When I was in the Great Lakes region around two years ago, the DRCongo was going through a quiet spell. But even then, I still sensed that for many Rwandans and Ugandans, the Congo border might as well have been the edge of the world, though it is hundreds of miles inland from the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
Both Rwanda and Uganda enjoy (by African standards) good road and communication networks that flow freely into Kenya and Tanzania, but come to an abrupt halt in Congo’s isolated North Kivu province.
Unlike Kenya and Tanzania, the DRCongo has been an unknowable quantity from which streams of refugees have poured with scant warning; from which terrorising armies – like the Interhamwe and Joseph Kony’s LRA – have entered the two countries, and into which they can disappear without a trace.
The old warning at the corners of medieval maps – ‘Hir there be dragons’ – could hardly be more apt: a UN staff member once told me over a pizza in the Rwandan capital Kigali that noone dared travel the road from Goma to Kisangani for fear of being attacked by cannibals.
The Congo casts a long shadow over its neighbours: where Rwanda has come some way to reconciling Tutsi with Hutu, the core antagonisms that led the 1994/5 genocide survive in Eastern Congo. And now it seems the region is breeding another humanitarian disaster, General Nkunda being the latest warlord to fill the power vacuum in the region.
However much Western governments and NGOs may congratulate themselves on their successes in post-1995 Rwanda, an anarchic North Kivu will continue to undermine stablity and propserity in the Great Lakes region. This is clearly not only a crisis for Kinshasa, but also for the whole of East Africa.
Sunset over Eastern Congo, 2006
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October 29, 2008 at 11:58 am
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