Congo Seeks Protection

Drive west through Rwanda, threading past hills of eucalyptus, down to the shores of Lake Kivu and the Congolese border and you’ll see real, actual signs of trouble. Every few hundred yards are hand-painted signboards marking the sites of massacres during Rwanda’s 1994 genocide. Here, 532 were killed. There, 318. Here, “+/− 5,000.” The word JENOSIDE is painted in scarlet, and after you’ve seen it–and the redness of the earth–a few times, it’s hard not to wonder about the great flood of blood that bathed Rwanda when 800,000 people were slaughtered in three months. But there are other signs, signs of progress, indicating new hospitals and schools, and government-placed signs extolling a future of prosperity and public virtue: YES TO INVESTMENT. NO TO CORRUPTION. They indicate that Rwanda is moving on.

The eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo is not. The seeds of the humanitarian disaster now consuming it lie in the same Hutu-Tutsi hatred that engulfed Rwanda. The war in Congo began in 1994 when the Hutu militias–known as the Interahamwe–that carried out the Rwandan genocide were defeated by a Tutsi army and fled across the border, where they were pursued by their enemies. In that sense, the war in Congo took up where the one in Rwanda left off.

But the sequel has proved bigger, longer and immeasurably more complicated. The fighting is now in its 15th year. According to the International Rescue Committee, it has claimed the lives of 5.4 million people, mostly through the disease and malnutrition that have accompanied it. In 1998, the war sucked six countries into a smash-and-grab for Congo’s minerals and timber. And it has spawned a plethora of new rebel groups, collectively known as the Mai Mai, founded on a mix of genuine tribal grievances and criminal and murderous intent. Everyone–the Mai Mai, the Congolese army, Hutu and Tutsi, Congolese and Rwandan–fights everyone else.

The latest chapter in the crisis began in October 2008 when Tutsi rebel leader Laurent Nkunda launched an offensive, taking advantage of the weak Congolese President, Joseph Kabila, and his collapsing army. Nkunda quickly doubled his territory in the province of North Kivu and threatened to march on the capital, Kinshasa. The U.N. says a quarter of North Kivu’s 4 million people are now refugees as a result. “This is war” was Nkunda’s explanation.

The fighting in eastern Congo is such a war of all against all, of alliances that shift by the week, that it is almost impossible for the outside world to keep up. The latest twist came on Jan. 20, when 4,000 Rwandan troops invaded once more, apparently with the acquiescence of the Congolese government. Two days later, Rwanda stunned observers–many of whom had thought Nkunda was a Rwandan proxy–by advancing on Nkunda’s forces and arresting him.

Whose Responsibility?

What the next stage of the conflict may be is impossible to guess. There are signs that forces loyal to Nkunda are melting away in the wake of his arrest. But that still leaves myriad armed groups who know only the way of war–and who continue to prey upon the people of eastern Congo. It was precisely to deal with such disasters–and with leaders like Kabila and Nkunda–that in 2005 the U.N. World Summit adopted a set of principles called the responsibility to protect, or R2P. Intended to prevent a repeat of cataclysms like the one in Rwanda, when the world watched but did little, R2P enshrines in international law the justification and obligation for intervention. A nation forfeits its sovereignty if it commits or is unable to prevent massive human-rights abuses on its soil. Should that happen, other nations can take action–using peaceful means such as diplomacy or sanctions or, if all else fails, military force–through the U.N. Security Council. Though the intent is not to replace a country’s government, invoking R2P serves as a censure of it. Its message: You are doing an unacceptably poor job. We, the world, can and must do better.

That’s the theory. It’s pretty optimistic. It assumes that the world agrees on the primacy of human rights over national sovereignty and has the resolve to impose that consensus–another heady assumption–on the wayward few. “I don’t know how the U.N. ever passed that resolution,” says Anthony Holmes, head of the Africa program at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City. “Maybe all the delegates had a great champagne reception before they signed, but I suspect that many of the countries that voted for it then would never vote for it again.”

But even if you support the theory, there’s the reality of implementing it. And to see that reality, Congo is the place to go. MONUC–the French acronym for the U.N. peacekeeping force of blue helmets and white vehicles in Congo–is the force tasked with getting R2P up and running. MONUC began work in 1999, years before R2P came into effect. But as the U.N.’s idea of peacekeeping evolved from deterrence and cease-fire-monitoring to peace-enforcing, so MONUC grew. It has the most aggressive peacekeeping mandate in U.N. history, one that includes “forcibly implementing” cease-fires and “using all means deemed necessary” to protect civilians and improve security. It is also supported by the world’s largest peacekeeping force–20,000 soldiers from 18 countries–and funded by the biggest peacekeeping budget ever, an annual $1.1 billion.

