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CHAPTER TWO

Outrages in Congo

SAVING “INNOCENT”: THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE “CHILD SOLDIER”

There is something about the extreme violence and brutality lived on Congolese lands that has long captivated the Western imagination. From the 1990s and through the first decade of the twentieth century, one of the most enthralling narratives about violence in the DRC—as elsewhere on the African continent—was the recruitment of children to armed groups.¹ Media coverage widely portrayed the stolen innocence of and irrational savagery perpetrated by “child soldiers” with AK-47s, as newspapers and journals displayed images of half-starved and drugged eight-year-olds manning checkpoints, evidence of the terrorizing barbarity of the post–Soviet era’s “new wars.”² Even more fascinating were stories about the mystical beliefs and practices of some armed groups that compelled children toward logic-defying engagement with violence; in one interview with journalists during a visit to the DRC in 2009, UNICEF’s executive director at the time described her shock: “A fourteen-year-old boy whose name translated from Swahili to Innocent, told me he was forced to commit acts of sexual violence against women. . . . Another still believed that he was invincible against bullets, a common belief among the Mayi-Mayi traditional armed groups in eastern and central DRC.”³ This kind of testimony fueled conceptions about the diabolic otherness of children associated with armed groups. Such narratives were often deployed within aid organizations’ communications strategies to raise funds from donors.

By the time I arrived in Goma in 2006, commonly cited estimates were that since 1996, more than thirty-three thousand children had been recruited to and used by armed groups in the DRC. Over the following years I would work with hundreds of such children and would soon come to know them as anyone but hapless victims or dehumanized perpetrators. Many of these children suffered terribly, somehow managing to survive brutal experiences of forced recruitment, then agonizing periods of frontline battle and associated labor. Much of my own work in the DRC in 2006–7 and again in 2009 involved the monitoring of recruitment cases and advocacy to ensure the release of children from the armed groups, and the investigation of alleged child recruitment to establish command responsibility for eventual punitive measures through the UN Sanctions Committee.⁴

Yet as I became more involved in the lives of young former combatants, the complexity of the child recruitment phenomenon began to reveal itself. I learned about the conditions of hardship that led to their recruitment, the limited choices available to them, and their experience during and after armed group engagement. One young man named Joseph eventually became a key informant of my doctoral research. His personal narrative offered rich insights into how young people navigate the extreme complexity of active conflict, how they deal with its aftermath, and how international programs to support the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) of children had done little to achieve their stated aims to improve demobilized children’s life outcomes.

In 1996, Joseph had joined the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo–Zaire (AFDL in French)—the main rebel alliance of the First Congo War—when he was just seven years old. He explained the circumstances of his initial recruitment as follows: “In 1996 the war came to [my town]. My family fled to Bukavu, where we stayed for three months. When we returned [home], we didn’t know who was in charge, though Mzee [Laurent] Kabila was leading recruitment efforts. I joined the AFDL with all the other boys I grew up with. We were taken to the Plains of Ruzizi and trained for five months in how to use guns. After the training we were given arms and uniforms and started fighting. By the time Mzee Kabila took Kinshasa, my battalion had returned to [the base near the airport].”

While the AFDL rebellion was successful in toppling Mobotu Sese Seko in May 1997, the configurations of the national and regional war soon altered, compelling Joseph to navigate the shifting front lines of an increasingly complex regional war. He continued his narrative:

When the RCD [Rassemblement congolais pour la démocratie] entered Bukavu in 1998, they took over our base and killed all but six of the AFDL officers. The soldiers who remained were forced to carry the bodies, they were then forced to douse [the bodies] in petrol and set them on fire. The soldiers were then shot and killed. Other soldiers who had gone to the police seeking refuge were also shot and killed. Six of us managed to survive and we escaped. Two of us hid with our commander. Two weeks later Bukavu was taken by the RCD, so we began our journey on foot to Goma, where we stayed with the family of our commander. He negotiated for us to be integrated into the RCD.

