Why fighting in congo

Elsewhere in the east, ethnic tensions have led to massacres. Around the town of Bunia, hundreds have died. There have been fierce battles west of the town of Masisi, as government troops attacked the base of a powerful local warlord known as General Delta.

Among the more than 1. Hidden among the trees, the year-old watched as men were beaten and women dragged screaming into huts. Buira saw several corpses on the ground but believes her parents also fled.

She is unaware of their whereabouts. The camp has no water and no food distribution since aid organisations withdrew from the region citing growing insecurity months ago. A family has allowed Buira to share their makeshift shack, but can provide little else. It supports, among other projects, a hospital with more than beds at Masisi, where 17, people received care in , a health centre in Nyabiondo, a network of mobile clinics and a fleet of ambulances.

The work is increasingly dangerous. In the last two months, MSF personnel and vehicles have been attacked five times. Logistics pose enormous challenges too. It can take an entire day to drive the 60km from Goma to Masisi on muddy dirt tracks.

There are no paved roads and many remote communities can only be reached by motorbike, some only after days walking on forest tracks. Patients regularly die when roads are cut by landslides, torrential rains or fighting. The crises have been exacerbated by an absence of international forces. A rebellion in central provinces cost thousands of lives last year and there have been a series of mass prison breaks.

They tried anyway. This is why they fought. And they were right, to an extent. They're saying that the government can't organize the country, and it can't.

The trouble is that people are tired of the war. I met their leaders not because of the sensibleness of their ideas, but because of the guns they commanded. Kazarama eventually emerged from the orange building. He was dressed in U. Army's dress standard. The uniform, along with his tendency to shift weight between his feet and stare at his phone in the middle of questions, gave him an awkward and bored affectation, as if even he had tired of spouting conscious and transparent lies to any journalist who showed up in Rutshuru.

Some of his talking points at least had the benefit of being true, even if they were intended to mislead: "There is total impunity in the DRC today," he said.

There is no democracy. The country is rich, but the population is very poor. You have seen how the roads are. Even in Goma, you have seen how awful the roads are. They can't pay teachers or soldiers. There is practically no government M23 would scarcely exist in its current form if it weren't for the support of non-democratic Rwanda, but Kazarama was happy to turn the accusation around: "There are many armed groups of foreigners, which are not local groups They are terrorists.

There's the FNC, from Burundi. There's the Bororu, from Chad. This was an embarrassing subject for M23, which isn't really a Rwandan proxy in the strictest sense - the leaders of the group are actually Congolese, even if their weapons and occasional fighting companions are not. But the group still extends Rwandan influence into an area where Kagame's government has a complex network of interests.

Chief among them is resource expropriation: minerals represent 28 percent of the country's official exports, even though Rwanda has few deposits of its own. It is believed that the unacknowledged mineral trade that's trafficked through Rwanda totals in the billions of dollars. Rwanda needs access to minerals, and support for Congolese Tutsi militants is one way to protect their supply lines.

There's another, even more fundamental reason for Kagame's machinations. Less than 20 years after its genocide, Rwanda is an authoritarian marvel: Flat tarmac connects the capital to the Goma border three mountainous hours to the west. In Rwanda, all motor taxi drivers wear helmets, as do their passengers; there are public clocks in every town, and they are accurate. Outside of Gisenyi, near the Goma border post, there is a freshly built prison surrounded by high, tan walls, despairing to look upon and angled conspicuously towards the highway.

Opposition leaders are in jail, the government brings cryptic charges of "genocide ideology"-- or just plain genocide -- against its opponents, and Kagame won the last presidential election with over 90 percent of the vote. Still, Kigali is a city of clean streets and shiny glass office buildings, with incorruptible police officers and traffic lights that people obey.

This is a function of Kagame's famously discipline-oriented leadership style: when he was commander of the insurgent Rwandan Patriot Front during the genocide -- the group that would overthrow a Hutu supremacist government and end one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century -- he is said to have executed subordinates for offenses as trivial as arriving late to meetings.

Kagame has purchased stability in his own country by exporting its problems to Rwanda's much larger neighbor -- there's no violent Hutu-Tutsi conflict inside Rwanda, because it's been safely transferred to the other side of the Congolese border.

