — a more or less democratic election had taken place. But Kabila, like his father who ruled before him, is more concerned to make and break political alliances in order to save his own position in power than build democracy and prosperity. He wants to keep his cronies happy, and this feeds rivalries between the various political factions and militias.
Kabila’s current conflict with Nkunda is partly explained by Kabila breaking ranks with Tutsi business people. It is Nkunda’s de facto control in the North Kivu province of DRC, a rich area that concerns the central government.
4. Everyone, central government, the various militias, the Congo bourgeois and western corporations, wants a piece of the action in the eastern provinces of South and North Kivu. That is access to the mining and trade in minerals including coltan (used in the electronic circuits of mobile phones) and gold.
The armies that involved themselves in the First Congo war (on the side of Rwanda and on the side of the central government) were in engaged in a scramble for these minerals. Coltan is mined in quarries often by adolescents and sometimes by young children who struggle everyday to earn a living for their families. They dig out very small amounts of ore for very little money.
People in the interior of Congo make a lot of money out of the trade. The militias finance their wars with the trade. Western businesses and western governments would like to see the trade continue, in more stable conditions for their profits, not in safer conditions for the people who work the mines. That is what concerns David Milliband when he went on his recent mission to Africa.
Socialists in the Europe need to know more and care more about what is happening in the Congo. We need to use our knowledge to make solidarity, not least with the Congolese community in Europe.
• A extremely effective film about the links between coltan extraction and the militias – Blood Coltan – can be found here:
