A Rebel Group Is Taking Congo While the World Looks Away
A primer for context on what's being perpetrated.
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A few days ago, UNICEF issued a statement about “horrific reports of grave violations against children” in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The horrors seen by the UN agency surpass “anything we have seen in recent years.” In a single week, cases of rape in 42 hospitals jumped fivefold, the agency said. Thirty percent of those treated were children.
So what’s going on? Here’s a primer. I’m starting back a ways so you can get a deeper view as to why the country is once again embroiled in a terrifying war.
In colonial times, DRC was considered part of Africa’s “heart of darkness.” While it certainly was a dark place, it was not in the way its colonizers imagined. Instead of being populated by “savages,” the country was inhabited by people who were enslaved by the Belgians, who murdered them at an astounding rate. Demographers estimate that about half the country’s 20-million-person population was killed between 1880 and 1920 alone. The Congolese died of starvation, of forced labor (tapping rubber) and of diseases exacerbated by the deplorable conditions imposed by the Belgians.
This horrific history only led to at best, disorganization, and at worst, mayhem when DRC was finally free of its colonizers in 1960, as various groups vied for power, as in many African countries who were shaking free of their chains. The reverberations of colonization led to poverty, corruption and ongoing conflict.
Congo’s east has an estimated $24 trillion of rare minerals in its earth.
DRC is a massive country — nearly the size of Western Europe. It’s 900 miles across as the crow flies, although there are no roads connecting the whole country. Kinshasa is in the west, far from the constantly war-torn east. The east has an estimated $24 trillion of rare minerals in its earth. It also has the most concentrated populations of Hutus and Tutsis in the country.
Rather than getting into the complex roots of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, just know that after the killing, many Rwandan Hutu genocidaires fled over the border into Congo. In 1996, Rwanda and Uganda invaded DRC to try to capture the remaining genocidaires in what is known as the First Congo War. The reason this is important is that the aftermath of the genocide created tension between Congo and Rwanda. That Tutsis are a much smaller population in the region than Hutus has long been a source of strife, as is their greater wealth and control of the Rwandan government since 2001. Tutsis are called “Rwandophones” because they speak Kinyarwanda, Rwanda’s official language. Then there are Hutu-backed armed groups like the FDLR in eastern Congo that have long destabilized the region, fighting with groups like the Rwanda-backed militia group M23 for control of the area’s mineral-rich ground.
The M23 is just one of what experts say are about 120 armed militias operating in the country. Formed in 2012, the group has varied in size and wreaked varying amounts of havoc since. Made up of mostly Tutsis, the M23 has made claims that it is simply defending Tutsis from persecution by other armed groups and the Congolese government.
Right now, the M23 is murdering and raping and taking over parts of eastern Congo, in North and South Kivu provinces. At the end of January, the M23 conquered Goma, a major city in North Kivu, forcing at least 100,000 people to flee and leaving bodies in the streets and hospitals overwhelmed. Now it is advancing on South Kivu, where Kavumu, the small village I spent years reporting on, is situated, just outside the city of Bukavu.
Kavumu is where a homegrown militia, led by a member of parliament, was drugging families and stealing little girls during the night and raping them. Nearly 50 girls, aged 18 months to 11 years old were violated because a witch doctor told the men that they would become impervious to bullets if they collected virgin blood.
Now the M23 has taken the tiny Kavumu airport, which is only fields away from the shacks of the village and is the last barrier to taking the city of Bukavu. And, as of yesterday, it appears that the group has finally reached the city.
I recently got a message from a source in the village:
“Here at home in Kavumu, the situation becomes untenable.” My source described how on the night of Feb. 7, heavily armed men forcibly entered houses. “Provisional assessment: Several property carried away, 9 people killed, 6 people injured. The humanitarian situation is catastrophic, no food, no drugs.”
With no one to protect them, with the world busy doing anything but paying attention to Congo, as usual, they are praying, he said.
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A history lesson for the uninformed. I never knew Congo was so big, with atrocities to match the size. It seems the whole world is fiddling while the desperate are burning.
As usual, the world shows little concern for any crisis in an African country. The DRC has been subjected to violence from without and from with. This, to a great extent, is a direct legacy of the Belgian rule. Read “The Ghost of Leopold”. Great book for incite into this.