Labor Day Marked By Congo Violence

Mortar and grenade blasts echo through the mountains where I spent Labor Day weekend last year. Recently, fresh fighting broke out between the Congolese Army and rebels under renegade commander Luarent Nkunda. Just a year ago, I was wandering around that region on the border between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda researching Heart of Diamonds. At the time, there was a lull in the fighting, although skirmishes had been reported farther north and west. Today, it looks like the Third Congo War is about to erupt.

Captain Tabaro Kiconco, a spokesman for the Ugandan Second Army Division, says they have stepped up already-heightened security and surveillance on the border near where I was camped a year ago. Several Ugandan rebel groups operating from eastern DRC use the tense security situation in the region to launch raids across the border.

The recent fighting in North Kivu in the DRC is the first major clash between forces since the Goma accords were signed in January, 2008, when some twenty-odd insurgent groups, gangs, and rebel factions agreed to a ceasefire under the aegis of the UN’s peacekeeping force, MONUC. Since then, the armed groups, including Nkunda’s breakaway army, have continued to attack civilians and loot the countryside, causing one of the most severe humanitarian crisis in the region since the Second Congo War officially ended in 2003. Estimates of the number of displaced civilians run as high as a quarter million people.

Tensions have been mounting in past weeks, with DRC forces (the FARDC) increasing troop strength while Nkunda’s CNDP ( National Congress for the Defence of the People) maneuvered to gain control of more territory. Western diplomats warned last month that the situation in the east of the DRC was becoming increasingly tense as various groups rearmed. The FARDC and CNDP blamed each other for starting the fighting which broke out in the village of Kanombe about 30 miles north of Goma and spread to several other towns.

MONUC said it has sent armored vehicles to patrol the region and increased contact with both sides to encourage an end to the latest clashes. It might seem that the 17,000-strong UN peacekeeping force would be easily dominant, but there are nearly two dozen insurgent groups in the region and many of the rebel forces receive outside help. Nkunda’s army, for example, has the near-overt backing of Rwandan President Paul Kagame, who uses them as a proxy force to battle the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), which includes many original members of the Interahamwe that carried out the 1994 Rwandan Genocide.

More than five million people have been killed in the Congo since 1998 according to the International Rescue Committee. Peace treaties have been signed, but there is no end in sight.

Dave Donelson, author of Heart of Diamonds

Tags: romantic thriller, Congo, blood diamonds

Some Congo Killers Are Silent

Over 2.5 million people have died since the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo officially ended in 2003, according to estimates from the International Rescue Committee. And 45,000 more die every month as a result of the country’s many conflicts.

Nearly half of them are children, the rest mostly women, the aged, and the infirm. Some are killed in the strife that continues in the Eastern provinces between government forces, rival warlords, rogue guerrilla bands, and gangs of rapacious criminals. Most, though, don’t die from bullets or blades; they’re victims instead of silent killers like malaria, pneumonia, malnutrition, and diarrhea. But they are casualties of war just as surely as if they had been hacked to death by machetes.

Food supplies are disrupted when fields are destroyed and farmers are driven from their lands. Medical care for easily-treatable diseases is unavailable because violence keeps all but the bravest—or most foolhardy—doctors and nurses away from the places they’re needed most. The cease fire of 2002 may have brought relative peace to the nation, but war continues to take its deadly toll.

People are still dying by the thousands because Congo’s economy and infrastructure was decimated during forty years of government by greedy dictators and wars large and small for control of the nation’s resources. The lack of a simple thing we take for granted—paved roads—is one of the largest single factors in the rising death toll. Because there are so few paved roads, surface transportation is all but unavailable during the best of times and totally impossible during the rainy season, a debilitating condition for a country about the size of Western Europe.

One of the accounts from a missionary I read while researching Heart of Diamonds said it took nine hours to drive 80 miles from Luebo to Bulape in 2000. The road was typical of all but the largest highways near the capital, a one-lane track that hasn’t been maintained because there is no funding for equipment or labor. What little income the government has goes to support the army necessary to keep a semblance of peace.

The lack of surface transportation (the railroads are in even worse shape and the rivers are impassable in many key places due to rapids) is strangling the already struggling economy. It also, of course, greatly complicates the delivery of aid even to the pacified regions.

It’s a recipe for death delivered by silent killers in a part of the world that can ill-afford to lose more of its children along with their mothers and fathers. When the children die, so does the Congo’s future.

Dave Donelson, author of Heart of Diamonds

Tags: romantic thriller, Congo, blood diamonds