So General Laurent Nkunda has been arrested in Rwanda. About time too. His thuggish rebellion scattered 250,000 people in the last months of 2008 as he flexed his muscles and played games with the lives of the families he claimed to represent. There are still questions to be answered – will Rwanda hand over to the DRC where he is a wanted man – but this, for what it’s worth, is my take on the affair…

Either General Laurent Nkunda has spent four years protecting his Tutsi tribemates from Hutu genocidaires or he is a Rwandan-backed troublemaker, intent on destabilising the Democratic of Congo depending on who you talk to.

Today it seems time has run out for the rebel leader. It may be that he has fallen out with too many of his senior lieutenants or that his arrest was the price Rwanda was willing to pay in order to send troops over the border to clear out Hutu militias hiding in Congolese forests.

Either way the man known as the Butcher of Kisangani appears to have lost support in key places. "Nkunda didn’t realise that he had lost political capital with a series of foolish moves," said a UN source in the regional capital of Goma.

"He thought he was indispensable and that he could do whatever he pleased." The forests of eastern Congo are the refuge of FDLR guerrillas, Hutu militias who fled Rwanda after the genocide. Kigali has long accused the DRC of not doing enough to clear the forests of Hutu gunmen.

As a result few doubt that Rwanda was offering assistance to Nkunda to do the job instead. A United Nations report last year cited evidence that Nkunda’s rebels were receiving cash and recruits from Rwanda, and that senior commanders had a direct line to officials in the Rwandan capital Kigali. But his leadership had been under threat ever since a breakaway faction of his National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP) declared a ceasefire earlier this week.

At times his comrades have been irritated by his erratic, narcissistic style promising one thing in media interviews, before contradicting himself days later. Last year his rebels sparked a major humanitarian crisis as they moved on the city of Goma. A quarter of a million people were forced from their homes. In the end Rwanda probably decided it no longer needed Nkunda’s bloody help.

"He’s an embarrassment for Kigali and he became part of the deal between Kinshasa and Kigali," said Francois Grignon, Africa director of the International Crisis Group in Nairobi. "He went too far." On Tuesday some 3500 Rwandan troops crossed the Congolese border to help DRC forces disarm the Hutu militias and Nkunda became surplus to requirements.

Photo by me: Laurent Nkunda and Olesegun Obasanjo inspect rebel troops

The findings of collaboration with the Tutu rebels by the Rwandan government came on the same day that some of its leaders as well as officials from the Congolese government were meeting in Nairobi to try to negotiate a ceasefire. Those talks, according to the UN representative there, were already faltering. The Tutu rebels are led by General Nkunda, a former Congolese army general, who has said he is trying to protect the Tutu minority.

This is desperately worrying news. Followers of African affairs know that the more outlandish the dress of rebel fighters, the more violent their actions. Remember the feather boas, wigs and dresses of the Liberian and Sierre Leonian militias? Tutu fighters are seriously bad news.
(What I love about this is that this is not just a simple typo, it is repeated four times in the story – and debuts in the intro no less. Or has the Indy replaced its subs with a spellchecker?)

Lord Malloch-Brown said the region’s rich tin ore and coltan seams were a key factor in the conflict. "Not just Rwanda but all the neighbours have to make sure they are not supporting this criminal political economy by being the exit route for minerals," he said. "President Kagame has a role to play but it is a mistake to put it all on his shoulders."

Despite the accumulating evidence that Rwanda was supporting Nkunda, and Rwandan troops were fighting on his side, it seems that no-one wants to accuse a president who survived a genocide of bad things. Until the BBC got hold of a draft UN report…

Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo have both been directly helping rebels fighting in eastern DR Congo, according to a draft report for the UN. Rwanda is accused of supplying aid and child soldiers to Tutsi rebels. Rwanda has denied such accusations previously.

Nkunda’s commanders have been calling up officials in the Rwandan presidency, collecting cash from their Rwandan bank accounts and using child soldiers recruited by Rwandan officers, according to the report.

The seemingly endless crisis in North Kivu is making a rare foray into the international news agenda. (Recent reports: New York Times, Reuters, BBC.) It’s more complicated than this, but here’s some of the recent background:

Not so long ago, North Kivu was controlled by the Rwandan-backed RCD-Goma, a legacy of the 1998-2004 conflict which came to be known as ‘Africa’s First World War’ because so many people died and because so many neighbouring countries sent troops to fight and plunder as the alliance of convenience that had helped Laurent Kabila topple Mobutu in 1997 fell apart.

As part of the power-sharing agreement that ended the war (but certainly not insecurity in the east), the RCD was given nearly a fifth of the seats in the National Assembly, but it was deeply unpopular, representing Rwandan interests and dominance of the Tutsi minority. When the Congolese people finally had a chance to vote for their representatives in 2006, the RCD held onto only 15 seats out of 500.

President Joseph Kabila owed a large part of his success in those elections to his overwhelming support in the war-ravaged eastern provinces, where he took credit for the UN-managed, internationally-financed elections and convinced the population that he would bring peace and security by ending the plague of foreign armed groups and local militias.

Unfortunately, the latter task fell to cautious, over-stretched UN forces and a corrupt, inept national army that was composed of former warring factions. With the huge country split into myriad, inaccessible local enclaves, it was never going to be easy to resolve all the problems of corruption, mismanagement and inter-ethnic power struggles. But the immediate post-election period offered a real window of opportunity for the new government to unite the country behind a clear vision and (with UN support) determined backing for the rule of law. They blew it.