Kagame thinks strategically: give the Tutsi a veto over regional stability, he figures, and the chances of a like hecatomb are dramatically reduced. Of course, this calculation only proves that the Hutu-Tutsi conflict still festers, even if Rwanda is superficially at peace. Inside Rwanda, Hutu killers still live next door to the Tutsis they victimized in , while Hutus and even some Tutsis have chafed under Kagame's tough rule.

The Hutu who committed the genocide, as well as their descendants, live just next door, in DRC. Kagame might privately be wondering whether his country is another Syria -- whether even the most skilled mixture of canny leadership, shrewd regional policy, and internal oppression can make a nation forget the horrors of its recent history, and the contradictions of its current order.

Read one way, Rwanda's policies in DRC reflect a strategic prowess that masks deep insecurity. In Kazarama's telling, M23 wasn't there to help enforce Paul Kagame's particular vision of regional peace.

They were solving Congolese problems, combating foreign armed groups and bringing democracy to their failed state. They would even do something about the DRC's rape crisis. In another town, 90 had been raped. The commander alone had raped 16 women in another. The Minova incident actually happened, yet somehow this made Kazarama appear even more cynical than if he had been inventing his facts.

Perhaps he understood his partial responsibility, and the responsibility of every militant, for weakening the state and the country to the point where its army could go on a rampage of sexual violence without anything changing as a result. Perhaps this status quo is exactly what M23 and the Rwandans were trying to preserve. Kazarama had adopted more than just human rights language: he also showed hints of the conspiratorial thinking of other factions in the DRC. The intervention brigade was authorized because "some countries on the Security Council have been corrupted by the Kinshasa government.

Now, they are bringing Africans here to kill each other, instead of finding a durable solution. We have to defend ourselves. In May, M23 actually did threaten Goma in a series of skirmishes around the city, and even managed to fire a mortar on the downtown.

But talk of retaking it is pure bravado. There had been a fracturing of M23 just a month or so earlier, when Makenga and his supporters violently purged Bosco Ntaganda's faction from the militant group.

Aid cuts from the U. The winds had shifted, and Kagame's calculations had shifted along with them. There's a high rate of defection, and very low morale. He sketched out two possible futures for the group: "soft targeting," which would involve a campaign of assassinations and kidnappings, or strategic contraction and even voluntary disappearance. M23 could bury their weapons, take off their fatigues, and wait until the winds changed yet again.

Kazarama continued, unbowed by reality: "we represent all of the Congolese people who are suffering, the 96 percent who are against the Kinshasa government.

They are saying that it is a sign of the disease in the Kinshasa government. I heard the same assertion from an M23 administrator named Benjamin Mbonimpa, a friendly man with a professorial air and a veteran of two of M23's predecessor movements.

They're still there. No one has gone away. Did either of these men actually believe this? Did they expect me to believe it? There are a lot of them: at the beginning of , there were only 2, IDPs in the Goma area, mostly people who were too old or sick to return home after the last round of fighting. Now, there were more than ,, and 50, of them live at Ngunga. The camp is strewn with volcanic rock, which the IDPs use to anchor their tarp-and-wood frame homes. Ngunga is an island of poverty set in an ocean of verdant green, bounded by a tree stump-covered mountain where women are often raped while out collecting firewood.

Overflowing latrines and infrequent food distributions characterize life there, and the IDPs get enough grain or corn for maybe two weeks of every month. In one tent, I met four women who were weaving handbags out of colored plastic strips, a skill they had acquired through an NGO training program.

They made 50 cents per bag, and their faces were dressed in a weariness too deep for an interloper to access. You just have to run away.

Their second displacement was a bitter homecoming -- they'd fled to an earlier iteration of the Ngunga camp during the CNDP conflict as well. We've lost all of those things again. Monotony was one of the camp's chief cruelties. There's nothing to eat, or to do. People can say what they want without any problem. Even international organizations go wherever they want to. The space for political and civic action in the DRC has been so distorted by 80 years of Belgian colonization, 50 years of dictatorship, and 20 years of conflict that this kind of nonsensical politics is virtually all that remains.

M23's rhetoric of democracy and humanitarianism consists of fake offices with hanging portraits of a fake president, or militants complaining about the government's failure to restrain the growth of militant groups, or Indian peacekeepers driving tanks that they'll never use, and which are useless anyway -- the conflict survives because it generates such absurdities while muzzling any real alternative to them.

