Angelo Izama
24 October 2007
opinion
Eastern DRC has become a fertile ground for a myriad of rebel groups. While some rebels are fighting DRC government, others are targetting other countries including Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi. Angelo Izama analyses why the Great Lakes region is not about to experience any peace
One of the most talked about 'African stories' these days is what has been portrayed as an 'epidemic of rape' in Eastern DRC. By one account published by Jeffrey Gettleman's of the New York Times, up to 10 girls are brutally raped everyday.
Some of these girls, barely teenagers, are raped in front of their parents and have their private parts poked with bayonets and pieces of wood. In one case, a group called the rastas by virtue of their dreadlocks, bashes babies with pestles or burns them.
Anyone Ugandan reading that story would recognise that the rastas do not just share their hairstyle but much their brutality with the much reported methods of the Lords Resistance Army (LRA) which is itself inside Eastern DRC. Both groups also have a vague political agenda.
The rastas have been linked to Hutu militias agitating against Rwanda while LRA, now with a political wing, is fighting for or on the behalf of northern Ugandans.
The brutality in Eastern DRC and for a decade and half in Northern Uganda is, however, just another heart-wrenching showcase of the complexities of ending impunity in the Great Lakes region.
After decades of war and low intensity conflict, it's clear the business as usual approach will not bring sustainable peace here. There must be a rethink of what could work. While today some form of stability is being sustained in Uganda, Rwanda and even in parts of DRC; Sudan is sliding towards another North-South war while almost all of East Africa is being drawn into an inferno in the greater horn of Africa.
Over five countries are involved in the chaos of Somalia, for example, extending for the first time the geographical stretch of instability from Bujumbura to Mogadishu.
Two things stand out. Firstly the rebel movements that are the main source of insecurity, and human rights violations, operate broadly all over the region because of the complex alliances promoted by the military regimes that dominate the political landscape. They also do so in lawless zones where states have retreated.
In Eastern DRC, where it is easier to get raped or killed than jailed for breaking the law, there is a concentration of as many as 10 rebel outfits fighting nearby governments. Uganda has recently threatened to invade DRC, a sign that there may yet be a third Congo war; the last two sucked in the armies of eight countries. A key to a better security is clearly to rationalise the alliances that breed and feed these rebel groups.
Policies of regional influencers
Unfortunately, the policies of powerful regional influencers like the US, Belgium, France and China tend to add fuel to the smoldering fires often deepening the suspicions of military regimes that control governments here. One thing to note is that most of these governments tend to concentrate on short term security and trade interests.
Long term stability does not influence present day decisions. So when Beijing supplies weapons to Khartoum's fundamentalist regime in return for oil sales, it uses the guns for regime maintenance and supplies some to the LRA, an ally in the south.
In Ethiopia, US support inadvertently allows President Meles Zenawi's hardline regime to commit atrocities in the oil-rich Ogaden region even as it fights a zero-sum war with Eritrea, much of it through proxies of both governments in nearby Somalia.
Ironically both strongmen, Yoweri Museveni and Meles Zenawi are routinely lectured on democracy and human rights by US government officials.
There is a dire need to lessen these external contradictions but also forge a saner basis for collective security in the great lakes region and the horn of Africa and opportunities do exist. One way is to replace traditional security competition with economic cooperation.
Regional trade in Africa has been growing by bounds often spurred by the reduction in wars but little focus has accompanied its great potential to bring self-interested hostile governments together.
These local incentives are often ignored by Western countries that rely often exclusively on donor funds from their taxpayer's pockets.
In this respect, for example, rather than become a basis for future cooperation, recent oil discovery in East Africa will more likely fuel even fiercer security competition that will keep machete-wielding rapists in business.
The oil is located in the common border between Uganda, DRC and Rwanda within the vicinity of Eastern DRC's raping fields. However, Western intervention is not focused on marshalling up these incentives.
Take for example, China in the region. Beijing which is engaged with a new scramble for Africa's resources, can easily arrange for peace in DRC by using its diplomatic and financial muscle to reign in Sudan, Uganda and DRC in return for a fair deal in developing the oil concessions there.
But rather than support a progressive approach to these issues, a more likely scenario, however, is that China, US and other European powers through their own scramble for influence and narrowly defined interests may instead perpetuate the security competition and hence the mayhem in the region.
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