A pretty good case can be made for the eastern districts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) being the most anarchic and unstable in the world. Perhaps Somalia can stake a similar claim, and stretches along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, but the list of contenders is, in any case, a roster of wretchedness. Rwanda shares part of its border with the DRC’s most chaotic region and thus its hard-won stability will remain tenuous as long as its vast neighbor is under the thrall of chaos.
Yet as Michael Abramowitz shows in this dispatch at The Atlantic, there are at least glimmers of hope. Congolese and Rwandan officials have joined forces to try to co-opt members of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), the guerrilla army of former Rwandan Hutus, perpetrators of the 1994 rwandan genocide, by sending them to “demobilization camps” that attempt to rehabilitate them. Yes, this seems a bit touchy feely and even pie-in-the-sky. And “demobilization” can sound an awful lot like “re-education.” But it seems to me that it is worth a shot, and the results seem to have been modestly successful, albeit still on a scale too small to assess. Still, in a region where small steps can loom large, this strikes me as wonderful news.
