* Evidence points to Rwanda involvement; Kigali denies this
* Rwanda's reputation at risk as western donors freeze aid
* Rebellion highlights Kabila's weak control over east
By Jonny Hogg
KIWANJA, Democratic Republic of Congo, Aug 22 (Reuters) - F our years after
dozens of his neighbours in the remote eastern Congolese village of Kiwanja
were butchered by rebels, Olivier has a sense of a recurring nightmare.
Insurgents once again stalk the village's abandoned streets and fearful
residents crowd for safety at the shut gates of the nearby U.N.
peacekeepers' base as gunfire shatters the silence and government troops
retreat in chaos.
As with a previous 2004-2009 rebellion, Congo's leaders, U.N. experts and
regional analysts point to small but militarily powerful neighbour Rwanda as
the driving force behind this latest insurgency to test Kinshasa's tenuous
hold over the east.
After wars in the 1990s, Rwanda withdrew troops from Congo in 2002. But
Congo watchers say Rwanda's security apparatus has continued to project its
military, political and economic interests across the border, using armed
groups as proxies.
Kiwanja resident Olivier, who withheld his surname fearing reprisals,
believes many of the same fighters that carried out the 2008 massacre that
killed 150 people in his village have returned as part of the new rebellion.
"For me, it's the same movement, just changed its name," said 20-year-old
Olivier, referring to the M23 rebels who have seized territory north of Goma
in eastern North Kivu province in recent months, forcing over 270,000 people
from their homes.
The United Nations linked Rwanda to the rebels behind the last revolt, which
finally ended in 2009 when Rwanda arrested the Congolese Tutsi rebel leader,
Laurent Nkunda, who denies his forces were behind the massacre in Olivier's
village.
For a time, Rwanda and Congo cooperated and Nkunda's former fighters, the
CNDP, were integrated into the Congolese army. But that deal has fallen
apart, and the new rebels say they have taken up arms again because the
Congo government reneged on it.
Meanwhile, Congolese who have known relentless war and rebellion for the
past 18 years, see more killing ahead. Jean Mwendo, one of thousands living
with no shelter on muddy roads on the outskirts of Goma after fleeing
fighting, said he had to leave his parents behind because they were too weak
to leave.
"Before it was the CNDP who made war. Now it's M23. We think it's the
same... It's Rwanda who cause all the war in the east."
DENIAL DOUBTED
Rwanda strongly denies backing the M23. A small country that has long been
held up by Western governments and businessmen as a model of reform, Rwanda
jealously guards its reputation.
But Western countries have made clear they do not believe its denials.
Several, including the United States, Britain and Sweden, have frozen aid
over accusations that Rwanda is waging proxy war across the border.
"Rwanda has maintained covert capacity to shape events in the east (of
Congo). They never let go," said Ben Shepherd, a British ex-diplomat who has
followed the region for 10 years.
"There is a complex stew of economic, nationalistic and ethnic drivers as to
why they are doing it," he added.
Rwanda, whose army first entered Congo in 1996 and fought in two wars there,
says it is being made a scapegoat for the Congo government's and wider
world's failures to bring peace to the vast, mineral-rich former Belgian
colony at the heart of Africa.
"We are kind of really getting tired of getting caught up in a conflict
that's not ours," said Louise Mushikiwabo, Rwanda's foreign minister.
When U.N. experts drafted a report, leaked in June, citing evidence that
senior Rwandan military officials had been backing the M23 rebellion, the
Rwandan government issued a detailed, point-by-point rebuttal that condemned
the report as one-sided.
Independent Great Lakes expert Jason Stearns believes the festering eastern
Congo conflict is eroding one of Rwanda's biggest assets: its status as
model of post-conflict development lauded by world leaders and business
executives.
"The biggest damage that's happening to Rwanda right now is the damage to
its reputation," he said.
Congo's geography of vast, impenetrable rainforest has long steered its
eastern trade away from its own distant capital Kinshasa and towards
Rwanda's much closer capital Kigali.
Congo's borderlands are separated from Kinshasa by more than 1,500 km (900
miles). There are no year-round roads and a decrepit aviation sector.
By contrast, traders in Goma, lakeside capital of Congo's North Kivu
province, can cross the Rwandan border and drive just a few hours on
gleaming highways to its capital Kigali, where a modern airport boast
flights to far-flung hubs like Dubai.
David Katumba, vice president of the Federation of Congolese Enterprises
lamented that Congolese businessmen keep millions of dollars in Rwanda's
banks: "With our weakness, it's given them (Rwanda) an opportunity to do
what they want with us."
OUTCOME OF GENOCIDE
More than 5 million people died in Congo through violence, hunger and
disease as a result of two wars and a series of rebellions since the late
1990s, according to a 2008 study by the International Rescue Committee.
All those conflicts were broadly linked to the 1994 Rwandan genocide that
saw Hutu soldiers and militia kill around 800,000 mostly ethnic Tutsis in
100 days. After the genocide, many of the Hutu militia fighters fled to
camps in Congo.
Rwanda, now led by President Paul Kagame's Tutsi-dominated government, says
the Hutu fighters sheltering in Congo remain a threat, and it has a right to
focus on security, especially as the Congolese state has failed to pacify
the border area.
A sizable population of speakers of the Rwandan language live across the
border in Congo. Militias have sprung up from this group, often headed by
Tutsis such as Nkunda's CNDP, officially to protect themselves from Hutus
and other hostile ethnic groups but frequently taking sides in uprisings
against Kinshasa, often with Rwandan support.
Nevertheless, Congolese officials and U.N. experts say Rwanda's past
interventions have been motivated as much by economic interests as by
security.
