Washington, DC — Trade, investment and the ongoing battle against HIV/Aids top the agenda of Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni's visit to the United States, but the bloody chaos in the eastern Congo and Uganda's role in it has not been erased from official pages that mostly contain congratulatory speeches.
For though Ugandan troops pulled out of the Eastern Congo in early May, Museveni's government has continued to back armed militias in the region. This support has caused enough concern that despite President George W. Bush's high public praise of Museveni's economic program and anti-AIDS campaign, in their private session at the White House Tuesday, he also had sharp, impatient words for the Ugandan president over his country's role in the Congo's continuing conflict.
Many organizations involved in the region have taken a similar critical stance. Before Uganda's withdrawal, in a March statement, Amnesty International protested human rights violations by the Ugandan People's Defense Forces (UPDF) in Congo. "UPDF personnel have reportedly sold arms to warring ethnic groups and have trained militias, including child soldiers. Repeated shifts in Ugandan political backing to the rival armed political groups in Ituri have also deepened and prolonged the crisis."
According to Amnesty, five armed political groups in Ituri "are all in one respect or another, proteges of the Ugandan government."
Uganda may be responding to the criticism and pressure. On this Washington visit by Museveni, as well as in recent weeks, Ugandan officials have been indicating willingness to end their support of Congo militias. And just last week, Ugandan Major-General, James Kazini, in charge of military operations in the Congo, was replaced in what is widely considered in Uganda, a forced removal.
The United Nations has accused General Kazini of using his position to profit from the Congo conflict. And in a report last month Uganda's Congo Probe Commission seemed to agree with the UN, recommending that disciplinary action be taken against Kazini.
Nonetheless, the Kampala government still insists it has major security concerns related to the ongoing conflict in the eastern Congo. An increase of UPDF troops along the border was announced Tuesday because, said army spokesman, Major Shaban Bantariza, the government was concerned that violent elements hostile to Uganda, like the dissident Uganda People's Redemption Army (PRA), might use the distraction caused by fighting in eastern Congo to mount attacks in Uganda. "There is a long history of terrorists using situations like this," he said.
And while Uganda has taken much criticism for its actions in eastern Congo, most experts and analysts say Uganda's behavior is hardly unique. The militaries of Zimbabwe, Rwanda, and Burundi have all exploited Congo's vulnerability, cultivating militias to advance their economic interests, usually in mining, forrestry or some other profitable venture.
Indeed, say experts, there is more than enough blame to go around. When Uganda agreed to pull out its troops, the United Nations promised to secure the Ituri region where, over a four-year period, armed conflict between warring parties left 60,000 dead and 500,000 displaced people. The UN established MONUC - the United Nations Organization Mission in Congo - and sent 712 soldiers with instructions to protect UN property and escort relief workers. Protection of local civilians was not part of MONUC's mission. About 500 people have been killed since their arrival.
According to the International Rescue Committee (IRC), the four-and-a-half year war in the Democratic Republic of Congo has taken more lives than any other since World War II. An IRC study found that between 1998 and 2002 at least 3.3 million people died in excess of what would normally be expected over this time period. "The worst mortality projections in the event of a lengthy war in Iraq, and the death toll from all recent wars in the Balkans don't even come close," said IRC president George Rupp when the study was released in April.
Political scientist Herbert Weiss, speaking as part of a panel discussion on the Congo crisis at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC last Friday, said the UN response to the Congo crisis has been too little, too late. In April of this year a "mechanism of mediation" was created - the Ituri Pacification Commission. While it's a good design for approaching conflict elsewhere in the Congo, Weiss says, "in Ituri it's come too late. It exists, but it hasn't been able to mediate."
"It's like window dressing while the house burns down," said John Prendergast of the International Crisis Group, who was on the panel with Weiss and complained about how little attention has been paid to the Congo crisis and United Nations ineffectiveness. "We're fiddling around while the Congo continues to burn."
Already aid workers are reporting new battles in North Kivu province between rebels of the Rwandan-backed RCD-Goma and the government-allied RCD-ML group. More ignored than Ituri, fighting in North Kivu, some 250 km (150 miles) south of Bunia, has been erupting periodically for weeks and the death toll "is much, much higher" there than in Ituri, says Prendergast.
The panelists, who included the IRC's George Rupp, Bertrand Lortholary, counselor for African Affairs at the French embassy in Washington, and Alan Eastham, director of the State Department's office of Central African Affairs, all agreed that any permanent solution requires more than an end to fighting in the region. "What the Congo needs more than any single accomplishment is decent government," said Rupp. "Foreign forces can only be a short term solution," said the State Department's Eastham.
"The society is under such stress that even the fear of death is not enough," said panelist Alison Des Forges of Human Rights Watch. The development of a "discourse of hate and fear" makes the northeastern Congo "similar" to Rwanda during the buildup to its genocide, she said.
Both the United Nations and France, embarrassed and still-criticized for their inadequate response to the 1994 Rwanda genocide, insist they will take steps to head off a similar occurrence in Congo. Some 700 French troops, mainly from the elite 3rd Infantry Paratrooper Regiment, with some from special forces, began deploying in the Ituri region earlier this week, while a 15-person UN Security Council mission met with President Joseph Kabila, hoping to find a way to get the peace process going again.
Thursday, the mission heads for the Ituri capital of Bunia, where much of the recent killing has taken place. There, they will meet with MONUC and the newly-authorized multinational force.
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Although these new French-led troops will be able to use force, if necessary, to protect civilians, most of the civilians have fled the city and the French forces will not leave the city. No attempt will be made to disarm the militias. "It's not our mandate," said Col. Gerard Dubois, a French military spokesman. "The mandate of the force is very clear - Bunia and the airport," he told reporters Wednesday.
According to Bertrand Lortholary, French troops will only stay in Bunia until September 1 at the latest. They will be replaced by Bangladeshi soldiers whose lesser authority forbids the protection of civilians, even in the capital.
This combination of confining forces to Bunia and a weak mandate for confronting the militias does not bode well for long term peace or stability, say many worried aid workers and local leaders. "This is the proverbial boy running around sticking his finger in the dike," David Agnew, president of Unicef Canada, told the Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper.
Already, fighting seems to be spreading. According to the United Nations, the Congolese Union of Patriots (UPC) took the town of Mongbwalu, about 90 km (56 miles) north of Bunia, in fighting on Tuesday, and UPC troops were pushing towards Aru and Mahagi.
When the multinational force reaches its full complement it will total 1,400 soldiers. Ituri, which is larger than Uganda and Burundi combined, with a population of more than six million, could become an even larger killing field.
