the origins of war in the drc - the atlantic

7/25/2019 The Origins of War in the DRC - The Atlantic

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The camp for internally displaced persons on April 22, 2013. (Armin

Rosen)

The conflict in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, which I visited

over the last week of April, has killed somewhere between 3.5 and 5.4million people since 1996. It destroys human life in crushing and un-

cinematic fashion. Its victims live deep in the mountains of central Africa,

The Origins of War in the DRCHow the region became overrun by warlords and lacking any kind of

functional government.

A R M I N R O S E N

J U N 2 6 , 2 0 1 3 | G L O B A L

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http://www.theatlantic.com/author/armin-rosen/

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and despite the efforts of a few intrepid journalists, scholars, and human

rights observers, their suffering goes largely undocumented. They include

peasant women who are raped collecting firewood, children dying of

cholera in bulging refugee camps, and starving young boys conscripted

into militia groups so numerous that experts have trouble keeping track of

them all. The DRC's conflict might be the deadliest since World War II,

and one of world's worst active crises. But it also may be the most obscure

-- the most anonymous.

In Kitchanga, the conflict erupted into view during a bloody week in

February and March. The aftermath is still visible, although the journey

there is a torrid demonstration of how the land, a blinding-green labyrinthof steep valleys bordered with jagged volcanic hills, can mask the tragedies

contained within it. The road from Goma, the eastern DRC's largest city,

rises into the mountains of the East African Rift, where villages stand

silhouetted against the distant shores of Lake Kivu, a harmony of sloping

green and mesmeric blue that stretches far into an unpolluted sky. As the

road climbs, travelers can have the illusion of being eye-level with thewhite smoke billowing from the Nyiragongo volcano, alone in the center of

the gaping mountain-ringed valley.

The conflict in eastern Congo is so fullyencompassing that everything seems to sustain it,

whether it intends to or not.

The dirt road is studded with tiny mountain ranges of bumps and craters

that turn the back seat of a Landcruiser into a human eggbeater. The drive

is an unending gamut of violent quakes -- every puddle and pothole inflicts

a painful snap of the neck, along with the mental image of brain hitting

braincase, or maybe a jarring collision between one's forehead and thepassenger-side window. Breakdowns are common on every unpaved

mountain road in North Kivu province; traffic can be snarled for hours if a



large enough truck gives out in exactly the wrong spot. In the rain, the

danger is magnified, and we arrived in Kitchanga under graying skies.

In the center of town, merchants peddled shoes and dress clothes in the

skeletons of burned-out structures, and in the bare concrete lots where

buildings had recently stood. The downtown was a checkerboard of

charred rectangles marked with lonely support beams and piles of stone

and ground-up cement. Life continued amid the ruins: rivulets of creek

water gushed through the central drag, where motortaxi drivers washed

their vehicles and young children bathed in crowded gutters. Columns of

soldiers from the Congolese military, called the FARDC, hogged the

center of a street bursting with commerce and activity -- the city continuedliving, paying little mind to its own physical destruction. Sellers had set up

along the frontage of a building that had nearly collapsed, and the crowds

were so thick that I barely realized that its sagging and ruined backside

was still the best-preserved structure in sight.

This was naked evidence of war, burned-out testimony to a violent mania

that had ground the physical environment to asphalt -- it's a place that

reminded me of descriptions I had read of burned-out cities in Syria or

Mali or the Nuba Mountains of Sudan. Yet the network of problems

gripping the easternmost quarter of the DRC -- "war" seems like lazy

shorthand in a place with 30 armed groups -- isn't about competing visions

of the country's future or about the fate of nations or ideas. Capitalism

isn't fighting communism; there are no Sunnis fighting Shiites, or Kurds

fighting Turks; no philosophical, religious, or national destinies in clash.

Violence isn't a means to a higher end in DRC, but the expression of a

deeper social, political and historical rot. Here, it's possible to witness how

war can become systemic and normal, even in the absence of some

broader, national-level struggle -- how a region can become trapped in

violent tension and mistrust.

Eastern DRC calls into question nearly every notion of what wars are



fought over, and what they even consist of. Global decision makers should

keep this in mind as the international community launches a landmark

regional peace effort. The UN is currently taking the unprecedented step

of deploying a peacekeeping force with a specific counterinsurgency

mandate, an "intervention brigade," consisting of special forces from

three of the most professional militaries in Africa. It will be empowered to

go on the offensive against the DRC's roster of armed groups, and a militia

called M23 will be high on its list of targets. The Rwanda-backed rebel

movement launched a destructive insurgency in March of 2012 and then

swept through Goma eight months later.

The rebellion sparked an international crisis that convinced the world'sleaders of the necessity of finally ending the conflict. In February, 11

African countries, including Rwanda, signed a framework agreement that

some observers believe could mark be the beginning of a serious peace

process. UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon appointed former Irish

president Mary Robinson as his Great Lakes special envoy two weeks after

the agreement was finalized. He even visited Goma on May 23, just a dayafter the city's outskirts were rocked by deadly skirmishes between M23

and the Congolese army. In a brief speech at a hospital for victims of

sexual violence, Ban made the UN's intentions clear: "[The peace deal]

aims to address the roots, the fundamental underlying causes of this crisis.

The intervention brigade...will address all this violence and will try its best

to protect human life, human rights, and human dignity."

But it might not be enough to "protect human life," or go after

"fundamental causes." The DRC's problems go beyond civilian

protection, or armed groups, or the revenues that those groups draw from

the region's lucrative and unregulated mineral trade. The situation grinds

away at ideals that are hardwired into democratic political culture. It is a

place to observe things through their absence: There are many soldiers,but no state; over 19,000 UN peacekeepers, but no peace to keep;

countless armies and militias groups, but no single, unified reason for their

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/un-chief-arrives-goma-congo



existence. From the other side of the Atlantic, these absences seem like a

void-like reflection of the political order that reigns over the democratic

world -- that idea of a consensual relationship between citizen and state,

with a mutually agreed-upon slate of rights and responsibilities to keep it

in place. Peel back this order, and its opposite is an environment where the

conditions for conflict appear to be cemented into place. Democracy is a

human and constructed thing, and in DRC, its absence has nurtured a

conflict so fully encompassing that everything seems to sustain it, whether

it intends to or not.

The road from Rubaya to Goma, with Lake Kivu in the background, onApril 23, 2013. (Armin Rosen)

Rubaya, a town in the Masisi Territory of North Kivu three hours

northwest of Goma, is a place to observe one of the sources of the

conflict's endurance: the Congolese government, its capacity sapped by

decades of kleptocracy and 20 years of conflict, is capable of doing little

more than making things worse. When it doesn't prey on its citizens, it

outsources its power to those who do, and even when it behaves like a



government, it highlights its own failures and entrenches the region's

problems.

Rubaya's problems have an ethnic component, and

the state's decisions are feeding into tendencies that are potentially volatile.

Though superficially calm, the town has been profoundly impacted by

violence in other parts of the region. Thanks to the M23 threat, there are

now as many as five FARDC brigades in the lowland forests and hardened

lava fields west of the Nyrigongo volcano. The government is convincedthat M23's best chance of taking the city is through sneaking behind the

volcano and marching east. Foreclosing on this scenario has meant pulling

soldiers out of parts of Masisi, where the army's presence was once

unusually strong. Now, after you pass an FARDC base perched on a cliff

overlooking a bend in the road -- just before ascending into a God's-eye

view of the volcano, the lava fields, the lake, and the rolling green carpetof the East African Rift -- the soldiers, and the government, disappear.

Except they don't really. The FARDC recently deputized a faction of the

Nyatura, a Hutu militia, to keep order in Rubaya and the surrounding

villages. "It is a temporary measure," FARDC spokesperson Olivier

Hamuli claimed when I asked him about this decision. "The Nyatura are

not against FARDC. That's why there's a bit of collaboration." So in the

city itself, the difference between FARDC and gun-toting thugs is

meaningless: they all wear the same standard-issue, dark-green military

uniforms. Some have shoulder patches depicting the Congolese flag.