Notable in Joseph’s narration was the admiration and appreciation he maintained for his AFDL commander. In contrast to the dominant international narratives about nefarious commanders who violently manipulated the children under their command, Joseph portrayed his commander as his protector and carer and the man who had saved his life.

Four years later, Joseph experienced what he described as the greatest loss of his life, one that led him to decisive action in a landscape of severely limited choices: “One day I was given some days of leave to visit home. Once there I went to visit my grandfather in the nearby village. When I returned home late that day, I found that the RCD had surrounded my house. They were accusing people of being Mayi-Mayi sympathizers. I saw my father as he was being beaten by the soldiers. He was beaten to death. To take vengeance for my father’s death, I decided to leave the RCD and to join the Mayi-Mayi.” By 2002, at thirteen years of age and having already served on the front lines of active conflict for almost seven years, Joseph was separated from the Mayi-Mayi group as it entered a demilitarization process negotiated during one of the peace accords—one of a series of DDR processes that would be repeated in various iterations over the following decade. He would benefit from the children’s DDR program, which included psychosocial support and education programming that aimed to assist his reintegration into civilian life.

Unfortunately, the war in the Kivus continued, and by 2004 Joseph was again left with few alternatives but to join another Mayi-Mayi group. During the infamous battle for Bukavu in May 2004, Joseph found himself once more on the front lines battling the RCD. Yet, rather than remembering this gruesome operation with anguish, Joseph recounted his involvement in this particular battle with pride: “I participated in the war in 2004 when the RCD attacked Bukavu. We managed to chase them back into Rwanda.” Most crucially for Joseph, by playing a part in the victory against the RCD forces, he had been able to avenge the death of his father. This knowledge helped him to deal with what he considered to be his life’s greatest loss and allowed him to maintain a sense of self-worth in subsequent years.

When I first met Joseph in 2010, he was twenty-one years old. He was struggling to earn the money he needed to survive each day. Although he had again been enrolled in a children’s DDR program after the 2004 conflict and had once more received “reintegration” training to become a mechanic, he could not find a job. Instead, Joseph was subsisting through daily wage labor, transporting heavy loads from the port up the long climb into town. It was grueling work that might earn him the equivalent of one US dollar per day. As I came to know Joseph better, I would learn that it was not his history as a “former child soldier” that distressed him but his inability to effectively surmount the challenges of daily survival.

Without the capacity to meet his basic needs, Joseph had stopped thinking about any kind of prospect for a more positive future. What surprised me about this was that Joseph had been a full “beneficiary” of two phases of children’s DDR programs, yet neither of these programs had made any significant difference in his life in the longer term. While in the first instance, in 2002, it was clear that “reintegration” could not happen due to the persisting conflict, the failure of Joseph’s second passage through the children’s DDR process required deeper investigation.

When Joseph had entered the second DDR program in 2008, a robust international normative framework had been firmly established to protect children from recruitment into and use by armed groups. As defined by the 2007 Paris Principles—or the Principles and Guidelines on Children Associated with Armed Forces and Armed Groups—a “child soldier” was any person younger than eighteen years of age and included “children, boys and girls, used as fighters, cooks, porters, messengers, spies or for sexual purposes. It does not only refer to a child who is taking or has taken a direct part in hostilities.”⁵ International law had criminalized the recruitment and use of children, and the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court listed it as a war crime: “Conscripting or enlisting children under the age of fifteen years into the national armed forces or using them to participate actively in hostilities.”⁶

Children’s rights to full DDR support had thus been enshrined in internationally accepted principles, and a generic approach to children’s DDR had emerged. At that time, the process was generally organized in three key phases. First, for disarmament, children would be identified among an armed group, usually through monitoring reports by UN observers, NGOs, and other local actors. Child protection actors would usually then engage in advocacy with the armed group commanders to ensure that any children under their command would be released. Once separated, children would be taken to transit care centers to begin the second stage of the process—“demobilization”—which was a transitional period that might last several weeks or many months and usually involved social, psychosocial, educational, and recreational activities conceived to support children’s eventual readaptation to civilian life. Once “demobilized,” children would be given certificates confirming their status and then returned home, thus beginning the third and last phase of the DDR process: “reintegration.” Children would be enrolled in one of a selection of reintegration programs that might include schooling, vocational training, or an income-generating activity.