And even extreme alternatives, like the UN intervention brigade, might not be enough to end it for good. But the logic of conflict must first be broken at ground level, and peace, when it comes, will be a local accomplishment. At the moment, the country lives only in the minds of its citizens: the best doctors, teachers and engineers all work for NGOs.

Oxfam provides water for over , people in North Kivu alone, and the Catholic Church operates over schools nationwide -- NGOs and religious organizations have supplanted the core services of the state.

In the east, the state has been whittled down to a currency no one uses, and to uniforms that no one trusts. The idea of a Congolese polity has become fatally abstracted: The state had given up on local-level engagement and institution building and retreated to a distant capital. A solution is beyond the purview of armies or politicians. A future peace likely rests in those quantum-level pockets of conflict that stain the region -- through the exhausting and unglamorous business of resolving local-level disputes, through reconciling feuding communities and rebuilding a broken polity.

When peace arrives, there will likely be grand bargains between powerful enemies -- the Rwandans will have to be secure in the knowledge that they have nothing to gain from meddling, and the Congolese government will have to be strong enough to take control of the entire country. But the solution isn't photogenic or even particularly exciting: it lies in teachers deciding not to become warlords, in the honesty of traffic cops, in citizens beginning to live in an environment where the gun is no longer the surest or most logical means of getting what they want.

War, like any political order, is a constructed thing. It's human. No natural law commands it, and there's nothing about it that's immutable or permanent.

Conflict isn't wired into the organs or the bones, and there is a covert bigotry to the idea that war is the only possible destiny for certain people in certain places, or to the notion that there are societies incapable of breaking out of their own deadly logic of conflict.

However enormous it may seem, the conflict in DRC is as inevitable as any other. There is nothing inevitable about it. On the road to Kitchanga, the rear wheels of trucks slid in the earth as if driving on ice. In a single five-kilometer span, we passed an over-laden pickup buried to the grille in a dirt crater, a second broken-down truck with its payload and passengers huddled by the side of the road with no obvious means of rescue, and another truck tugging a car from a dust trap with a fraying rope.

Even the vehicles that were surviving the journey were bruised and belching hulks, their chassis rattling and their rusted tailpipes wheezing thick smog. The traffic on the road was heavy and slow -- James said that drivers now feared the taxation that M23 imposed on commercial trucks, and preferred to take their chances with the Kitchanga route if they had to drive to the Ugandan border. But the road can barely accommodate one truck at a time.

Passage of two-way traffic was a skilled negotiation, a dialogue of monsters inching backwards and forwards, then honking in greeting or warning, then tacitly agreeing to a tiny leeway buffered with a mountain-sized drop, then huffing in opposite directions billowed in clouds of dust and exhaust. More certain of their passage are the motorbikes and bicycles, the latter of which are usualy piled high with bushels of charcoal, and then slowly wheeled to Goma, 20 or 30 miles to the southwest.

This was a lucrative enterprise, James said: FARDC soldiers, who were barely paid or fed and who live in roadside bases that looked like refugee camps, pillage local forests and sell charcoal and timber to the bicycle men, who then sell their wares in Goma at a markup. But I'd spent the morning watching men push bicycles in the hot sun, with the city still hours or even days in the distance.

I'd seen their vehicles propped up with logs by the side of the highway, their minders crouched in the shade of their heavy payload, looking as if mere survival were exacting an impossible price. In a nondescript single-story building in Kitchanga, we met a nervous local administrator who locked his office door while he was speaking with me and refused to tell me his name. The terror that had gripped Kitchanga in February still hadn't lifted, and his account was tinged with a certain anti-Tutsi bias.

He spoke of the "Rutshuru" side of town, infiltrated by seditious Tutsis who he believed were in league with M23, and the "Masisi" side inhabited by Hutu and Hunde. He gave his accounting of events: "The APCLS [a Hunde militia] was called here by the government, so that all of them could be integrated into the army," he said.

They weren't the only ones: "Even the Nyatura were everywhere around Kitchanga A powder keg had been lit. They asked to stay here and control this area. Who knows if this is true -- the important thing is that the APCLS, and some percentage of the local Hunde and Hutu community, thought it was true. A posse of his comrades attempted to recover his body, which invited a predictable response. That tiny fire, kindled over months of escalating tension, was enough to ignite a violence that destroyed the entire city enter -- that resulted in the hospital getting shelled, apparently by the FARDC, and in IDP camps being attacked, apparently by the APCLS.