Others don't. The difference between the patch-wearers and non patch-

wearers is technical and meaningless, so when Nyatura harass motortaxi

drivers or steal food from refugees, it is the government that is enablingand engaging in these behaviors as well.



The area's problems have an ethnic component, and this is where the

state's decisions begin to feed into tendencies that are potentially volatile.

Rubaya and its environs are traditionally the domain of the Hunde ethnic

group. But much of the best land is owned and cultivated by Hutu, who are

relatively recent arrivals. The Hutu now comprise a majority of the area's

population, and they do not always get along with their Hunde neighbors,

whose leaders harbor delusions of recovering the land they've sold to Hutu

outsiders over the years. Small incidents have turned explosive. Last

November, a Hunde and Hutu motortaxi driver collided in a village in

central Masisi. Soon their families started disputing responsibility for the

accident. So did the Nyatura and a local Hunde group. "From a little thing,

it became a community war," a Congolese NGO employee in Rubaya

recalled. An absent state is partly at fault, explained James, my Congolese

fixer: "If there's an ethnic conflict in Masisi, it's because there are no

police," he said. "There's no sense of the role of local authority."

Compounding these problems is Rubaya's population of internally

displaced persons (IDPs), refugees from elsewhere in DRC, about 15,000of whom live in a crowded and anxious camp on the outskirts of town.

Overwhelmingly Hutu, about half of them fled from M23 after the group's

emergence in mid-2012. The others were victims of the Raia Mutomboki,

a notoriously violent militia that began as a self-defense network after the

FARDC temporarily pulled army divisions headed by former rebels from

the CNDP, M23's predecessor organization, from parts of nearby South

Kivu. The government wanted to separate the ex-rebels from their local

networks on the ground. The Raia were an unintended consequence of this

perfectly logical policy.

The Rubaya IDPs are no longer at the mercy of ravening armed groups.

But in DRC, safety is a tight cluster of cramped wood-frame tents, a

teeming colony rutted with steep, narrow gullies and creeks. Childrenhave a tendency to plummet into them -- one had died this way the week

before.



The absence of violence isn't the absence of conflict, and in the IDP camp,

the war was still bleeding its survivors. I met a thinning man with patches

of missing hair and teeth, who told a convoluted story of his displacement:

the Nyatura had begun fighting a Tutsi group, lost, fled to Raia Mutomboki

territory, and then lost to them as well -- but not before the Raia had

started burning villages, believing that all local Hutu were bandits and

thieves. The man's companion, a younger fellow with two fingers missing

from his right hand, believed that "ethnic leadership" was to blame for

these troubles. "They don't understand how to make peace between

groups," he said. Like most IDPs I met, the men had been farmers, making

their cramped, coffin-sized living arrangements seem all the more cruel.

"Our village is now a forest," one IDP told me. "Even if we had any crops

left, the Raia Mutomboki or Nyatura probably ate all of them. We are not

eager to go back home." The man was Hutu, as was nearly ever inhabitant

of the camp. I asked him why the Nyatura, a Hutu group, had preyed on its

own base of support. "That doesn't mean they'll protect other Hutus," he

replied. "They're thieves -- all they want is power. The ethnic connotationcame later." As if to prove this, the group charges a 1,000 franc ($1) fee to

IDPs who want to cross the bridge out of town, which is more than most

can afford.

I walked past a child climbing a rotting, branchless dead tree and entered a

hut blackened with smoke, where a woman who said she had lost four

children in the recent violence despaired of her prospects. "The war still

continues," she said. "I don't think it will end. There is no sign of

improvement or peace in our own villages." I asked her if she could

explain what the fighting was about. Her friend, a younger woman, said

something about minerals and tensions between Tutsi and Hutu which

had then created tensions between Hutu and Hunde. But the woman who

had lost four children said that she didn't even know.



A general view of Rubaya. (Armin Rosen)

Rubaya is comprised of close-built wooden shacks, dust-caked clapboard

and tin hugging steep hills that are rich in minerals. The smell of cook-fires

and burning garbage is never quite enough to overwhelm the green of its

surroundings. The land is generous, and under the circumstances its

inhabitants work it heroically. In every town, women peddle wax-wrapped

wheels of a soft white cheese, delicious and filling and hardly the only

good village street food. I ate crushed cassava root boiled in banana

leaves, a heavy and sweet paste that's always served with a bag of salty

peanuts on the side. I wolfed down dried plantains and skewers of

barbecued goat meat.

"There's no official FARDC. Just militants who weregiven combat fatigues and guns. They rape, kill andsteal."

In Rubaya -- as in the entire eastern DRC -- there is a jarring discrepancybetween the abundance of one's surroundings and the insecurity of daily

life. This, like so many of the country's problems, can be partially traced



back to the Belgians, who imposed a uniquely brutalizing model of

colonialism (described in Adam Hochschild's best-selling King Leopold's

Ghost ) that left the country hobbled when it finally won independence in

1960. The DRC had only 30 native-born university graduates when the

Belgians left; since then, it has never been stable or competently-governed

enough to make its wealth work to its advantage. "Since the colonialists

left, there wasn't any thought to creating a good state," explained

Innocent Nyirindekwe, the rector of a Catholic college in Goma. "All roads

in DRC were colonial. There were few new high schools, or public

universities." With all of the country's subsequent travails, "it is really

difficult to move forward."

The east has gold, tungsten, uranium, oil, natural gas and coltan -- just feet

beneath the surface of the earth are enough minerals to keep the global

technology and defense industries humming. Dearth and plenty can be

embodied in single individuals: outside the IDP camp, I met a miner

returning home, a solid young man with dust-stained hands, a pair of

cheap rubber boots, and a small pickaxe looped through his belt. He hadfinished a day of sweltering labor in one of Rubaya's coltan mines, whose

runoff gives the town's waterways the uncanny appearance of rushing,

liquid clay. He worked six days a week, and made decent money -- $20-30

over a good three days. "It is not an easy job, but it's not too hard for us,"

he said. "It's the only job we have here."

I asked several people about the process for obtaining a mining

concession, but their answers were vague: you'd have to purchase them

through a government office, which is time consuming since all the

minable land belongs to politicians in Kinshasa or to FARDC generals. So a

prospective developer can give into the predations of the state, or they can

just start mining illegally, hence eroding the authority of the state. There's

no legal or governmental framework for a mining sector that can providemore than day wages, or that isn't dominated by thieves and warlords --

the result of ongoing conflict fed by a total absence of government

http://www.amazon.com/King-Leopolds-Ghost-Heroism-Colonial/dp/0618001905

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/features/storyofafrica/14chapter7.shtml



authority, which is itself a result of conflict. The causality is dizzying; the

government's lack of capacity is an outgrowth of war, and visa versa. But

its consequences are clear: in Rubaya, the Congolese government is worse

than useless. It acts without considering the implications of its decisions,

often in a way that seems designed to sabotage its own authority.

It's given up on law on order by handing the city over to the Nyatura,

although it didn't seem to have the capacity to govern it in the first place.

In a town with an official population of 32,000 (not counting the refugees)

there is no centralized electricity or water, no internet, no paved roads,

and only intermittent cell phone service. NGOs provide healthcare and

even some basic infrastructure, like water pumps. There are only fivesecondary schools in town, and they are all run by religious organizations.

Their place in Rubaya's social fabric is precarious. "If you work in a mine,

you might make $50 in a day -- more than if you're a teacher," the head of

a local Catholic high school told me. "So sometimes the teachers leave.

And when the children are unable to pay their school fees, they go work in

the mines as well." His school had 1100 students, eager children inspotless white uniforms. Just fifteen had graduated the year before.