Over the years of my work in conflict-affected contexts, I repeatedly witnessed the weak conception and poor implementation of children’s reintegration programs. The Paris Principles define reintegration as “the process through which children transition into civil society and enter meaningful roles and identities as civilians who are accepted by their families and communities in a context of local and national reconciliation.”⁷ In practice, the programming support provided to children was consistently unable to meet their reintegration needs.

Such failures were clearly and simply articulated in the narrative of Christian, another young man I worked with closely during my doctoral research. He described how the support he had received from a child protection NGO had done nothing to help him meet his everyday survival needs. He had gone through the children’s DDR process in 2006 and enrolled in a skills training program that was designed to help him earn a viable livelihood and return to civilian life. When I met Christian in 2010, he was twenty years old and struggling to survive each day. As he explained:

Before the war, I was a student. I had to stop studying in 2002, after my third year of school. We didn’t have any money, and I was responsible for taking care of my brothers. When the war came here, we were displaced to Walungu, where eventually I was taken by the [militia]. I stayed with them until 2006. There was so much suffering in those years, but I was quiet because that’s life. Once I got out, I went to [the local child protection NGO] for demobilization and reintegration. They gave me training and they promised me a job. But they lied—I never got a job. I got my [demobilization] certificate, but what good is a piece of paper? I dreamed that at this age I would be doing something different, that I would be able to care for my brothers, but I can’t. My parents left during the war. After my father was chased away from our land in Mushinga, he went to Maniema to look for gold, and we haven’t heard from him since. My mother is a merchant in the gold mines in Mushinga. She prays for me every day that I may find a job. A job is the most important thing for me.⁸

According to both this young man and Joseph, the clearly elaborated children’s DDR framework, and in particular its reintegration aspects, had done little to help them “enter meaningful roles and identities as civilians,” despite the DDR program’s aspirations. More disconcertingly, several other young people described their situation after having gone through the children’s DDR process as more precarious than before. This was especially the case for a group of young women who had been separated from the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC). One young mother who had served with the national army for five years regretted no longer benefiting from the relative security that came with mobilization: “Now that we’re out of the army, we’re unable to get enough work to support ourselves and our children. Our friends who stayed in the army, at least they receive a salary at the end of the month. They have access to food and protection from their husbands. Military lifestyle was a kind of protection for us.”⁹

Over the years I tried to work through why it was that children’s DDR programs were consistently inadequate in meeting the reintegration needs of children exiting from armed groups. The clearly elaborated international framework was supported by an arsenal of technical guidance, including family reunification, formal and nonformal education, psychosocial support, and vocational skills training. Yet the gap was vast between technical ideals clearly elaborated in guidance documents and the actual experiences of children and the challenges they faced.

Whenever I asked practitioners for their perspectives on this gap, their explanation pointed to the insufficient donor funding of reintegration programs. According to this logic, if there was more funding, and for longer periods, children’s DDR programs would achieve their stated aims. Yet it was also obvious to many practitioners that the underlying socioeconomic conditions in the DRC were so dire in general that the obvious question was: “Reintegration into what?” For children were simply being sent back to the situations of impoverishment and family breakdown that had been conducive to their recruitment in the first place. The struggles of Joseph, Christian, and the hundreds of other young former soldiers whom I met over the years were poignant to witness, but regrettably they were not so different from the struggles of countless other young people throughout the DRC who battled ceaselessly with the daily toils of poverty.

