View from outside the UN's DDR camp in Goma
Congolese officials are preparing a veritable extravaganza for the arrival of President Kabila in Goma on Tuesday to mark independence from colonial rule. Meanwhile, many of the soldiers rehearsing their drills in preparation for his visit remain unpaid. Local aid workers worry about the volatile mix of large groupings of invariably drunken soldiers with accompanying pay grievances descending upon the town, and the UN has imposed a 9pm curfew. Nerves were tested further when there was an attempted prison outbreak last week. No one escaped, but there were causalities and the mass rape of 20 female inmates. For now at least though, there have been no new incidents.
Goma is a town defined by its incongruity.
Standing on the edge of Lake Kivu – where the MONUC compound is, and the houses of Mobutu’s former cronies (now rented by the ex-pat brigade) back onto – you feel you are at a luxury resort. Then five minutes by moto (in contrast to the well-regulated Rwandan system across the border, you’ll find no helmets or nifty green jackets here) and you are in the midst of a chaotic and impoverished town center. Unlike in many parts of say, south Sudan, there clearly were real asphalt roads here at one point. But it’s something of a stretch to classify the disparate concrete slabs lying haphazard between the dirt and gravel as “roads” anymore.
In Congo, life expectancy at birth is just 45 years and the most recently available statistics put the portion of the population that are undernourished at 74%. Yet the part of Goma’s town that was flattened by the lava flowing from nearby Mt Nyiragongo in 2002 now boasts over a dozen repulsively over-sized multi-million dollar homes. Mining money, I was told.
On Saturday, I visited MONUC’s demobilization camp where I spoke to a former FDLR combatant who had been in Congo since fleeing (presumably along with his Interahamwe colleagues) across the border in the aftermath of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. His newfound desire to move to civilian life is related to the pressure being put on the FDLR by the joint MONUC/FARDC (Congolese National Army) Operation Kimya II against them. A positive development. Yet by all accounts such benefits are far outweighed by the revenge attacks being perpetrated against civilians by the FDLR in areas where the joint operation moves. As is too often the case, women and girls are the hardest hit, with mass rapes being a key feature of the attacks. In another perverse consequence of the operation, one of the UN staff told me he thinks that Rwanda has gotten more than its just reward for arresting, in January this year, its renegade colonel, Laurent Nkunda – who had headed the Tutsi-dominated counterforce to the FDLR, known as the CNDP. With CNDP soldiers now being integrated into the FARDC, in name but not (yet) in command structure or spirit, Operation Kimya II has enabled the CNDP (widely acknowledged as Rwandan-backed) to gain control over mining areas that were formerly in the hands of the FDLR.
Goma, and indeed the entire eastern provinces of the DRC, have many lessons to offer: Lessons about the curse of being blessed with an abundance of natural resources, lessons about the long shadow of colonialism, lessons about the greed of outsiders and elite insiders. But for me, the area stands most of all as the clearest refutation imaginable to those who think it is too costly put the resources into genocide prevention. From Goma, I would say it’s too costly not to.
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