No one is really in charge of Rubaya, but the theater of state authority

endures. One of the city's largest buildings is a freshly whitewashed

structure behind high, barbed-wire capped walls. At least theoretically, the

region's mines are regulated from the building, whose lobby was

featureless, aside from a small bulletin board with architectural charts of

the building itself. It had lighting fixtures and light switches, but no

electricity. Rooms were empty; I saw no filing cabinets or papers, and only

a single desk. "This is a fake office," said James.

We met an earnest man named Francoise, the secretary for the

department responsible for overseeing the area's "small mines." The

process works like this: some time recently, NGOs, and, he claimed, the

U.S. Agency for International Development, had conducted a survey of



mines in the Rubaya area, to determine which were exploiting their

employees and kicking their profits to militant groups. "After an

investigation, they determined Rubaya minerals are clean," he said. Well,

not really: several mines were labeled "blood sites," including one

connected to Bosco Ntaganda, a career militant and the former leader of

M23. Prior to March 23, 2009, he had been a leader of a Tutsi insurgency

called the CNDP. Thanks to the treaty signed on that date -- the day that

M23 is named after -- he became a high-ranking general in the Congolese

army, despite being under an International Criminal Court indictment for

his use of child soldiers during an earlier chapter of the DRC conflict. He

had recently appeared at the U.S. embassy in Kigali after the group began

to violently fracture, and the Americans promptly transferred him to The

Hague.

Ntaganda's enterprise was unbothered, and five local mines were deemed

"clean." They had each been assigned a regulator from the secretary's

office, even though it wasn't clear what this regulation consisted of. Yet by

"regulating" only the "clean" mines, the government had essentially givenup on the vast majority of mining activity, in which minerals flowed into

the global economic system to the benefit of the DRC's militant groups.

The really bad stuff wasn't any of this office's concern. And then there was

the issue of "blood mines" run by the FARDC itself, a problem that

Francois readily copped to. "It needs a big investigation," he said.

"Kinshasa and the international community know about that traffic." A

colonel might simply put a relative in charge of a mine -- "regulated" or no

-- and reap the income himself. By awarding certificates of legality to

mineral shipments from the clean mines, Francois's office made it seem as

if any regulation was occurring at all, reducing law and order to a sham.

A man named Emile Ntabwiko is professionally obligated to at least

pretend Rubaya is under the government's control. He is what Congolesecall the chief d'post -- the government's top representative in town. His

duties, which were still vague even after he carefully explained them to

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/03/bosco-ntagandas-surrender-doesnt-mean-the-drc-conflict-is-over/274162/



me, are discharged from a mud hut whose only adornment is a portrait of

Joseph Kabila, DRC's doughy and unpopular young president, and the son

of the late president Laurent Kabila, who was assassinated in 2001. Clad

head to toe in khadi, Ntabwiko was youthful-looking and serious. "Rubaya

is not really an old town," he explained. "People came to settle here within

the last 15 years because of the minerals, and it's a strategic place because

it's quiet." The biggest issue he had to deal with was the arrival of the

IDPs. "There's insecurity, and food is getting expensive," he said. He was

grateful that the Nyatura were keeping order, but mindful of the fact that

they hadn't been paid or fed yet.

Later that day, I sat under a different and even more ironic portrait of Kabila in a village seven kilometers up the road, straddling a high and

narrow ridge. The town was a sort of unofficial headquarters for the

faction of the Nyatura that had joined the FARDC. I met with the

traditional Hunde chief, an older fellow whose responsibilities included

tax collection for the same government that theoretically paid the salary of

the Nyatura colonel whose base was barely 300 yards from his office.

"There's no official FARDC. Just militants who were given combat

fatigues and guns," he told me. "They rape, kill and steal." He reserved his

worst scorn for a Nyatura-turned-FARDC colonel named Kigingi. "He's

very bad. He recruits even children. Today, I've received the message that

when the Colonel catches me, he will imprison me for three months." This

intimidation had not fazed him. "The dog barks, but cars pass without

stopping," he said.

Kabila's portrait seemed like an absurdity, and not just because it depicted

a man whose office was over 1,000 impassable miles to the west, in a part

of the DRC that was at peace. Kabila's father had been a washed-up

Marxist exile when the Rwandan government recruited him as the local

figurehead for a 1996 invasion force that toppled Mobutu Sese Seko, a

U.S.-supported dictator who had ruled DRC for the previous 30 years. In



the aftermath of Rwanda's 1994 ethnic genocide, nearly 1 million Hutu

refugees settled in neighboring DRC. Some of them were armed

genocidaires plotting against Rwanda's post-genocide government.

Rwandan president Paul Kagame, a Tutsi, accused Mobutu of sheltering

members of the former Hutu government responsible for the country's

slaughter -- although it's possible that the invasion was ethnic revenge

under the guise of national security, considering the appalling number of

Hutu refugees the invaders killed en route to Kinshasa. Laurent ended up

as an accidental president after the success of the initial military

campaign, although disagreements with his Rwandan backers, suddenly

unwilling to pull their army and military advisers out of Congolese

territory, touched off a second round of fighting (Jason Stearns's Dancing

in the Glory of Monsters is an excellent popular history of this period).

The younger Kabila has shown little enthusiasm for even pretending to be

in charge of a difficult country of nearly 70 million people. He has done

practically nothing during his 12 years in power, other than steal the 2011

presidential election, convince international backers of hisindispensability, and secure the loyalty of the presidential guard -- which is

likely the only thing standing between a supine and unspectacular

dictatorship, and a military coup.

Kabila is almost never seen in public. He is the least interesting kind of

enigma, a secretive mediocrity who has managed to stick around for

reasons that make sense individually, but are bewildering if viewed on the

whole. Over French food in Goma, an expat hypothesized that Kabila

could easily turn things around. If he gave a few rousing, populist

speeches, if he rolled out new infrastructure programs, if he brokered a

solution to a few of the country's more solvable ethnic and land-related

disputes, or fired a couple of his more corrupt deputies, or appeared to be

in charge of something, Congolese might start believing in him. Theywanted to feel that someone was running things, even if it was the

nepotistic empty suit that so many of them despised. Sure enough, when I

http://www.amazon.com/Dancing-Glory-Monsters-Collapse-Africa/dp/1610391071



asked Congolese to pinpoint the cause of their country's problems, I would

often hear about the failure of the political leadership, or a certain ethnic

group's leadership, or just of leadership in general.

In the chief's office, Kabila's portrait was just a reminder of a government

that could do almost nothing right, when it decided to do anything at all.

The chief said that his community had requested that the army -- Kabila's

army, at least in theory -- pull out of his village. Instead, the integrated

Nyatura imposed a head tax, forcing each household to provide a quantity

of corn to feed their alleged protectors.

The militia had only raised resentments within the chief's community. He

believed that the Hutu don't exactly want to live with the Hunde, but

weren't natural enemies. "The tension is caused by leaders who are

extremists, who don't want people to get along. But the people want to live

in peace together."

This guarantees nothing. Events in DRC can take on a logic that's apparent

only when it's too late: it wasn't obvious that a local militaryreorganization would lead to the rise of the bloodthirsty Raia Mutomboki,

or that the government's reinforcement of the area west of Goma would

empower an ethnic militia hours up the road. But that's the logic of a

vacuum: absent an authority capable of isolating thorny and usually hyper-

local issues, those issues are pulled into the larger ecosystem of conflict,

where they fester and grow, until they drift into each other and explode.DRC's conflict continues because no one is capable of stepping in and

halting the process, and the people who could be capable are uninterested

in doing so.



A central avenue in Goma. (Armin Rosen)

Back in Goma, an NGO employee described a situation that perfectly

illustrated the relationship between government and citizen in such an

incompetent and predatory state.