What perhaps made the situation more difficult to confront for the young people who had gone through the DDR program were the unrealistic expectations that had been set up for them. For example, the “meaningful roles and identities as civilians” promised by the internationally elaborated DDR program sought to encourage a life for children in an environment of peace and development. Yet in the Kivus, war had become the way of life—the only one known to young people born after 1993—and daily survival was a challenge for most of the population.

A further weakness of the children’s DDR approach was that it was highly technical, sequenced primarily as a logistical process that could be generically implemented by international child protection actors. Yet, this approach could not be adapted to the highly nuanced and multidimensional experiences of each child. As political scientist Gérard Prunier had earlier discerned, the complexity and rootedness of the “child soldier” phenomenon in the DRC suggested no simple pathway into or out of armed groups: “Young local boys . . . came in droves: massive rural poverty, lack of schooling opportunities, boredom, disgust with Mobutu’s decaying rule, all combined to give [Laurent Kabila] in a few months an army of 10,000 to 15,000 kadogo (‘little ones’). They ranged in age from ten to twenty, with a median age of around fifteen. Many were orphans, their parents having died either from diseases or in the Kivus ethnic wars that had been endemic for the past three years. They looked up to the revolutionary leader as a charismatic father-like figure.”¹⁰

Children’s reasons for joining an armed group were highly complex and were contingent upon a wide range of individual life factors, which themselves were in a constant state of flux. While it was well established among practitioners that young people joined armed groups for a wide variety of reasons that included poverty, lack of educational opportunities, unemployment, and loss of family members, the education, skills training, or income-generating projects could not manage to push back the structural forces of poverty and absent services.

Young people clearly articulated how the structures of violence were so overwhelming that all they could do was to discern when mobilization might offer the best possible of a range of poor outcomes. One young man described how he had been recruited to the Mayi-Mayi: “One Sunday—it was either in December 1998 or January 1999—I was in church. The Mayi-Mayi came to recruit us. Before then, I had already considered joining. Life was so difficult, we were forced to transport for the different armed groups, we were beaten by soldiers. There was always so much suffering. I thought that maybe life with the Mayi-Mayi would be better.”¹¹

In a context of such deeply rooted violence, young people I knew believed that the only way to assert themselves was by taking up arms. As one participant in a group discussion explained: “In this état de guerre [state of war] power can only be held by the one who has a weapon.”¹² Violence had become internalized in their worldviews as they had known nothing different. As described by one young man in a rural town in South Kivu:

Since 1994, power has been with the military—their weapons are their power. We will do whatever they ask us to. As youth, we feel powerless, we feel bad. If we go to the fields [to cultivate] we have to have money in our pockets so that we can buy our way out if they stop and threaten us. To cross any checkpoint, we have to pay. We can’t even get to Bukavu. This takes away our dignity. We are forced to do things under the threat of guns and knives. Their weapons keep us from moving and prevent us from talking. . . . People should be given power, but here it’s taken from us.¹³

It became increasingly clear to me that if I was to ever effectively support the protection of young people in the DRC, I would have to understand this “common sense” of violence. I would have to dig deeper into history.

FOUNDING VIOLENCE

History tells a grim story about violence on Congolese lands. The vast geographic expanses of the Congo Free State were first etched out during the 1884–85 Berlin Conference, when it came under the personal rule of Belgian King Leopold II. As Adam Hochschild narrates in King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1998), the extremely violent methods of conquest during Leopold’s reign were integral to his strategy of territorial domination and control, designed to maximize the exploitation of rubber, ivory, and copper. These foundations of violent, extractive rule established an approach to governance that continues to this day.¹⁴

