Monday, January 26, 2009

What Now?

In a perfect world, Rwanda's incursion into North Kivu and arrest of its erstwhile proxy Laurent Nkunda would be a good thing. Since 1994, the presence of ex-genocidaires operating with relative impunity in eastern Congo has been one of the major irritants in the region. The Rwandan army, which has the capacity and the will to round-up the ex-genocidaires, never had the authority to do so, while the Congolese army, which was ostensibly in control, never had the ability to carry out the necessary police action or the slightest interest in undertaking one.

In a perfect world, then, Kagame would have struck a deal with Mobutu sometime in 1995 or early 1996 to allow Rwandan troops to cross the border and round-up the ex-genocidaires, who were then re-constituting themselves in the munificent refugee camps parked in the environs of Goma or Bukavu. The UN would have been invited to oversee the operation; the ex-genocidaires would have been forcibly repatriated; and the democratization process underway in distant Kinshasa would have proceeded--however fitfully--to its own satisfactory resolution. (Yes, such an incursion would have been illegal according to international humanitarian law, but the Rwandans could have truthfully argued they faced an imminent threat.)

But this is not a perfect world, and what might have made sense fifteen years ago is now, I'm afraid, a case of too much too late. The notion that Rwandan forces will effect a quick, clean military sweep of the FDLR in two to four weeks and then return to their barracks requires a kind of willful amnesia, as though the last decade and a half had taught no lessons, suggested no insight into the character of the principal actors.

The Rwandan incursion of 1996 quickly turned into a full-bore invasion, disguised, in one of history's greatest bait-and-switch operations, as an indigenous uprising against a despised dictator. Kagame's chosen sock puppet: Laurent Kabila, a full-time hedonist and comically inept ex-rebel whose rotund body and shiny bald head looked as if they were carved out of black butter. Meeting little resistance from the moribund Congolese army, the Rwandan troops leading the invasion focused their attention on the thousands of refugees who had fled the camps westward, into the rainforest. To be sure, a fraction of these refugees were genocidaires, but the scale of the killing that ensued, and the silence in which it took place, invites comparison to the Katyn Forest or Babi Yar massacres, and constitutes one of the last, great crimes against humanity in the 20th Century.

Two years on, piqued that his chosen underling was failing to show the requisite deference, Kagame re-invaded, hoping that a quick strike would preclude any embarrassing questions about the invasion's legitimacy. He might have succeeded too, had Angola not been tempted into an alliance with Kabila. But once the Angolans arrived, the combatants established a stable division of the country between east and west. No longer preoccupied by the exigencies of war, the invaders, distracted by the glittering wealth beneath their boots, set aside any pretense that the war was about securing Rwandan borders or eliminating the genocidaire threat. Instead they began stuffing their pockets with Congolese booty. To secure that wealth, they made alliances with their former enemies and made enemies of their former allies. The thousands of Congolese killed in the crossfire between Rwandan and Ugandan soldiers fighting over the gold mines of Kisangani can attest to that.

This is why I've never found the diagnosis that the FDLR is the root of the problem particularly convincing. And why, when I read that "dismantling the FDLR would force the CNDP, the Congolese government, and the Rwandan government to negotiate solutions to the other major tensions driving the conflict," I think to myself, "Force them to? Really? How so?"

The crux of the problem, IMHO, is that there's no effective state, no regional Leviathan, and at the same time plenty of incentive for entrepreneurial rebellion. Dig here, you've got yourself a gold mine; dig there, a tin mine. With no state to enforce property agreements, it's easy to see how things can get out of hand. It's the Wild West, times a hundred.

And so I come back to MONUC, as imperfect as it is, because it's the only disinterested militia on the ground with a prayer of imposing peace. Remember that peace is not the absence of conflict. Still less is it the establishment of justice. It is, simply, the achievement of an environment in which conflicts can be managed, even if imperfectly, through peaceful means, an environment in which justice can be pursued without recourse to the gun.

Clearly, MONUC has neither the capacity nor the mandate to expel the Rwandan army from the Congo. But it can insist that it be allowed to monitor what is going on. Kagame should be asked to account in a timely manner for what his troops are doing, and provide clear, realistic, and verifiable objectives and timetables for the operation. A proud man, Kagame cherishes his reputation as an African Lee Kuan Yew among the globalistas of Davos, but he is also intensely realistic and calculating. Threaten economic sanctions if his soldiers let loose on civilians or begin re-appropriating the Congo's resources, and he will listen. MONUC can't challenge Rwanda militarily, but we can make it very expensive for Rwanda to overstay its welcome. The people of Kivu, who through no fault of their own have been at the very heart of this decade-long conflict, deserve that much.

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