7.1 Eastern DRC: An Early and Ongoing Test in the Great Lakes Region

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In many respects events in Zaire/DRC since the Joint Evaluation was published represent both a continuation of the conflict and genocide of 1994 and reflect the critical failings of the international community in that period, principally in:

1. failing to halt the genocide and
2. failing to separate the FAR and Hutu militia elements from the bona fide refugees in the camps in eastern Zaire between 1995-96.

Because of the unwillingness of the UN Security Council and UN member states to undertake a military operation in the camps to manage a threat to the security of Rwanda, Zaire and also Burundi, the Rwandan Government was left to take its own action to protect its security. In undertaking its operations to push back refugees into Rwanda and, with its AFDL allies, to pursue those who moved westwards there is some evidence that Rwanda was given a green light and even received support from some members of the Security Council. However, what might have initially been seen through the then fashionable lens of ‘African solutions to African problems,’ Rwanda’s military operations in Zaire were a massive abuse of the rights of the bona fide refugees who were intermingled with the Hutu militia. Moreover they set off a sequence of events that became the most destructive and widespread conflict yet witnessed in modern Africa and arguably the bloodiest conflict in the world since the Second World War. With its moral authority weakened by the failure to halt the Rwanda genocide and its ability to act collectively limited by the differing interests of its members the international community’s response was initially supine. It was not until 2002, after powerful evidence was produced of Rwandan and Ugandan exploitation of Congo’s natural resources, the human rights abuses and the appalling death toll that the international community began to publicly condemn the two countries.

Given a role by the (African led) 1999 Lusaka Agreement and frequent reports on the severity of the situation by the Secretary General, the Security Council chose not to heed the lessons from Rwanda in 1994 and dispatched only an observer UN mission to DRC. Poorly supported by member states even this mission took years to reach its designed strength. It was only following widespread killings in Bunia in 2003 (fully four years after the Lusaka Agreement) that a Chapter VII operation by willing member states was authorized and MONUC upgraded to a Chapter VII operation. The six-day violent occupation of Bukavu by army mutineers with links to Rwanda in June 2004 exposed the inability of the Chapter VII UN force to prevent a major town falling into the hands of a faction seeking to derail the Transition Process. While robust intervention by the international community seems to be the order of the day in other parts of the world, in central Africa ‘robust’ is a very relative term. A central conclusion drawn by General Dallaire from his experience as head of UNAMIR during the genocide was that human beings in central Africa were valued differently from human beings in other parts of the world (Dallaire 2003). One should add to this the geopolitical unimportance attached to some countries by some members, usually the Permanent Five, of the UN Security Council. Despite recent indications of a willingness to increase the size of MONUC, there is no reason to believe that this situation has changed significantly over the last ten years.

Attempting to attribute the cause of death to violent and non-violent causes in such a context is fraught with difficulty. But even when allowance is made for a wide margin of error it is interesting to reflect that the ratio between violent and non-violent deaths revealed by the IRC surveys in the DRC since 1998 (15:85) is almost the exact reverse of the ratio recorded by Study 3 of the Joint Evaluation.⁹⁵ While much of this contrast can be attributed to important differences between the two cases⁹⁶, it suggests that the performance of the humanitarian sector has been exceptionally poor in the DRC. Whereas the Joint Evaluation attributed much of the blame for the loss of life to the failings in the political, diplomatic and military domains, it would appear that in the case of eastern DRC the humanitarian sector must be added to the list. One seasoned observer recently wrote: ‘The case of Congo … demonstrates appallingly sparse responsibility to protect and plenty of inhumanitarian non-intervention.’ (Weiss, 2004)

Given the enormity of what has happened in Eastern DRC and the seriousness of the accusations being leveled at the international community, the UN and the humanitarian sector generally, the DRC case deserves to be subjected to an evaluation as thorough, transparent and wide ranging as the Joint Evaluation.

95. Approximately 90,000 people were estimated to have died as a result of cholera and dysentery whereas the numbers killed during the genocide are generally believed to be 850,000, giving a ratio of violent to non-violent deaths of approximately 90:10.

96. Key features of the two cases are: 1994 Great Lakes: a genocide of 100 days duration; ready, and comparatively safe, access by humanitarian agencies to refugees and IDPs 1998-2004 Eastern DRC: a five year conflict between armed groups (with scant regard for the rights of civilians) in which access by humanitarian agencies to a substantial proportion of the affected population has been denied or has been dangerous.

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