Between 1885 and 1908, an estimated eight to ten million people died as a result of disease, famine, and torture. These atrocities were documented by George Washington Williams, an American journalist who was also a lawyer, minister, and former soldier. Williams had traveled to the Congo in 1890, and what he saw was an outrageous affront to the supposedly humanitarian enterprise that King Leopold II was claiming to lead. In a letter addressed to the king, Williams reports that the Congolese people he met “everywhere complain that their land has been taken from them by force; that the Government is cruel and arbitrary, and declare that they neither love nor respect the Government and its flag. Your Majesty’s Government has sequestered their land, burned their towns, stolen their property, enslaved their women and children, and committed other crimes too numerous to mention in detail.”¹⁵ Williams goes on to decry the forced labor system, including the subjugation of migrant workers brought from other parts of the continent. He provides a list of abuses that he witnessed firsthand: “Your Majesty’s Government is excessively cruel to its prisoners, condemning them, for the slightest offences, to the chain gang, the like of which cannot be seen in any other Government in the civilized or uncivilized world. Often these ox-chains eat into the necks of the prisoners and produce sores about which the flies circle, aggravating the running wound; so the prisoner is constantly worried. These poor creatures are frequently beaten with a dried piece of hippopotamus skin, called a ‘chicote,’ and usually the blood flows at every stroke when well laid on.”¹⁶ Williams recounts slave-hunting raids, razing of villages, maiming of hands, murder, and acts of cannibalism. These grotesque expressions of violence were later documented by many others, including European and American missionaries.

The knowledge of these atrocities eventually reached Europe, spurring activists to mount what some consider the world’s first global human rights campaign.¹⁷ As documented in Hochschild’s history, men such as Edward Morel and Roger Casement, and the Congo Reform Association they would establish, labored tirelessly to raise awareness among European leaders about the atrocities under way in the Congo Free State. The great writers of the day joined the cause, including Joseph Conrad with Heart of Darkness, Mark Twain with King Leopold’s Soliloquy, and Arthur Conon Doyle with The Crime of the Congo.

Although this violence was moderated by the Belgian state when it took over administration of the territory in 1908, the priority on extracting natural resources continued. Great wealth was generated not only from rubber, copper, diamonds, and gold but also from agriculture. Forced migration of laborers fueled the economy and was practiced especially in the eastern regions. In the decades from 1920 until independence, more than a hundred thousand people were brought to the Kivus to labor on the farms and dig in the mines. Additional migration occurred from the neighboring Belgian colony of Ruanda-Urundi—modern-day Rwanda and Burundi—with laborers eventually settling in the territories of Rutshuru and Masisi.¹⁸

These newly settled “people of Rwanda,” also known as Banyarwanda, were Rwandaphones and were administratively designated as “nonnative” Congolese by the colonial authorities. Local populations felt threatened by these newly arriving people. Rwandaphone “foreigners” could not own land and did not fall under the customary systems that had been co-opted by the Native Authorities. Without local protection, the laborers from Ruanda-Urundi found themselves in a precarious position, unprotected by the state and vulnerable to attack. It is these historic beginnings that laid the foundations for the conflicts over land and belonging that continue to reverberate today.

From this early period, possession of land and accordance of citizenship became tightly linked with identity politics, and regularly contested through violence. The first identity-based wars of the postindependence era occurred in 1964 in South Kivu and in 1965 in North Kivu. These conflicts pitted the Rwandaphone population against those who considered themselves autochthons. Uncertainty, fear, and resentment became some of the most effective tools for political and economic manipulation, including by President Mobutu Sese Seko, who would eventually become one of sub-Saharan Africa’s most notorious leaders, and one of Western governments’ greatest allies. In the Kivus, Mobutu was astute in deploying the threats of contested identity to his political advantage. By fomenting competition over land and decreeing unstable citizenship policies, Mobutu maintained his influence over the restive eastern provinces.