According to one Goma-based observer who visited Kitchanga a couple of weeks before it exploded, the disaster unfolded with little intervention from the UN and the government.

Everyone was aware of the problem. Not a single emissary was sent. The UN and the government did nothing. There was no effort made to get people to the table and have them talk. The tensions hadn't abated: the terrified district administrator said that some people suspected a nearby IDP settlement was actually a military encampment for M23 sympathizers. Kitchanga's IDP camp is crisscrossed with streams. The city's most vulnerable residents live atop a rocky swamp, where water rushes and pools and crawls, invading the alleys between tents and accumulating in every unoccupied wedge of space.

We found a tent where two withering women, who might have been 20 or 40 or 60 years old, sat and killed time. Much of the town had joined them in taking refuge in the forest. Everything was stolen. Even the brush on the roof of our hut was stolen.

The storm began as a hum, as the suggestion of rain, droplets whispering on a tarp roof. And then it became loud enough to silence our conversation and any worries I had about the conditions of the road -- to overwhelm even the most natural thoughts and fears. Our voices faded into the static roar of the deluge, imposing total silence upon us.

The onslaught showed no signs of passing, and the roof did not leak, even as heavy raindrops shattered overhead. Then tiny, clear marbles began skipping trough gaps in the bottom of the tarp, ice like mancala beads, smooth frozen disks dumped from the raging sky.

It seemed impossible in a hot equatorial country, a place with palm trees and tropical birds, as if an ice storm in Kitchanga was some deliberate final rebuke to the idea that anything here, or anywhere else, needed to make much sense.

Ice skipped across the ground like firm glass pills. Even at a touch they would barely sweat. This was strong and resilient ice -- brilliant, opalescent, dangerous to our purposes. Before we ran into the storm, I asked one of the women if it rained like this very often.

Every day, she replied. The center of town sat deserted. By emptying the city, the ice and rain had revealed the extent of the devastation. The blackened trees and lumps of concrete went further back from the road than I'd realized; the men selling shoes and dress shirts, now sheltering under flimsy tin ledges, had hidden the empty frames, the piles of rubble and ash, flat reservations patterned with the footprints of destroyed buildings.

Weather, like war, is a situation from which no one is wholly immune. And this rain seemed possessed with a conscious rage: the sky heaved with force and violence, pounding Hutu and Hunde and Tutsi, pounding FARDC and APCLS and M23, slamming into refugee tents and army bases, into bicycle pushers and NGO trucks, pounding the rocky earth, pounding the empty gray spaces where a city once stood.

This reporting was sponsored in part by Oxfam America. Around 5. The provinces of North and South Kivu, which border Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda to the east, were directly affected by Rwanda's genocide, which saw ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus slaughtered by the Hutu ethnic majority. Hundreds of thousands of Rwandans sought refuge in the Kivu provinces, including many of the genocide's main perpetrators. The invasion quickly escalated with other foreign troops joining, including Uganda and Burundi.

He was replaced by Laurent Kabila and the FDLR fighters — albeit severely decimated — went deeper into hiding and new rebel groups emerged. But even UN peacekeeping forces haven't been able to stop the conflict that is still smoldering today. Over the decades, new rebel organizations entered the conflict, including the National Congress for the Defense of the People CNDP lead by former Congolese general Laurent Nkunda, who succeeded in bringing a large part of the Kivu region under his control from until his arrest in Even after Nkunda's arrest and the CNDP's dissolution, Congo's military backed by UN peacekeeping troops, have been unable to prevent the formation of new rebel groups wanting to "liberate" eastern Congo.

Many of these armed groups say they want to restore order and bring peace to eastern Congo but it is difficult to know the fighters' true motivations. While some groups are formed along ethnic lines, there are often no identifiable ideological or political goals.

President Felix Tshisekedi, who has lead Congo since January , has so far failed to live up to his promise to improve security in the Kivu provinces. When will it end? The trial of Bosco Ntaganda, who is accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity, has now begun in The Hague.

He is not the only Congolese warlord to have to answer to the International Criminal Court. But the rebels are shifting the blame to the armies of DR Congo and neighboring Rwanda. But others remain at large, despite threatened action by UN and Congolese troops. Got an opinion about the stories making headlines?

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