Congo fighting mirrors ‘90s war

To his followers, Congolese rebel leader Laurent Nkunda is known affectionately as “Mon General.” He calls himself a born-again Christian and claims he is fighting a war to liberate Congo from corruption.

Yet prominent rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch say his troops loot from, rape and execute civilians.

Lately, reports of troops from neighboring Rwanda and Angola in Nkunda’s stronghold in eastern Congo — on opposite sides of his 11-week offensive against government troops — have raised the specter of a renewal of Africa’s first world war.

“If the reports of an armed intervention by Angola are confirmed, it would certainly change the situation in eastern Congo,” said Herman Cohen, a national security official and assistant secretary of state for Africa in the Reagan and Clinton administrations.

Angola lies more than 1,000 miles away from the battle grounds in eastern Congo, where Nkunda’s forces have forced 250,000 civilians to flee to the regional capital of Goma for protection.

From 1997 until a shaky peace deal in 2003, Angola, Zimbabwe, Chad and Namibia helped Congolese forces prevent the ouster of the government of Congolese President Laurent Kabila by the combined forces of Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. An estimated 3 million people died.

The Rwandans had earlier installed Mr. Kabila, a man from southeastern Congo, in power, bringing an end to dictator Mobutu Sese Seko’s three decades of rule.

The Rwandans later turned against Mr. Kabila who was assassinated in 2001.

Now the threat of renewed fighting, with a flood of photos depicting civilian refugees on dirt roads, have rallied the United States, United Nations, the African Union and individual European countries to call for a negotiated settlement.

This week, Africa experts Jennifer Cooke of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and John Prendergast of the International Crisis Group appealed for an intensified effort to craft a peace deal.

But in an interview on National Public Radio, they were unable to confirm that foreign forces had joined the fighting.

A decade earlier, Angola’s first intervention was based on concern that a Rwanda-controlled government in Kinshasa would ally itself with Jonas Savimbi, then leader of the Angolan rebel group known as UNITA, or the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola.

Savimbi was killed by government troops in 2002. But it appears that Angola still regards Tutsi-led Rwanda as a hostile country, with Nkunda the latest Rwandan ally to appear in eastern Congo.

Rwanda denies that it is offering Nkunda material help but justifies moral support on grounds that he is opposing Rwandan exiles who fled Rwanda after committing genocide against the Tutsi and their Hutu supporters.

Nkunda, shown posing in news photos like a rock star, at times has defined his ambitions narrowly, as a fight to protect Congolese Tutsi against their enemies Rwandan Hutu exiles.

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