Years earlier, a foreign donor realized that one way to improve law and

order in the DRC was by building prisons. Prisons mean that there are laws

to be broken as well as consequences for breaking them; without them,

criminal cases end in impunity or violence -- in more criminality. The new

prisons were cleaner and more humane than what few facilities theyreplaced. But they sometimes deepened the problem they had set out to

solve: local despots could use them to ransom or kidnap their opponents;

guards would demand bribes from families delivering food to prisoners,

since the state was incapable of feeding them. Worst of all, innocent

people would rot in brand-new jails while war criminals like Bosco

Ntaganda served as generals in the national army. Building more prisonshad arguably eroded rule of law.

"Are you going to be a teacher or a warlord? You'regoing to be a warlord. Because it would be crazy to

be a teacher."

There was a similar principle at play in Goma, where the municipal

government had recently banned motorbike taxis at night, out of fears that



M23 would use them as a covert means of attack. After dark, the streets

are a ghostly husk of the vibrant, overstuffed city that inhabited them just

hours earlier -- in the downtown of a city of one million people, foot traffic

is almost non existent after dark, and the most common vehicles are

armored trucks belonging to UN military police. But this isn't because

drivers respect the dictates of the local authorities. They know that if

they're spotted after dark, the underpaid and maybe even unpaid traffic

cops, who are corrupt almost by necessity, will use the new rule as an

excuse to shake them down. Something that seems to indicate the

existence of the rule of law -- the force of the state, the legitimacy of its

rules and of the officers who enforce them -- indicates its opposite.

In North Kivu, the citizenry's alienation is so total that every transaction

serves as a grim reminder of the state's failures. At my hotel, at

restaurants, with shopkeepers and women selling phone cards on the

street, I paid in U.S. dollars. I never exchanged money -- such a

transaction would produce an unwieldy and worthless stack of bills, and

you might be laughed or glared at by the wait staff if you tried to pay for a$20 (18,000 francs, roughly) cote d'beouf with them.

The primacy of the dollar puzzled me. It is impossible to obtain dollars,

which are backed by the most powerful government on earth, in exchange

for francs, which are hardly backed by anything. Every dollar had to travel

thousands of miles before it arrived in the DRC -- they didn't print them in

Kisangani, after all. Even so, the American currency brought in by expats

and foreign businessmen had simply re-circulated over the years, until it

blotted out the Congolese franc, along with much of its practical value. A

basic form of sovereignty -- the ability to mint money and affect

nationwide economic policy -- had faded, and even the small act of

purchasing a bottle of water had the effect of condemning the state to

irrelevance.

The disintegration of the state's moral and legal authority plays itself out

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/05/a-day-in-the-drc/276038/



in ways that are deeply insidious and directly connected to the region's

violence. One Goma-based humanitarian professional explained how

something like ICC-indicted warlord Bosco Ntaganda's integration into

the military might pervert everything else in the eastern DRC. "Ntaganda

got a good deal. What incentive are you giving people here to be good, or

to follow the law, or to not take up arms? None," he said. "Are you going to

be a teacher or a warlord? You're going to be a warlord. Because it would

be crazy to be a teacher."

The night I returned from Rubaya, I met young men who had made exactly

that decision. Their names were Henri, Wolf and Chris, and I spoke with

them in a discrete corner of a hotel courtyard in Goma. They were buddingwarlords from M23-occupied territory, leaders of fledgling Hutu militias

that were fighting the mostly-Tutsi rebels. Chris was a thin and intense

man who drew invisible maps on the table with his forefinger as he spoke.

He had been a math teacher before he became a militant. The quiet and

muscle-bound Wolf brought along a fancy notebook with the MONUSCO

logo embossed on the cover; he had been studying to become a teacher aswell. Henri was president of a group called the Movement for Popular Self-

Defense; the other two belonged to a militia called the FDIPC, whose

meaning I never learned. Between them, they claimed to command about

400 fighters, and they volunteered responsibility for various battlefield

successes over the course of our conversation, including the killing of eight

M23 the week before.

"For a long time, nobody understood our suffering," said Chris. "As a

Hutu living in Rutshuru [M23's capital], no one can help us." Certainly not

the state. "The government is unable to end armed groups," Chris said

with no apparent irony. "Inside the government, there are people creating

armed groups."

He took a conspiratorial view of his country's problems: "The Tutsis now

have 11 [FARDC] generals. Nine are in faction, working together. There



are 45 Tutsi colonels, who continue to create problems. Why do they do

that? The Tutsis already have many things here. Other ethnic groups don't

have the same advantages as them."

This is a bigoted train of thought, but it hints at a painful history: during

the 1996 invasion, Rwanda and its proxies massacred over 100,000 Hutu

refugees who had fled into DRC, a round of reprisal killings too systematic

and too ferocious to be justified by Rwandan national security alone.

Later, the CNDP, the forerunner of M23, had largely been integrated into

the Congolese armed forces after the 2009 peace agreement -- Rwandan-

supported insurrectionists hadn't been punished but rewarded with high-

ranking positions in the military as the rest of the region suffered. Evenbefore that, Rwandan meddling had led many in the DRC to think of the

country's Tutsis as a kind of fifth column, sleeper agents for the ruthless

and brilliant Paul Kagame, whose tiny country had a preternatural ability

to wreak havoc in its much larger neighbor.

Hundreds of thousands of people have died in DRC because of attitudes

like these, suspicions that can quickly morph into violent paranoia and

hate. The three junior warlords were convinced of an anti-Hutu conspiracy

that went all the way to the White House, which was suspiciously willing to

accommodate Kagame's every whim. Their sense of abandonment was

absolute: "Hutu are not against Tutsi," said Chris. "We are ready to live

with them. And Congolese society is not against Hutu. The problem is

Kagame. Here in the DRC, we have approximately eight million dead, a

genocide. Why does no one publish this? The Hutu arrived in the Congo

during the [Rwandan] genocide. The international community gave them

permission to enter. Why don't they do anything to help them now?" The

world had instead sided with Kagame, Chris said, a man who, in his

opinion, "hates, hates, hates Hutu. It's not even a question."

He believes the U.S., a friend to countries that had sown violence and

chaos in DRC, had abandoned the Hutu as well. "When there was a report



about the Congo, Susan Rice refused it," said Wolf, referring to the

American UN ambassador's cautious public treatment of evidence that

Rwanda, a U.S. ally, was aiding M23. "And when there's a woman raped

in India, she says there's been a rape."

It was the absence of the state, and of an army capable of defeating M23,

that had turned these young men into fighters. But they were animated by

grievances that ran far deeper than state failure, and that hinted at cycles

of victimization, dispossession, and bitterness that no government could

be expected to break. But violence couldn't break these cycles either --

400 bush soldiers were incapable of creating a region where all wounds

were healed, and where rational politics, or a sense of democraticcitizenship, could be possible.

Wolf, Chris, and Henri were M23's enemies. But it is this psychic vacuum,

the hidden corollary to the eastern DRC's political and security void,

which the rebel movement seeks to occupy and exploit. I met scores of

people in the DRC, and members of M23 provided some of the most

cogent and comprehensive interpretations of the country's problems. The

people with perhaps the clearest view of their nation's tragedy were also

violent hypocrites: ethnic militants who talk about national unity; armed

thugs miming platitudes about democracy and human rights, projections

of another country's foreign policy -- Rwanda's -- that insist on their

Congolese character. They don't embody the schisms that drive the

conflict forward so much as wield them like a blunt instrument, as if

insisting on the ugliness of Central Africa's ethnic and historical divisions,

and the vanishingly tiny space for resolving them nonviolently.

M23 represents the lack of a viable alternative to the current disorder, and

the seemingly chronic perversion of the entire region's civic life. This, like

the predation and constant bungling of the Congolese state, is a critical

ingredient in the DRC's logic of conflict.



