There are few places on Earth where one could believe that people have exhausted their ability for cruelty, but the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo may be one of them. Since the mid-1990s, the country has been embroiled in a series of ethnically-fueled conflict and civil war that has killed over two million people. Some of the responsibility for the conflict lies with the DRC, which suffered for decades under the corrupt rule of Mobutu Sese Seko, and some of it has links to neighboring Rwanda and Uganda as their own conflicts spilled over the border.
In particular, the FDLR rebel group, a group largely composed of Hutu extremists who fled Rwanda after perpetrating the genocide there, presents a massive obstacle to peace in the DRC. The FDLR continued to attack civilians in the DRC even after most of the Congolese rebel groups in the east agreed to a peace accord that ended the Second Congo War in 2003. Negotiations in 2005 to allow the FDLR to disarm and return to Rwanda in exchange for amnesty fell through, as Rwanda was not involved in the negotiations. The only remaining option, many reasoned, was through military force.
This is why in January the Congolese government granted permission for Rwandan army to enter the DRC and try to shut down the FDLR in a joint operation. They were successful getting thousands of FDLR fighters and their families to repatriate to Rwanda, but failed to shut down the organization completely. And therein lies the problem. Since the Rwanda-DRC joint operation, the FDLR has been hitting back, mainly by killing civilians.
And the level of violence is increasing. While sexual violence has always been a part of the conflict in the DRC, human rights groups are now reporting that male rape is becoming more widespread in the Eastern Congo. Multiple massacres, attributed to both the FDLR and the Congolese Army, have occurred since January. As one researcher from Human Rights Watch put it, “From a humanitarian and human rights perspective, the joint operations are disastrous.”
The FDLR is not alone is its tactics. The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has done the same thing in the DRC when its bases were threatened late last year by Ugandan military action taken in an attempt to end the twenty-year war plaguing Northern Uganda. In that case, the military action was supported by the Security Council and key UN figures in Uganda. But the LRA rapidly responded, most notably with the ‘Christmas Massacres’ where hundreds of Congolese civilians were killed in retaliation for the joint offensive.
The situation leads to complicated questions of what should and should not be done when dealing with these groups. In the case of the LRA, they have refused to sign a peace deal that was meticulously negotiated for two years and the likelihood of a peaceful settlement to the conflict seems highly unlikely. With the FDLR, there is little chance that Rwanda would welcome them back into the fold en masse on the FDLR’s terms, which includes complete amnesty for crimes committed during the genocide and since. These developments lead to a series of questions that no one is too keen to ask: What does it say when the international community effectively backs off because you prove that you are willing to do the exact things it is trying to get you to stop doing? Where is the fight against impunity then? But in the alternative, is it right to take action that you know will increase human rights abuses if the only alternative is allowing human rights abuses to continue at a lower, though chronic, level?
Some say yes, some say no. Notably, former president of Mozambique and the UN envoy for the conflict in Northern Uganda, Joaquim Chiassano, says yes. But regional leaders questions that, as do numerous human rights groups. In Rwanda, some repatriated FDLR fighters have found peace in their new home, which may suggest that there is hope for that particular conflict. Regardless of viewpoint, there is no denying that these are difficult questions, and they will inevitably involve difficult answers. Unfortunately, for the sake of peace in the Great Lakes region, it is necessary to ask them.