But as Alan Doss, the U.N. special representative who is the MONUC boss, admits, MONUC is also something of a test of good intentions. “R2P is a huge step forward in terms of the principle of international humanitarian intervention,” he says. “But the question remains: How do we actually do it?” A recent trip I made to eastern Congo suggests that question is not yet answered.

Threat Level 4

Congo is the land Rwanda left behind. At the border, the road turns from asphalt to mud and grit. Rwandan officials are famous for their incorruptibility, but Congolese immigration shook me down. Beyond lies the city of Goma, a sprawl of tin- and grass-roofed huts and refugee camps.

In late November, MONUC raised the threat level in Goma to 4 out of 5. Escorts of humanitarian convoys continued across North Kivu, but hundreds of soldiers had been pulled back to the city from 43 bases across the region, and patrols were largely limited to Goma and its immediate environs. The U.N. Security Council also granted MONUC 3,000 extra troops. Still, the force remained chronically overstretched. “Congo is the size of Western Europe, without roads,” Doss says. Before he received his reinforcements, Doss had 10,000 soldiers in North and South Kivu protecting a combined population of 10 million from 40,000 to 50,000 armed men. In all of Congo, he had the same number of soldiers he had in 2003 as the U.N. special representative to Liberia, a country less than one-hundredth the size.

The day after entering Congo, I headed north toward the fighting. By 7 a.m., Goma’s streets were jammed with blue helmets and white armored vehicles. The traffic ended abruptly on the edge of town. In the next four days, I did not see a single peacekeeping operation or, aside from two supply convoys, even a U.N. vehicle more than 500 yards (450 m) from a MONUC base.

Three miles (5 km) from town, I passed the last Congolese-army checkpoint and crossed the front line into rebel territory. Two hours later, at Kiwanga, where first Mai Mai and then Nkunda’s advancing forces executed 50 to 100 young men on Nov. 5, thousands of refugees converged on a MONUC base, spooked by rumors of a Mai Mai counterattack. On their heads and wooden bicycles they carried mattresses, sacks of potatoes, children. The Indian soldiers at the base drove two armored personnel carriers 300 ft. (90 m) outside. They kept 30 more carriers, tanks, jeeps and trucks in neat lines behind the razor wire and limited their interaction with the crowd to shooing them off an adjacent helipad. The refugees built tents of sticks and rags in front of the gates. “Nobody ever gets into the base,” said Meshaq Shebani, 22, a roadside diesel vendor. He eyed the rows of yellow and red flowers around a spot marked vip parking next to the commander’s tent. “They don’t protect us. They just sit there drinking tea.”

Days later, at a press conference back in Goma, MONUC spokesman Lieut. Colonel Jean-Paul Dietrich described refugees huddling outside U.N. bases as a sign of public confidence. A reporter asked him how MONUC treats the wounded. “If people are injured, we take them to the base,” he said. “That’s the Geneva Convention.”

Word of that obligation does not seem to have reached Kiwanga. In one case last October, an elderly Spanish nun, Sister María, was caught in the cross fire between rebels and the Congolese army and became trapped under a falling wall. Still conscious, Sister María used her mobile phone to call Father George at a nearby Catholic mission. He contacted officials at MONUC and asked for an armored rescue but says they refused. A few hours later, the rebels carried Sister María to the front line. From there, a group of nuns took her to the Rutshuru hospital, where both her legs were amputated. The next day, Father George again asked MONUC to take Sister María to its base for an air evacuation. Again MONUC refused, and the nuns took her themselves once more. Almost 36 hours after the U.N. first learned of her being injured, a MONUC helicopter picked up Sister María and flew her the 10 minutes to Goma. “What is their point?” Father George says of MONUC. “They say they protect people, but they do nothing, nothing, nothing.” Farther north, at Rwindi, I watched a group of Mai Mai child soldiers as young as 12 march unmolested past the gates of another MONUC base. Later, Dietrich said at the press conference in Goma that this column had been stopped.

We headed toward three towns where the Congolese army was fighting the Mai Mai. I arrived to find thousands of Congolese soldiers looting. Lines of men were carrying food, radios and clothes away. The army allows wives and children to accompany the men, and in the town of Karimba the soldiers slumped in the street, counting out their plunder with their families. In a courtyard off the main street lay the burned corpse of a young man. A second charred body lay outside, this one disemboweled, his yellow guts spilling across his navel. At the deserted town hospital, three soldiers sat unhappily with weak, malarial babies in their laps. The soldiers said they hadn’t eaten in days.