MONUSCO personnel ride through Rutshuru on April 24, 2013. This

picture was taken outside of the local government complex, where M23's

senior leadership was meeting at the time. (Armin Rosen)

M23 traces its origins to the CNDP, the earlier Rwandan-supported group

that was integrated into the FARDC under a treaty signed on March 23,

2009. After the truce, the Congolese government was mindful of the

potentially violent consequences of exerting any sort of real command

over the ex-rebels, who were allowed to continue their mafia-like reign

over areas they controlled before the peace treaty. In early 2012, there

were rumblings that this arrangement was about to change, and even hints

that the Congolese government intended to turn Bosco Ntaganda, theCNDP leader who became an army general under the 2009 treaty, over to

the ICC. Some of the ex-CNDP, and probably some of their Rwandan

backers, decided that the 2009 treaty had worn out its usefulness. The

rebellion began with mass defections in March of 2012, and still hasn't

ended.

"The Congolese state has outsourced its monopolyon violence to the UN."



In November of 2012, M23 marched on Goma, violating an unspoken

international red line. Well-trained and heavily armed Rwandan

commandos reportedly joined them. The FARDC was overmatched and

fled, and in the absence of the national military, the UN made only tacit

attempts at stopping the onslaught. This was widely criticized, but what

looked like failure might actually have saved large sections of the city:

M23 just waltzed into Goma without the costliness and destruction of an

urban street battle, sued for peace, and retreated 11 days later after a

round of frantic international diplomacy -- but with their negotiating

position enhanced.

MONUSCO actually did engage M23 with attack helicopter gunships early

in the crisis -- but that was before the FARDC emptied out of Goma as the

rebels advanced, putting the peacekeeping mission in an impossible

situation. "[The FARDC] withdrew from the front lines late last year, as

M23 advanced on Goma," says Kieran Dwyer, a spokesperson for the

U.N.'s Department of Peacekeeping Operations. "There was then adecision point of how far do we go unilaterally in using force against M23.

As they advanced further, do we fight in the streets of a city with hundreds

of thousands of civilians? There was an ultimate call that we would have

put civilians at more risk if we had allowed the fight to be taken inside of

Goma than if we had resisted the advance." MONUSCO evacuated

civilians at risk of being targeted by M23 and continued to patrol the city

even as it was under the militant group's control. This was arguably in

keeping with the mission's purpose: after all, the main objective of the

peacekeeping force is to protects civilians, and it isn't really oriented

towards traditional -- not to mention politically-sensitive -- war-fighting

activities.

Yet in taking Goma, M23 and its Rwandan backers had proven their point,without the messiness of a long occupation: They were capable of seizing

Goma if they wanted to, and the Congolese state and the international

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/21/us-congo-democratic-un-idUSBRE8AK1AC20121121



community were unwilling to stop them. The red line was no red line at all.

M23's return to Goma is unlikely, but it's a possibility that both the UN

and the FARDC are obviously taking seriously. The Goma airport is ringed

with UN bases. Armored personnel carriers full of Uruguayans and UN-

labeled Egyptian army jeeps patrol its streets, and the feeling of a warzone

begins well south of M23 territory.

The last government checkpoint appeared just as the city gave way to

fields of volcanic stone, a collection of plastic chairs where bored

policeman hissed perfunctory questions at any driver with the gall to exit

their domain. It was the first of three checkpoints before entering M23

country. The second was manned by the UN mission, called MONUSCO,

which made an overwhelming display of force: six emplaced tanks, gun-

toting soldiers, pickup trucks with machine guns in back. The Indian

battalions sport tough-sounding names like the "Deccan Devils," but at

least two people closely involved in the UN's Goma operations told me

that the Indian army's main objective in the DRC was to avoid losing a

single additional soldier. For one checkpoint, at least, MONUSCO seemed

like a formidable army, the type of modern force that no one would want

to gamble on having to shoot through (setting aside the questionable

applicability of battle tanks to a guerrilla war in a volcanic forest).

About a half-kilometer up the road were soldiers in fresh jungle camo, with

shiny new machine guns that made a mockery of the wooden rifles carriedby the FARDC, and high-end walkie-talkies sticking out of their pockets.

There is no reason for an outsider to fear them: M23 has a "humanitarian

coordinator" named Dr. Alexi, an ex-UN physician who makes sure that

the group respects NGO activities and adheres to international law. This

neatly encapsulates M23, a group that terrorizes civilians and recruits

children, but still understands the public relations benefit of appearing to

care about humanitarianism. At the checkpoint, and at dozens of

subsequent checkpoints, our car, which had large signs reading "PRESSE"



taped to each side, was waved through.

By the best estimates, M23 is down to its last 1500 fighters, and we might

have passed the bulk of them during the drive to Rutshuru. There were

M23 on the back of pickup trucks, young teens toting jet-black rifles that

looked like they had barely been fired. There were M23 in matching green

rain slickers standing over bends in the road -- even soldiers who looked

like they had barely entered their teens wore clean, well-fitting uniforms. I

saw M23 harassing commercial trucks; credible word had it that the rebel

movement's grunts hadn't been paid in weeks.

We also passed hundreds of MONUSCO troops even after we had crossed

into M23 country. In one town, our jeep cowered by the side of the road

while ten high-clearance trucks passed, with blue-helmets crowded into

their hoppers and Indian tanks following close behind. M23 and

MONUSCO know that they have nothing to gain from a shooting war; in

lieu of open conflict, they stare at each other with looks of undisguised

violence and contempt. I was sure that an especially angry-looking Indian

tank commander would exchange words with one basilisk-eyed militant

and was relieved when he drove off in silence.

Two armies occupy M23 territory, and they are content with leaving the

other alone, for now. It turns out M23 and their Rwandan supporters

actually had violated a red line in seizing Goma -- in early 2013, the UN

Security Council authorized the deployment of the 3,000-troop"intervention brigade," consisting of special forces from South Africa,

Tanzania, and Malawi. In a break with standard peacekeeping practice,

the brigade's force composition and rules of engagement will allow them

to go on the offensive in order to protect civilians. The UN is dabbling in

modern counterinsurgency methods for the first time in its history.

The force will be deployed over the course of the summer, and by late

June, 2,000 soldiers were already in DRC. In a best-case scenario, the

force will both protect Congolese and recuperate some of the credibility



that MONUSCO lost during a difficult year. Sometime in 2012, members

of an armed group called Mai Mai Cheka summarily executed the local

chiefs in a town called Pinga, and then paraded their heads in front of the

nearest MONUSCO base. If the brigade succeeds, MONUSCO -- and, by

extension, the UN -- can transcend these earlier issues, and the

international community's commitment to protecting Congolese civilians

will be harder to question. (The U.S. has a stake here: America provides 27

percent of the UN peacekeeping budget, including $519 million for

MONUSCO over the last fiscal year).

But in the DRC, even the definition of "success" is an open question --

especially given the recent history of foreign interventions in the country'seast. In 1996, Paul Kagame and Ugandan dictator Yoweri Museveni's

campaign against Mobutu was thought of by some as the continuation of

the remarkable events in South Africa just a couple years before -- part of a

larger movement to transform a troubled continent, and reverse a legacy

of conflict and misrule. Mobutu belonged to a class of post-colonial leader

that needed to be expunged: a vapid kleptocrat who spewed old-line pan-African nonsense; an illegitimate president-for-life who would even

tolerate Rwanda's genocidaires if it would increase his chances of

retaining power. In its violent aftermath, which included brutal reprisal

killings against Hutu refugees (recounted in in Howard French's A

Continent for the Taking ), and a war between Uganda and Rwanda, the

campaign ended up mocking whatever higher ideals it might once have

stood for. The DRC wound up with the Kabila clan, a dictatorship just as

sclerotic as that of the leopardskin enthusiast who had ruled Congo -- or

Zaire, as he had renamed it -- since 1965. And it wound up with 15 more

years of war.

