The heart of darkness

For once, it looks like, the United Nations is going to do something. In Africa, no less, the region of the World that most people, even Middle Eastern despots, awkwardly avoid talking about and studiously avoid rhetorical eye contact with.

General Laurent Nkundu, the oft-mentioned Rebel leader of a tribal-based and highly trained militia in north-east Congo, has been attacking villages, killing civilians, and has threatened directly to topple the democratically elected government of the DRC.

A dozen nations from the African Union have promised aid to the DRC government if it comes to a reignition of the Congolese Civil War that claimed five million lives, mostly civilian, between 1998 and 2003. The UN is pondering sending three thousand more troops to what is already it's largest peace keeping mission. Humans Rights Watch and the BBC both strongly condemn Nkundu for threatening to destabilize the region.

It's all over the news. Really. I know everyone's still talking about the election, but just google "Congo" and see what pops up in the news section.

So what's the problem? Well, the problem, as should be evident from the coalition of forces aligned against him, is that General Lauren Nkundu is close to being absolutely right in this case.

The problem is that the ethnic group in question are the Tutsis, who were of course massacred in neighboring Rwanda in 1994, with a proportionate death toll that might actually surpass the Holocaust, transpiring in just a few short weeks. The UN, as an organization, did absolutely nothing to stop the killing. Well, in fairness, the French did help- although, silly French, they were helping the people carrying out the genocide.

So, after the international community absolutely failed to end the killings, a lot of Tutsis (and I'm sure some Hutus; the ethnic distinctions in this part of Africa are particularly arbitrary, which is pretty ironic considering) got together and joined up with the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which drove out the genocidal Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi militias.

You can understand the frustration of people who've just lost most of their loved ones to weeks of rape, torture, and then mutiliation and murder by machete when you've got the SOBs on the run and you just can't get at them.

The first problem was, again, the French, whose Operation Turquoise basically provided a killing zone where remaining Tutsis or Hutus who lacked ID cards or showed Tutsi-sympathy could be hacked to death, while providing a UN buffer against the Tutsi army and, of course, providing humanitarian relief. Because a long day of chopping body parts off of women really works up an appetite.

Of course, that didn't last forever. The Hutu militias next fled to the Congo, where they were harbored by Mobuto Sese Seko, truly an especially heinous dictator in his own right, but who managed to really up his legacy a notch by harboring these freshly-blooded, genocidal murderers, armed and fed and protected.

You can see where this kind of situation would lead to war for the Rwandans. How would the Israelis feel if the Jordanians had harbored, fed, and elevated to political status not only Himmler, but the entire Waffen-SS? It's not like these guys stopped, either, there were more Tutsis to rape, mutilate and kill in the Congo, and they weren't always so picky about who was a Tutsi either.

So one civil war later, and now the Congo's a democracy instead of a dictatorship. Nominally. So what's the problem?

These same refugees, the same people that committed the Rwandan Genocide 14 years ago? Yeah. They're still there. Granted, the Rwandans have killed plenty of them off, but they're still out, loud and proud. They have their own political party. And, get this- they're still killing Tutsis, or anyone who passes for them.

One doesn't want to condone killing civilians, or men believed to be civilians, but when they're known to be harboring these people, you have to kind of admire Tutsi restraint for not just burning everyone in these villages alive.

Also, it turns out that being democratic doesn't suddenly equate to military reform.

The international community is following a well-worn tactic of stability at any cost, and ignoring the foundation of corpses it's being built on. Stability cannot and should not come at the cost of condoning thousands of murderers and rapists. And the impressive thing? The Rwandans aren't engaged in tit-for-tat killings themselves. While Rwanda is hardly a model democracy, just the very absence of reprisal killings on a mass scale should earn international praise and offers of assistance. Certainly the Rwandans deserve justice, and an answer to why Germany hasn't yet extradited Ignace Murwanashyaka, the leader in exile of the FDLR, the latest iteration of the Hutu nationalist militias. No one's been a saint here, but it's a Hell of a thing to side with rapists and mass-murderers because the Rwandans are using anti-insurgent tactics that were par the course for the British Empire during much of the last century.

If the international community intervenes, it should not be to put down Nkundu's 'rebellion', but to provide him and his followers with the justice they're legitimately entitled to. This kind of behavior is, frankly, ridiculous. Certainly if the UN tried to protect the murderers of hundreds of thousands of European or American citizens in the name of protecting the status quo... well... I'm not even sure what would happen. The situation is unimaginable.

It's time the international community started acting like it recognizes that people in impoverished parts of the World are still people, and not simply bugs to be swept under the rug because their existence is inconvenient. If the international community wants to actually help instead of watching or contributing to the mayhem, it could learn that building democracies is painful, and takes time and the steady building of strong legal institutions, the rule of law and a free press and a military subservient to the government- instead of simply setting up elections, dusting off it's hands and declaring mission accomplished.

At any rate, after 14 years, it's about time for justice for some 800,000 dead.