Through costly trial and error in militia-infested Ituri (bordering Uganda), some evidence emerged that the formula of newly trained Congolese brigades backed by (Pakistani, South African, Guatemalan and at one stage European) peacekeepers ready and able to project and use force could produce results.

But the army was rotten, and those who called for senior officers (including untrained former militia leaders) to be vetted for war crimes and prevented from pocketing all the pay were repeatedly told that such niceties would have to wait until later. Ordinary soldiers were left to fend for themselves, in the fine tradition established by Mobutu in his decline, with predictable effects on their morale and reputation.

When the Congolese army was sent to oust Laurent Nkunda’s CNDP rebels from their strongholds in the hills of North Kivu late last year, they relied on overwhelming numbers, lots of new weapons, and dangerous alliances with local and foreign Hutu militia groups (I saw both in Masisi when researching for Human Rights Watch). UN support was limited to logistics and medical evacuations, partly for fear of becoming complicit in war crimes. As the CNDP ceded ground, the army bombarded empty hilltops and proclaimed great victories. In a dramatic turnaround, the army was routed as soon as the rebels counterattacked, abandoning their uniforms and looting as they fled.

Diplomats scrambled to salvage the situation. A ceasefire was agreed, followed by a dubious peace deal that contained the conflict while acknowledging and cementing the status quo. Clashes and human rights violations continued even as the deal was being negotiated, so the local population and civil society remained deeply skeptical of the intentions of the signatories.

Referring the Congolese army’s alliance with the FDLR (a Rwandan Hutu rebel group led by former genocidaires) and frequent ceasefire violations, the CNDP announced its withdrawal from the peace process. On 2 October, media-savvy Nkunda told the BBC he was ready to expand his operations to ‘liberate the people of the Congo’. That statement must have earned him a lot of people’s undivided attention.

Now the CNDP have once again humiliated the Congolese army by forcing them to flee strategic positions across North Kivu, tellingly beginning with the stretch of Virunga National Park which offers a supply line from Rwanda. (The CNDP certainly recruits from Congolese Tutsi refugees in Rwanda, and there are frequent allegations that they have covert support from the Rwandan army as well.)

UN troops tried to block the advance, stationing APCs to block the roads into Rutshuru, north of Goma. But the CNDP works in small, mobile groups, so they simply bypassed the barricades and overran the town, sabotaging the mobile phone network as they did so.

Large numbers have already fled Goma. Now the remaining population, including tens of thousands of displaced people who have nowhere left to go, is huddled and waiting to see what happens next. They are bitterly disappointed by their own government and have no faith left in the UN. The years of conflict have furnished them with numerous nasty memories from which to compose worst-case scenarios. They heard gunfire all night, but cannot tell who’s doing the shooting: rebels, soldiers on a looting spree, or just firing in the air?

International relief workers and UN staff are gathered in two fortified compounds in Goma, sleeping on the floor, eating rations and trying to keep up with the news to see if they will be evacuated.

Nkunda declared a ceasefire last night. Is his plan to leave the CNDP as de facto authority of a big chunk of fertile, mineral-rich North Kivu, or do his ambitions really extend even further? Aware of the regional implications, the UN Security Council is anxiously pondering its options, including the rapid deployment of a UN-mandated European force.

It’s usually preferable to agree some sort of ceasefire before holding formal talks. Suspending hostilities – however temporarily – is the polite thing to do. It builds confidence, sets the tone, and helps the concentration.
But no such niceties marked this month’s peace conference in Goma, eastern Congo, which was hastily convened after an attempt to overcome a group of Tutsi rebels ended in a demoralizing retreat by the ill-disciplined Congolese army, itself composed of former rebel factions.

In a memo to President Kabila in mid-December, parliamentarians, provincial ministers and civil society leaders (two-thirds of whom were based in Kinshasa) “noted with bitterness the loss of strategic positions in North Kivu” and, reluctant to admit defeat, proposed the “simultaneous use of ‘Fight and Talk'”.
Sure enough, violence continued, as belligerent groups sought advantage and spoils ahead of an agreement, although the UN and the media have struggled to confirm the various rumours and reports of forced recruitment, massacres and looting.
More than a thousand delegates registered to take part in the conference, doubling the planned capacity. Abbé Malu Malu, the former election commissioner who is chairing the conference, described the first few days as ‘group therapy’, as a succession of minorities and armed groups aired their grievances, presented their versions of history and declared their pure intentions.

Behind the scenes, it appears an agreement has now been brokered between the Tutsi rebels and the government. This will involve an immediate ceasefire with a UN-patrolled buffer zone to separate their forces, and a ‘partial amnesty’ for the rebels (who will not be tried for insurgency but could still face charges for war crimes). The status of their leader, Laurent Nkunda, remains undefined. He continues to say he no intention to go into exile.
Confusingly, even as this news broke, journalists received an email from the rebels objecting to being ‘put in the same basket’ as Mayi Mayi militia groups allied to the national army, and alleging the involvement of Angolan troops and FDLR militia on the side of the government. The email pointedly suggested that Rwanda could yet intervene if provoked by the presence of Rwandan FDLR guerillas near its border.

As I write, a BBC World Service bulletin says “peace may be in sight” in eastern DRC. It remains to be seen whether the agreement indeed sets the scene for genuine progress or merely marks a return to the status quo. An impressive total of 32 sub-commissions will be set up to oversee a plethora of tricky tasks identified by the conference. History suggests that the rebels will be slow to demobilise, insisting on progress with the return of refugees from Rwanda and disarmament of the FDLR. In the meantime, the most obvious spoiler to the ceasefire agreement is the FDLR, who were not invited to the conference and have a vested interest in instability.