The intervention brigade will be much smaller than the '96 invasion force,

and its goal will be to strengthen, rather than overthrow, the sittinggovernment. And it isn't the result of adventurism, but of a 20-year policy

failure that the international community is finally confronting. Yet within

http://world.time.com/2012/11/26/defining-peacekeeping-downward-the-u-n-debacle-in-eastern-congo/

http://www.amazon.com/Continent-Taking-Tragedy-Hope-Africa/dp/1400030277



the vacuum of the eastern DRC, even the greatest of charities -- and the

defeat of M23 qualifies -- could have worrying consequences. Will the

brigade opt for a light footprint, and wage targeted, special operations-

style strikes on militia leaders? Will it clear territory for the FARDC, which

has a human rights record as troubling as some of the armed groups the

brigade is empowered to fight? Olivier Hamuli, an FARDC Lieutenant

Colonel and army spokesperson, told me that the brigade was being

deployed for his military's benefit: "It is coming to support the FARDC.

They will have good equipment, such as drones along the border, which

will be necessary to control the armed groups." In Hamuli's mind, the

brigade is there to help them fight the Rwandans.

"American soldiers are well-paid and well-equipped," Hamuli said, after

pointedly asking me to name a military that would remain as disciplined as

the FARDC under the difficult circumstances that it faced. "They have

everything. But they still tortured and raped in Iraq," he said. Given the

FARDC's dismissive attitude towards the army's crippling command and

control issues, it isn't surprising that some analysts doubt whether a UNmilitary victory over M23 will change much of anything. "No one's saying

the offensive part of it won't work," says one Goma-based expert. "It will

work. These are 14-year-olds with AK 47s. Of course they're going to get

flattened by South Africans with tanks and helicopters...the problem is

that the brigade is not going to stay. They're going to move on to the next

armed group."

From Kinshasa's perspective, the brigade comes with few strings attached,

and little added pressure on security sector or governance reform. Some

experts I spoke with told me the UN hasn't really thought about what will

fill the vacuum left behind by the armed groups it defeats. Dwyer says that

the intervention brigade should be viewed in terms of parallel

developments in the political sphere, like the 11-country peace initiative,Mary Robinson's appointment as special envoy, and increased

international pressure on Kinshasa on security sector reform and other



matters. "The idea is that if the political framework is effective," he said,

"any armed groups that have any legitimate concerns will have an avenue

to be addressed at the regional and local level."

But even then, the brigade signals the further erosion of the state: "The

Congolese state has outsourced its monopoly on violence to the UN," said

one Goma-based analyst.

Like Rubaya, Rutshuru would prove that this wasn't really the state's to

outsource in the first place.

The Ngunga 1 internally displaced persons camp outside of Goma, on

April 25, 2013. (Armin Rosen)

Rutshuru sits north of the lower slopes of Nyiragongo and is insulated by

uninhabitable expanses of hardened lava. On the morning I visited, M23

leader Sultani Makenga was hosting a summit with his lieutenants and

bush commanders. They were meeting inside a stately government

building painted a light shade of orange, with a Congolese flag out front. It

was part of a larger government campus where daily life seemed to ignore

the scores of heavily armed and clearly bored M23 milling about -- men



with gleaming black machine guns and sniper rifles who would enter into

stare-downs with UN tanks passing just feet away from where the entire

M23 leadership was meeting.

We were there to meet M23 colonel Vianny Kazarama, who would not

leave his meeting with Makenga under any circumstances. For the next

two hours, I got a taste of M23's respect for discipline: no one would talk

to me unless Kazarama gave them permission. No one would even tell me

their name.

M23 would scarcely exist in its current form if it weren't for the support of non-democratic Rwanda, but the group is more than happy to turn theaccusation around.

As the hours dragged on, Kazarama's two deputies -- unarmed men in

fatigues who seemed as if they were under strict orders not to evince any

sort of emotion -- attempted to convince my driver to join their cause. He

was a stylishly-dressed man with an almost brand-new Toyota Prado

entrusted to his care. By appearances, he was a hopeless candidate. They

tried anyway.

"It's the Congolese people who are responsible for these problems," one

deputy told him. "There's no awareness that if they work, they are capable

of actually changing the country." The Congolese people's own passivity

had doomed them, in his view: "With this government, even to get

something very simple done becomes a prayer," one of the men said. "To

get water is a problem in a country with so many rivers and lakes."

Compare the DRC to Rwanda, Uganda, or even Burundi, he said. This is

why they fought.

And they were right, to an extent. "The people who support them are

hypocrites," Pascal, my interpreter for the day, told me. "What they're



asking, their agenda -- people support these ideas. They're saying that the

government can't organize the country, and it can't. The trouble is that

people are tired of the war." But the trouble was also that in a political

culture so warped by conflict, there would be no reason to listen to

anything M23 had to say if they weren't heavily armed. I met their leaders

not because of the sensibleness of their ideas, but because of the guns they

commanded.

Kazarama eventually emerged from the orange building. He was dressed

in U.S. army desert camo, with exposed Velcro where the nametags and

insignia should be and the top collar of the uniform Velcro'd shut, in what

would actually be a violation of the U.S. Army's dress standard. Theuniform, along with his tendency to shift weight between his feet and stare

at his phone in the middle of questions, gave him an awkward and bored

affectation, as if even he had tired of spouting conscious and transparent

lies to any journalist who showed up in Rutshuru. Some of his talking

points at least had the benefit of being true, even if they were intended to

mislead: "There is total impunity in the DRC today," he said. "There iscorruption. There is no democracy. The country is rich, but the population

is very poor. You have seen how the roads are. Even in Goma, you have

seen how awful the roads are. They can't pay teachers or soldiers. There is

practically no government...there are no human rights."

M23 would scarcely exist in its current form if it weren't for the support of

non-democratic Rwanda, but Kazarama was happy to turn the accusation

around: "There are many armed groups of foreigners, which are not local

groups...there is the FDLR," he said, referring to a Hutu militant group

consisting of former members of the genocide-era government and army,

"which are Rwandan, and arrived in 1994. They are terrorists. There's the

FNC, from Burundi. There's the Bororu, from Chad." (One noted DRC

expert I consulted in the U.S. said that she had never heard of the lattergroup).



This was an embarrassing subject for M23, which isn't really a Rwandan

proxy in the strictest sense - the leaders of the group are actually

Congolese, even if their weapons and occasional fighting companions are

not. But the group still extends Rwandan influence into an area where

Kagame's government has a complex network of interests. Chief among

them is resource expropriation: minerals represent 28 percent of the

country's official exports, even though Rwanda has few deposits of its

own. It is believed that the unacknowledged mineral trade that's trafficked

through Rwanda totals in the billions of dollars. Rwanda needs access to

minerals, and support for Congolese Tutsi militants is one way to protect

their supply lines.

There's another, even more fundamental reason for Kagame's

machinations. Less than 20 years after its genocide, Rwanda is an

authoritarian marvel: Flat tarmac connects the capital to the Goma border

three mountainous hours to the west. In Rwanda, all motor taxi drivers

wear helmets, as do their passengers; there are public clocks in every

town, and they are accurate. Outside of Gisenyi, near the Goma borderpost, there is a freshly built prison surrounded by high, tan walls,

despairing to look upon and angled conspicuously towards the highway.

Opposition leaders are in jail, the government brings cryptic charges of

"genocide ideology"-- or just plain genocide -- against its opponents, and

Kagame won the last presidential election with over 90 percent of the

vote. Still, Kigali is a city of clean streets and shiny glass office buildings,

with incorruptible police officers and traffic lights that people obey. This is

a function of Kagame's famously discipline-oriented leadership style:

when he was commander of the insurgent Rwandan Patriot Front during

the genocide -- the group that would overthrow a Hutu supremacist

government and end one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century -- he is

said to have executed subordinates for offenses as trivial as arriving late to

meetings.

