Goma North-Kivu February 10th
CNDP soldiers on patrol in Rushuru district
For a small city Goma does actually have traffic jams and a morning rush hour. As the traffic slows down the motorcycle taxi drivers—who are my main means for getting around town—are in their element, weaving in and out between vehicles, passing head-on in the centre line against oncoming traffic and essentially stopping for nothing. So when the moto-taxis and other vehicles immediately clear to the side of the road when the whine of sirens begins rising up ahead, something is up. A line of army and police trucks loaded with soldiers are barrelling toward us and as they pass I notice that several are full of police carrying AK-47 rifles, their heads covered by balaclavas. It is the rapid response unit and for them to get involved it has to be something major. For the rest of the day, it seems, there is movement and tension in the city.
When we gather in the evening for our project planning meeting for the Reintegration Centre, where we report back on progress and update plans, Ferdy looks worried; there is a high state of political tension in Goma involving the central government and a senior general of a rebel group, the Congrès national pour la défense du peuple (CNDP), the group formed to protect the area’s Tutsis against the genocidal Interahamwe, has been close to Rwanda and, by one name or another, has dominated the area militarily for the past decade and a half, although it is bitterly resented by the province’s non-Tutsi ethnic groups who have been on the receiving end of its own appalling human rights record.
Officially, the CNDP have been absorbed into the national army under one of Congo’s peace accords, and should not exist, but continue both as a kind of sub-identity within the army where they now hold high rank in the provincial command—and as a political party with a military arm. They retain units not integrated into the army and parallel administration in several areas of the province which they dominate militarily. Their generals are the most powerful and, like most military people here, heavily involved in mining, money and politics. They also have legitimate grievances as neither has the government honoured its commitments under the accord that ended fighting between them—which government forces decisively lost. As a result there is the current, half-in, half-out situation, as well as other conflicts and tensions including a fracturing of traditional alliances. The group is moving away from its historical anchor—a close alliance with Rwanda, which holds its former leader, Laurent Nkunda, in prison. There are also new Tutsi-led rebel groups of uncertain origin and motives forming, and the fractiousness in the CNDP points to a new and uncertain period both for it and the Kivus. In short, another Congolese peace process has only partially been implemented or succeeded, and the vacuum is being filled by new alliances and mutation.
There is also kind of a sea-saw battle for control of the Kivus between the CNDP, for whom this is their home base, and the national government which is struggling to assert its authority here. Not very effectively, however. A recent attempt to transfer several senior CNDP officers to military command in other parts of the country was simply ignored. So much for integrated command.
The current tensions involve the CNDP’s most powerful general, Bosco Taganda, known as The Terminator, who is wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court, although for obvious reasons the government is incapable of exercising sovereign authority on its own territory by complying with international law by arresting and extraditing him. Such is the lot of a failed state. A private plane with foreign nationals carrying millions of dollars in cash has alleged just arrived at the Goma airport direct from Nigeria on some kind of mission connected with Taganda that is thought could be either a mining, business or arms deal, or even a fresh rebellion.
It isn’t known what is involved and may never be—generally in unstable African countries where the rule of law is absent, outlandish things happen all the time and the stories that circulate about them are never fully known or confirmed. Such rumours contribute to the air of unreality that underlies everything here; nothing is as it appears and whatever is said as regards official policies and pronouncements are window dressing for a parallel universe where actual power is wielded out of sight, disreputable things are done behind closed doors and whatever is heard about them is the tip of the iceberg, a fraction of a constellation of sordid goings on.
But this is no joke—the CNDP are militarily powerful and now in an expansionary mood, even recruiting fresh young soldiers. The last time they decided to “opt out” of the national army in 2008, they unleashed a war that displaced hundreds of thousands and swept aside government forces in North Kivu, undoing 6 years of peace building and conquering the whole province, before being stopped at the gates of Goma by UN peace keepers.
In the latest incident, when the plane arrived unannounced at Goma airport, Taganda’s men intervened to have the occupants, and a large amount of money, whisked through customs—hardly a newsworthy event in a land of impunity. When this was resisted by police, following a direct order from the president’s office in the capital, a scuffle ensued in which the plane’s occupants were liberated by CNDP soldiers and brought to Taganda’s compound in Goma. After an armed stand-off the government had its way, and the foreign nationals, including French and American citizens, were delivered to the intelligence office, a few steps from my hotel where they are now. It isn’t possible to know what is really involved and it is not that important either—shady mining and business deals are the life blood of politics and military power in the Kivus and that is how this country’s wars and the participants involved are self-financing.
Six months ago President Kabila announced a sudden ban on mining of eastern Congo’s conflict minerals, a measure ostensibly meant to address the chaotic, violent, unregulated small scale mining sector in the province in which military and political figures are deeply involved. The ban has had little affect, and according to international human rights and conflict resolution agencies, mining and resource extraction in the Kivus continues much as before and is the realm of a “mafia-like network of military, political, rebel and business interests.” Instead of nominally protecting civilian populations commanders in the army—as well as the militias and rebels—compete for control of the mines, earning millions of dollars per month extracting it themselves or taxing those who do. Walikale district west of Goma is acknowledged to be the centre of this activity, the area of the biggest mines, the most guns and the most conflict.
In reality the bar on mining is selective and who can and cannot continue to do business can be granted or withdrawn by political gift, giving the president and his people one means to try to control who has access to economic power. But the Kivus are a contested area and the government can exert policy and uphold its authority only to the extent it has the military and political power to do so. The state is weak and there are many other powerful factions in play here in Congo’s wild west. It is by these kinds of struggles and turf battles that power is exercised in North Kivu and the tensions in Goma over the past few days are one of the many skirmishes that go on all the time; by the violent standards of this area it is not even a significant one.
All of this does actually have some bearing on me: we are supposed to leave in two days for a project field visit to Walikale, North Kivu’s Apocalypse Now district, that is a centre of mining, money and militias, and my travel has to be approved by intelligence who will issue the laissez-passez. Now is “not a good time” to go to the intelligence office, Ferdy tells me. “These people are suspicious and hostile (yes, at the best of times) and the fact that you are a foreigner, particularly a North American, doesn’t help. To even try now is to ask for trouble”. I couldn’t agree more. Walikale must wait.