Rwanda now has one of the best armies in Africa, and has not suffered an
attack from Hutu rebels in Congo for about a decade.
The United Nations says the Hutu rebel FDLR force hiding in eastern Congo,
believed to number as many as 15,000 a decade ago, has been reduced to less
than 3,000 fighters.
Previous U.N. reports have documented lucrative smuggling rackets ferrying
coltan, tin, gold and tungsten ferried across to Rwanda. At the height of
Congo's last war in 1999, profits from eastern Congo's mineral fields
contributed some $320 million to Rwanda's defence budget, U.N. experts said.
Congo's Information Minister Lambert Mende says the pattern of war for
mineral wealth has resumed, and the latest rebel campaign is an extension of
a Kigali-backed "war of pillage".
"The (Rwandan) mafia profit to the maximum from the disorder, not paying
anything to the Congolese state," he said.
Noel Twagiramungu, a Rwandan human rights activist who fled his country in
2004 when civil society groups came under pressure, also said money was at
the root of the intervention.
"I think we can say that Rwandan involvement in Congo minerals is a
state-controlled enterprise," he said.
Emmanuel Ndimubanzi, head of the North Kivu's provincial government's mining
division, said new local and international legislation targeting conflict
minerals has slowed legal trade to almost zero, but smuggling routes remain.
WEAK CONGO
Those who accuse Rwanda of pulling the strings point to the M23's rapid
expansion as a sign it must be helped from abroad.
The M23 rebels numbered just a few hundred in April and were surrounded by
government forces. Since then, their ranks have swelled to some 1,500. The
advancing fighters wear crisp camouflage uniforms and brandish gleaming new
guns and grenades which they say they captured from fleeing government
troops.
Rebel deserters have given detailed accounts of recruitment drives in Rwanda
to supply fighters for M23. Young men identified themselves as Rwandans and
said they were told they were joining the Rwandan army, but instead found
themselves sent across the border to fight as Congolese rebels. Rwanda and
M23 deny those accounts.
Ultimately, the success of rebellions in eastern Congo has at least as much
to do with Congo's weakness as Rwanda's strength. Congo's President Joseph
Kabila has ruled out dialogue with the rebels, saying they must be crushed,
but he lacks the capable military forces that could carry out the threat.
Several weeks of rebel advances have laid bare the weakness of the Congolese
government army, despite millions of dollars in foreign aid. The front is
now just 30 km (19 miles) from Goma.
M23 takes its name from a March 23, 2009 deal that ended the 2004-09 revolt
by Nkunda's CNDP. The new insurgents accuse Congo's government of failing to
honour that 2009 peace pact, which would have guaranteed them salaries as
Congolese troops.
U.N. investigators say a key figure in the M23 uprising is Bosco Ntaganda,
who took over the CNDP when Nkunda was arrested, and then served as an
officer in Congo's army for several years when the CNDP was incorporated in
it under the 2009 peace deal.
Ntaganda is now sought by the International Criminal Court for alleged war
crimes. His fighters began flocking to the M23 after the Congolese
government raised the prospect of arresting him and breaking up what it
described as CNDP criminal networks.
Shepherd says Rwandan President Paul Kagame is caught between wanting to
maintain inflows of foreign aid to fund his development plans and sustaining
the loyalty of his powerful military, which sees opportunities in Congo's
eastern riches.
"Keeping their loyalty may explain Kagame's willingness to risk so much in
(Congo)," the former diplomat wrote in an analysis for independent think
tank Chatham House in London.
Tutsi rebel chiefs like Nkunda and Ntaganda forged deep bonds through
military careers in the ranks of Rwanda's armed forces on both sides of the
border in the 1990s, before they later became rebels in Congo.
"You can't see the Rwandan element in Congo without domestic politics in
Rwanda. The military establishment in Rwanda is extremely influential and
important. They often have an attitude towards eastern Congo of wanting to
control everything that goes on, especially on their border," Stearns said.
The M23 rebels have made tentative efforts to link up with other armed
groups in the east, where Kabila won heavily in a 2006 election but where
his popularity has plummeted since, further hurt by a troubled re-election
last year criticised as flawed by local and foreign observers.
The rebels are also keen to tap into broader frustrations over incomplete
decentralisation plans, sentiments shared both in the east and in the
southern copper rich mining province of Katanga, which has a history of
secessionist bids.
Kinshasa's press is full of editorials accusing Rwanda of seeking the
break-up of Congo.
Kabila faces a dilemma similar to 2009, and must choose between a
domestically unpopular deal with the rebels and trying to defeat them with a
government army which has simply collapsed in the face of rebel advances.
Witnesses often talk of encountering drunken government troops in full
retreat.
Regional efforts to tackle the crisis have for now led to a pause in
fighting but provided no lasting solution.
A summit in Uganda's capital Kampala earlier this month discussed a "neutral
force" that would eliminate Congo's eastern rebels, but failed to secure
clear agreement.
It was not established who would be part of such a force, raising raw
memories of the late 1990s, when armies of nine neighbouring nations were
sucked into fighting in Congo.
The longer the M23 revolt lasts, the more difficult Rwanda may find it to
end its damaging entanglement in eastern Congo.
"Can Rwanda draw a line between what is Rwandan affairs and what is
Congolese affairs? I don't think so," said rights activist Twagiramungu.
Back in Kiwanja, Olivier wishes only for an end to the recurring nightmare.
The rebels bring a "reign of terror", he says. "Everyone goes to bed and
dreams that when they wake up, they will be gone."
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Received on Wed Aug 22 2012 - 18:14:22 EDT