Kagame has purchased stability in his own country by exporting its



problems to Rwanda's much larger neighbor -- there's no violent Hutu-

Tutsi conflict inside Rwanda, because it's been safely transferred to the

other side of the Congolese border. Kagame thinks strategically: give the

Tutsi a veto over regional stability, he figures, and the chances of a 1994-

like hecatomb are dramatically reduced. Of course, this calculation only

proves that the Hutu-Tutsi conflict still festers, even if Rwanda is

superficially at peace. "This is a cyclical crisis, because the issue of

Rwanda has not been tackled," one Goma-based expert told me. "The

issue of the Tutsis and their contentions with the other groups hasn't been

addressed."

Inside Rwanda, Hutu killers still live next door to the Tutsis theyvictimized in 1994, while Hutus and even some Tutsis have chafed under

Kagame's tough rule. The Hutu who committed the genocide, as well as

their descendants, live just next door, in DRC. Kagame might privately be

wondering whether his country is another Syria -- whether even the most

skilled mixture of canny leadership, shrewd regional policy, and internal

oppression can make a nation forget the horrors of its recent history, andthe contradictions of its current order. Read one way, Rwanda's policies in

DRC reflect a strategic prowess that masks deep insecurity.

In Kazarama's telling, M23 wasn't there to help enforce Paul Kagame's

particular vision of regional peace. They were solving Congolese

problems, combating foreign armed groups and bringing democracy to

their failed state. They would even do something about the DRC's rape

crisis. "There were 126 women raped by the FARDC in Minova," he said.

In another town, 90 had been raped. The commander alone had raped 16

women in another. The Minova incident actually happened, yet somehow

this made Kazarama appear even more cynical than if he had been

inventing his facts. Perhaps he understood his partial responsibility, and

the responsibility of every militant, for weakening the state and thecountry to the point where its army could go on a rampage of sexual

violence without anything changing as a result. Perhaps this status quo is



exactly what M23 and the Rwandans were trying to preserve.

Kazarama had adopted more than just human rights language: he also

showed hints of the conspiratorial thinking of other factions in the DRC.

The intervention brigade was authorized because "some countries on the

Security Council have been corrupted by the Kinshasa government. Now,

they are bringing Africans here to kill each other, instead of finding a

durable solution." He promised retaliation if the brigade moved against

M23. "If the brigade attacks, we will chase them into Goma...We have to

defend ourselves."

In May, M23 actually did threaten Goma in a series of skirmishes around

the city, and even managed to fire a mortar on the downtown. But talk of

retaking it is pure bravado. There had been a fracturing of M23 just a

month or so earlier, when Makenga and his supporters violently purged

Bosco Ntaganda's faction from the militant group. Aid cuts from the U.S.

and various European donors had shamed Rwanda into scaling back its

support for M23, and Kagame's government, which has a seat in the UN

Security Council, even voted in favor of the deployment of the

intervention brigade. The winds had shifted, and Kagame's calculations

had shifted along with them. "The M23 has a young soldier set that's tired

of not being paid, and tired of being unpopular," one Goma-based security

consultant told me. There's a high rate of defection, and very low morale.

He sketched out two possible futures for the group: "soft targeting," which

would involve a campaign of assassinations and kidnappings, or strategic

contraction and even voluntary disappearance. M23 could bury their

weapons, take off their fatigues, and wait until the winds changed yet

again.

Kazarama continued, unbowed by reality: "we represent all of the

Congolese people who are suffering, the 96 percent who are against the

Kinshasa government." "The DRC people support M23. They are saying

that it is a sign of the disease in the Kinshasa government." He claimed



that M23 hadn't created any new refugees: "There are even people in

government territory who fled into M23 territory for security reasons."

I heard the same assertion from an M23 administrator named Benjamin

Mbonimpa, a friendly man with a professorial air and a veteran of two of

M23's predecessor movements. His office had an immense Congolese

flag and a calendar from the International Rescue Committee, a relief

NGO. "There are no refugees from the territory controlled by M23," he

said. "We have records of the number of people who were here before

M23 took over. They're still there. No one has gone away."

Did either of these men actually believe this? Did they expect me to

believe it? The next day, at the Ngunga IDP camp on the outskirts of

Goma, I met some of the people who Kazarama and Mbonimpa said did

not exist. There are a lot of them: at the beginning of 2012, there were

only 2,200 IDPs in the Goma area, mostly people who were too old or sick

to return home after the last round of fighting. Now, there were more than

200,000, and 50,000 of them live at Ngunga. The camp is strewn with

volcanic rock, which the IDPs use to anchor their tarp-and-wood frame

homes. Ngunga is an island of poverty set in an ocean of verdant green,

bounded by a tree stump-covered mountain where women are often raped

while out collecting firewood. Overflowing latrines and infrequent food

distributions characterize life there, and the IDPs get enough grain or corn

for maybe two weeks of every month.

In one tent, I met four women who were weaving handbags out of colored

plastic strips, a skill they had acquired through an NGO training program.

They made 50 cents per bag, and their faces were dressed in a weariness

too deep for an interloper to access. "We saw houses burn, and had a

neighbor killed," one of the women replied when I asked why she thought

M23 had attacked her village. "How do you have time to ask what

happened? You just have to run away." These women had been homeless

before, back when the CNDP was fighting the government in the mid-



2000s. Their second displacement was a bitter homecoming -- they'd fled

to an earlier iteration of the Ngunga camp during the CNDP conflict as

well. "This is too hard to us," one of the women said. "We tried to rebuild

our lives when we went back home -- to farm, and raise chickens and

goats. We've lost all of those things again."

Monotony was one of the camp's chief cruelties. "Imagine having to eat

this morning, midday and night," said one IDP, who was sorting maize on

a tarp spread out over the floor of his tent. "And there isn't even

enough...we are suffering here. There's nothing to eat, or to do."

"This camp is like a jail," a young woman added.

A main avenue of the Ngunga 1 internally displaced persons camp on April

25, 2013. (Armin Rosen)

"We have a democratic ideology," Mbonimpa told me. "You can see that

other political parties are not disturbed in this area. People can say whatthey want without any problem. Even international organizations go

wherever they want to."



The space for political and civic action in the DRC has been so distorted by

80 years of Belgian colonization, 50 years of dictatorship, and 20 years of

conflict that this kind of nonsensical politics is virtually all that remains.

M23's rhetoric of democracy and humanitarianism consists of fake offices

with hanging portraits of a fake president, or militants complaining about

the government's failure to restrain the growth of militant groups, or

Indian peacekeepers driving tanks that they'll never use, and which are

useless anyway -- the conflict survives because it generates such

absurdities while muzzling any real alternative to them. And even extreme

alternatives, like the UN intervention brigade, might not be enough to end

it for good.

The recent peace effort, a new UN Great Lakes envoy, and the

MONUSCO intervention force all mean that a resolution could be closer

than it appears. But the logic of conflict must first be broken at ground

level, and peace, when it comes, will be a local accomplishment. At the

moment, the country lives only in the minds of its citizens: the best

doctors, teachers and engineers all work for NGOs. Oxfam provides waterfor over 200,000 people in North Kivu alone, and the Catholic Church

operates over 650 schools nationwide -- NGOs and religious organizations

have supplanted the core services of the state. In the east, the state has

been whittled down to a currency no one uses, and to uniforms that no one

trusts. The idea of a Congolese polity has become fatally abstracted: The

state had given up on local-level engagement and institution building and

retreated to a distant capital. "This fragmentation," one Goma-based

expert told me, "lack of communal dialogue, and lack of engagement in

the political process means that everything is centralized in Kinshasa, that

corrupt people are lining their pockets, and that people on the ground are

resolving their problems with the only means they have, which is through

arms."

