Relentless Diplomacy Holds Congo’s Shaky Peace in Place

When a U.N. Security Council helicopter touched down in this eastern hot spot Tuesday, blue-helmeted soldiers crouched with guns around the landing field and gunship escorts hovered above. It was quiet in Bukavu, a lakeside town that fell briefly in June to Rwandan-backed rebels -- a move that threatened to unravel a shaky peace between Congo and its neighbors.

The diplomats listened to a military briefing, met with community leaders, and then, reassured that the peace was holding, took off to neighboring Burundi.

But hours after they left, the United Nation’s special envoy to Congo, William Lacy Swing, got a midnight call warning him that Rwandan-backed forces were preparing to attack the territory just north.

A flurry of diplomacy headed it off -- for the time. The incident shows how tenuous the peace is here, and how relentless an effort is required to protect it.

“If you could solve one crisis out of all the crises in Africa, Congo is the one that would make the most difference,” said France’s U.N. ambassador, Jean-Marc de la Sabliere, who led the U.N. trip.

“We came to show that we are committed to the region, we support their efforts, and that there is no alternative to the path of peace,” he said.

Last week’s visit was the fifth by the Security Council to this volatile region in the center of Africa. It began in Nairobi, Kenya, where the delegates provided symbolic support to Sudan’s peace process and discussed that country’s crisis in the Darfur region.

They then traveled to Rwanda, Congo, Burundi and Uganda to help build peace in a region that has been home to genocide, civil wars, mass refugee exoduses and 10 U.N. operations in two decades. Their six-day trip ended Friday.

In 2003, Congo ended a five-year conflict that dragged in the armies of five other countries and left 3 million people dead, mostly from war-induced starvation and disease.

The war began when Rwanda invaded Congo in 1998 in its effort to hunt down Hutu leaders of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. The conflict that ensued, which came to be known as Africa’s First World War, pitted forces backed by Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe against rebels who were supported by Uganda and Rwanda.

Swing, the U.N. envoy, called the war-ravaged country “a vast wasteland of human tragedy and destruction ... everything is broken but the human spirit.”

Congolese President Joseph Kabila and other leaders are trying to rebuild the country and hold elections by June. But there is much to do: End the fighting in the east and register tens of millions of voters in a country that is the size of Western Europe but has few roads.

“There is a lot of skepticism when you see how huge the obstacles are,” De la Sabliere said. “But when you compare it to three years ago, the trend is very positive. It’s possible to be optimistic without being naive.”

The Security Council’s presence here was symbolic and pragmatic. Meeting with the council’s 15 members gave the African leaders a chance to ask for more money and peacekeeping troops. Congo is home to the largest U.N. mission in the world and the Security Council’s largest investment in peacekeeping. The U.N. body voted last month to send 6,000 more peacekeepers to reinforce the eastern Kivu region, bringing the total to nearly 1,700.

“The Security Council and the U.N. have invested a lot in the stability of the region,” De la Sabliere said. “It is essential that these countries work together as partners to reach that goal.”

Rwanda is a small, landlocked country of lush hills, where Hutu extremists killed more than 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus a decade ago while the U.N. refused to send in reinforcements to stop the slaughter. The parliament building is still pocked with window-sized artillery shell holes. Hard-core leaders of the genocide are based across the Congo border, recruiting fighters among refugees to overthrow Rwanda’s government, Rwandan President Paul Kagame said.

In a meeting in a small circular chamber of his hilltop residence last Sunday, Kagame dismissed the Security Council’s insistence on trying to talk the fighters out of their weapons.

“I think asking them to voluntarily leave it, leave what they are doing for the last 10 years is unattainable,” Kagame said. “I don’t think it can work.” He told the council members that he didn’t trust the Congolese or the U.N., and then said exactly what they didn’t want to hear: The only way to stop fighting with the “genocidaires” is to crush them militarily.

“If you want peace, you have to make war,” Kagame said.

Meetings like those make some members feel that the Security Council is like a sheepdog nipping at the heels of chaos. “All we can do is let them know we’re watching,” said Adam Thompson, the British deputy ambassador on the trip.

People at the center of the region’s conflicts were hoping for more from the trip. In a meeting with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni on Friday, the Security Council focused more on the crisis in Congo than on the 18-year-long conflict in Uganda’s north -- an intractable war that the U.N.’s emergency coordinator calls “the world’s most neglected crisis.”

Every night, thousands of children “commute” from their villages to safe havens in nearby towns to avoid being kidnapped and conscripted as child soldiers in the rebel army.

“Here is another wasted opportunity to bring a just and lasting peace to the people of Uganda,” said Stella Aya Odongo, chairwoman of the Civil Society Organizations for Peace in Northern Uganda.

She reminded the diplomats that as they got ready to sleep in their hotels, thousands of children would be traveling to lie down on the floors of hospitals and police stations, and that safety for these children was just a dream.