An army colonel, John Tshibangu, arrived and promised that looters would be caught. A pastor, Rahera Kambale, pulled me aside. “Even as he’s talking, they’re still looting and raping and killing,” he said. “This is the second time this month.” I asked about MONUC. “They passed by one day,” said the pastor. “They didn’t stop.” He echoed Father George: “I don’t see their point.” A few miles to the north, we found a Mai Mai checkpoint, where fighters searched a truckload of army wives, confiscating tubs of baby formula, bottles of Golden cooking oil and packs of Nice & Lovely face cream. Mai Mai leader Kissinger Kisamba is an army deserter. “This is my area,” he said. “So I formed my own group to protect the people.” MONUC, he added, “does not know the situation here.”

When the Good Guys Go Bad

The day Sister María was injured, MONUC’s compounds in Goma came under attack by mobs claiming that the peacekeeping force was doing nothing to protect them. Being set upon by the people it was sent to protect is a searing indictment of MONUC. “There is a huge amount of genuine frustration,” admits Doss. “I understand it. I would be less than honest if I said we could guarantee the protection of every civilian.”

Just as troubling is a mandate requiring MONUC to reinforce state authority. That means MONUC trains former militiamen and introduces them to the ranks of the same Congolese army that lives by looting and commits war crimes on a daily basis. Crippling its ability to rise above this behavior, a small number of MONUC soldiers have engaged in the same kinds of sexual assaults practiced by the nastiest of Congo’s armed groups, resulting in 40 being sent home, nine civilian staff members being charged and one more being sacked. MONUC is also investigating possible arms- and gold-trafficking by Pakistani soldiers. Tatiana Carayannis, a Congo expert at New York City’s Social Science Research Council, concludes, “It’s not quite hell, but we’re at a turning point here. Congo could go either way, and it’s really about what MONUC does.”

It’s also about what MONUC is. In addition to 3,000 extra troops, Doss persuaded the U.N. Security Council to expand MONUC’s mandate to allow it to target the commercial drivers of the war: the trade in Congo’s minerals, like gold, and the world’s largest reserves of coltan, which is needed to make components for cell phones. He continues to argue for an even more muscular approach to enforcing peace. “When we make these statements, when we claim the responsibility to protect, we have to be careful that we have the means to match our mandate,” he says. “You don’t go to war with blue helmets and white tanks.”

Talk of war is a long way from traditional peacekeeping. But it is a direct consequence of the open-ended nature of R2P, and it raises troubling questions. Where does the responsibility to protect end? Does it mean fighting a national army? Does it mean supplanting a national government? Does it mean accepting the large losses that would inevitably accompany intervention in Somalia–the site of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis–or in totalitarian states like Burma? Doss insists there are limits to what he proposes. “We assist the national process. We do not replace it,” he says. “We’re not an army of occupation.” But introducing a foreign combat force into Congo would cast doubt on whether such declarations are sincere.

Gareth Evans, a former Australian Foreign Minister who’s now president of the International Crisis Group, has just published a book on R2P. If something proves difficult, “it doesn’t mean you abandon it,” he argues. Rather, you “reinforce and update” it. Initially, he says, that would mean sending more soldiers and money. Others wonder whether the U.N. is doing not too little but too much and is in danger of falling into the same trap as NATO in Afghanistan and the U.S. in Iraq: the more robust the mission, the harder it is to leave. Alex de Waal, program director at the Social Science Research Council, warns, “When you move to coercive peacekeeping, you’re no longer neutral. You cannot expect to be treated above and beyond the conflict. You are part of it.”

The recent Rwandan invasion suggests that the Congolese and Rwandan governments, for their part, now doubt that the U.N. should have any role in the region. In December, the U.N. published a report alleging Rwandan support for Nkunda. Kigali shot back that the U.N. was among those that “have failed to resolve the conflict … despite numerous bilateral, regional and international initiatives in the last 14 years.” Conceivably, Rwanda is now showing that it is prepared to be serious about peacemaking and cut off allies like Nkunda if they behave badly. The message from Rwanda seems to be: You, the world, are doing an unacceptably poor job. We locals can, and must, do better.

I left Congo with the memory of one more sign. At MONUC headquarters I found a display of the achievements of Indian peacekeepers. Pictures of the soldiers with refugees were captioned GUARDIANS OF THE LOCAL POPULACE and DO NOT WORRY, WE ARE THERE. In pride of place was a display of pictures and letters detailing how the Indians extracted the body of a Chinese climber from the crater of the nearby Nyiragongo volcano. Above these was a proud banner reading BEYOND MANDATE. Retrieving a dead Chinese tourist from an uninhabited, uncontested mountain may be noble work. But the responsibility to protect was supposed to be about more than that.