A solution is beyond the purview of armies or politicians. A future peace

likely rests in those quantum-level pockets of conflict that stain the region



-- through the exhausting and unglamorous business of resolving local-

level disputes, through reconciling feuding communities and rebuilding a

broken polity. When peace arrives, there will likely be grand bargains

between powerful enemies -- the Rwandans will have to be secure in the

knowledge that they have nothing to gain from meddling, and the

Congolese government will have to be strong enough to take control of the

entire country. But the solution isn't photogenic or even particularly

exciting: it lies in teachers deciding not to become warlords, in the honesty

of traffic cops, in citizens beginning to live in an environment where the

gun is no longer the surest or most logical means of getting what they

want.

War, like any political order, is a constructed thing. It's human. No natural

law commands it, and there's nothing about it that's immutable or

permanent. Conflict isn't wired into the organs or the bones, and there is a

covert bigotry to the idea that war is the only possible destiny for certain

people in certain places, or to the notion that there are societies incapable

of breaking out of their own deadly logic of conflict. However enormous itmay seem, the conflict in DRC is as inevitable as any other. There is

nothing inevitable about it.



A MONUSCO convoy on the road between Sake and Kitchanga on April

27, 2013. (Armin Rosen)

On the road to Kitchanga, the rear wheels of trucks slid in the earth as if

driving on ice. In a single five-kilometer span, we passed an over-laden

pickup buried to the grille in a dirt crater, a second broken-down truck

with its payload and passengers huddled by the side of the road with no

obvious means of rescue, and another truck tugging a car from a dust trap

with a fraying rope. Even the vehicles that were surviving the journey were

bruised and belching hulks, their chassis rattling and their rusted tailpipes

wheezing thick smog. The traffic on the road was heavy and slow -- James

said that drivers now feared the taxation that M23 imposed on

commercial trucks, and preferred to take their chances with the Kitchanga

route if they had to drive to the Ugandan border. But the road can barely

accommodate one truck at a time. Passage of two-way traffic was a skilled

negotiation, a dialogue of monsters inching backwards and forwards, then

honking in greeting or warning, then tacitly agreeing to a tiny leewaybuffered with a mountain-sized drop, then huffing in opposite directions

billowed in clouds of dust and exhaust.

More certain of their passage are the motorbikes and bicycles, the latter of

which are usualy piled high with bushels of charcoal, and then slowly

wheeled to Goma, 20 or 30 miles to the southwest. This was a lucrative

enterprise, James said: FARDC soldiers, who were barely paid or fed and

who live in roadside bases that looked like refugee camps, pillage local

forests and sell charcoal and timber to the bicycle men, who then sell their

wares in Goma at a markup. But I'd spent the morning watching men push

bicycles in the hot sun, with the city still hours or even days in the distance.

I'd seen their vehicles propped up with logs by the side of the highway,

their minders crouched in the shade of their heavy payload, looking as if

mere survival were exacting an impossible price.



In a nondescript single-story building in Kitchanga, we met a nervous local

administrator who locked his office door while he was speaking with me

and refused to tell me his name. The terror that had gripped Kitchanga in

February still hadn't lifted, and his account was tinged with a certain anti-

Tutsi bias. He spoke of the "Rutshuru" side of town, infiltrated by

seditious Tutsis who he believed were in league with M23, and the

"Masisi" side inhabited by Hutu and Hunde. He gave his accounting of

events: "The APCLS [a Hunde militia] was called here by the government,

so that all of them could be integrated into the army," he said. They

weren't the only ones: "Even the Nyatura were everywhere around

Kitchanga...They were supposed to support the FARDC in their fight

against M23."

A powder keg had been lit. "When the government integrated the CNDP,

the commanders refused to go elsewhere. They asked to stay here and

control this area. When the FARDC asked the APCLS and the Nyatura to

come to town for integration, the ex-CNDP commanders were in contact

with M23," he said. Who knows if this is true -- the important thing is thatthe APCLS, and some percentage of the local Hunde and Hutu

community, thought it was true.

The shooting began when an APCLS fighter was killed in the "Rutshuru"

side of town. A posse of his comrades attempted to recover his body,

which invited a predictable response. "That's when the fighting started,"

the man said. That tiny fire, kindled over months of escalating tension,

was enough to ignite a violence that destroyed the entire city enter -- that

resulted in the hospital getting shelled, apparently by the FARDC, and in

IDP camps being attacked, apparently by the APCLS.

According to one Goma-based observer who visited Kitchanga a couple of

weeks before it exploded, the disaster unfolded with little intervention

from the UN and the government. "The Kitchanga area has 100,000

people. Everyone was aware of the problem. Not a single emissary was



sent. The UN and the government did nothing. There was no effort made

to get people to the table and have them talk." (Dwyer says that

"MONUSCO was involved in efforts to try to diffuse this situation," but

did not go into additional detail.) The tensions hadn't abated: the terrified

district administrator said that some people suspected a nearby IDP

settlement was actually a military encampment for M23 sympathizers.

Ruined buildings in Kitchanga on April 27, 2013. (Armin Rosen)

Kitchanga's IDP camp is crisscrossed with streams. The city's most

vulnerable residents live atop a rocky swamp, where water rushes andpools and crawls, invading the alleys between tents and accumulating in

every unoccupied wedge of space. "Everyone is afraid to talk," James said.

"There isn't really peace." The sky glowered, full with the rain we both

dreaded.

We found a tent where two withering women, who might have been 20 or

40 or 60 years old, sat and killed time. They had first arrived in Kitchanga

six years ago, when they were fleeing the CNDP. "In March, when the

fighting broke out here, we had to run away again," one of them told me.



Much of the town had joined them in taking refuge in the forest. "When

we came back, nothing was left. Everything was stolen. Even the brush on

the roof of our hut was stolen."

The storm began as a hum, as the suggestion of rain, droplets whispering

on a tarp roof. And then it became loud enough to silence our conversation

and any worries I had about the conditions of the road -- to overwhelm

even the most natural thoughts and fears. Our voices faded into the static

roar of the deluge, imposing total silence upon us. The onslaught showed

no signs of passing, and the roof did not leak, even as heavy raindrops

shattered overhead.

Then tiny, clear marbles began skipping trough gaps in the bottom of the

tarp, ice like mancala beads, smooth frozen disks dumped from the raging

sky. It seemed impossible in a hot equatorial country, a place with palm

trees and tropical birds, as if an ice storm in Kitchanga was some

deliberate final rebuke to the idea that anything here, or anywhere else,

needed to make much sense. Ice skipped across the ground like firm glass

pills. Even at a touch they would barely sweat. This was strong and

resilient ice -- brilliant, opalescent, dangerous to our purposes. "We have

to go," James said. Before we ran into the storm, I asked one of the women

if it rained like this very often. Every day, she replied.

The center of town sat deserted. By emptying the city, the ice and rain had

revealed the extent of the devastation. The blackened trees and lumps of concrete went further back from the road than I'd realized; the men selling

shoes and dress shirts, now sheltering under flimsy tin ledges, had hidden

the empty frames, the piles of rubble and ash, flat reservations patterned

with the footprints of destroyed buildings.

Weather, like war, is a situation from which no one is wholly immune. And

this rain seemed possessed with a conscious rage: the sky heaved with

force and violence, pounding Hutu and Hunde and Tutsi, pounding

FARDC and APCLS and M23, slamming into refugee tents and army



bases, into bicycle pushers and NGO trucks, pounding the rocky earth,

pounding the empty gray spaces where a city once stood.

This reporting was sponsored in part by Oxfam America.

A B O U T T H E A U T H O R

ARMIN ROSEN is a former writer and producer for The Atlantic 's Global channel.

Twitter

https://twitter.com/intent/user?screen_name=ArminRosen

http://www.theatlantic.com/author/armin-rosen/

http://www.oxfamamerica.org/

the origins of war in the drc - the atlantic

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