In 1972, Mobutu passed the Citizenship Decree, according citizenship based on identity group presence in Congolese territory before 1960. This reversed the colonial legislation that had designated citizenship based on identity group presence in the territory as of 1885. Subsequently, Mobutu’s Bakajika land reforms of 1968–73 led to the passage of the 1973 General Property Law in which all land formerly owned by private Belgian interests was nationalized. This land, primarily in Masisi and Rutshuru territories, was sold to individuals favored by Mobutu, who were at that time mostly Kivu-based elites of Tutsi identity who had previously been excluded from landownership. In this way, Mobutu gained much-needed political loyalty in the Kivu periphery, helping to consolidate his rule over the vast Zairian nation.¹⁹

By the early 1980s, however, the power balance again shifted. Non-Rwandaphone Zairians who considered themselves the only legitimate owners of the land pressed Mobutu to repeal the citizenship rights of anyone who could not prove their identity group presence in Congo prior to 1885. Without citizenship, land could not be held. This 1981 Citizenship Law excluded a large proportion of the Rwandaphone population settled in the Kivus, which led to a fission in the Banyarwanda population: Rwandaphone Congolese living in the Hauts Plateux of South Kivu declared their Banyamulenge identity (Banyamulenge translating as “people of Mulenge,” the hills of the Itombwe, South Kivu), and the Congolese Hutu of Rutshuru distinguished themselves from other Rwandaphones by claiming a longer historical presence in the Kivus.

The identity-based political violence that had simmered in the 1960s and 1970s worsened in the 1980s and 1990s as the process of “democratization” imposed on Mobutu by Western governments gained momentum. The Conférence Nationale Souveraine, or Sovereign National Conference, convened by Mobutu in 1991–92, provided a forum for further mobilization and division along ethnic lines, rallying autochthonous Congolese against “Rwandan foreigners.” To distract his opponents and divide any credible opposition, Mobutu increasingly relied on identity-based political strategies.²⁰

Interethnic violence was particularly virulent in the Kivus, where fears of the demographic strength of Banyarwandans led other ethnic groups to mobilize along identity lines. Particularly concerned with the democratic weight of the large Hutu population in the planned 1993 local elections, the North Kivu governor encouraged ethnic Hunde and Nyanga youth militia to kill Banyarwanda Hutu in Walikale, Rutshuru, and Masisi. Up to 10,000 people were killed during this phase of the conflict, and an estimated 250,000 others were displaced in North Kivu.

MILITARIZED VIOLENCE

It was into this highly charged conflict dynamic that, in the wake of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, an estimated one million Rwandan Hutu refugees arrived in the Kivus. Although contemporary narratives of conflict in the Kivus often begin with the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the genocide only fed into an already tense and specifically Congolese political situation in which identity-based politics had long served as a powerful tool for further mobilization to violence.²¹ Prior to the genocide, approximately half of the four million people living in North Kivu were of Banyarwandan descent, with most of the Hutu population living in the territories of Masisi and Rutshuru. With the arrival of the Rwandan Hutu refugees, the tenuous ethnic balance in the Kivus was further destabilized.

Among the refugees arriving in eastern DRC were approximately thirty to forty thousand elements of the former Forces Armées Rwandaises (FAR) and Interahamwe militia responsible for carrying out the genocide. Importing their Hutu-power ideology from Rwanda, they were able to gather local support for their attacks against the Congolese Tutsi population living in Rutshuru and Masisi territories. The ex-FAR reorganized itself first as the Armée de Liberation du Rwanda (ALiR) and then as the Forces démocratiques de libération du Rwanda (FDLR), which would become the most entrenched of all rebel groups operating in eastern DRC.²²

The resource-rich provinces of North and South Kivu consequently became the launching grounds in 1996 for “Africa’s World War,” which was effectively two consecutive wars that drew in nine countries and lasted for seven years.²³ At the culmination of the first war (1996–97), the Forces Armées Zairoises (FAZ) of Mobutu Sese Seko fell to the Alliance des Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération du Congo (AFDL), which was led by Laurent Desirée Kabila. Kabila, a long-term revolutionary known to have met with Ernesto “Che” Guevara in Tanzania in 1965, would take over the Congolese presidency. In 2001, Laurent Kabila was assassinated, then succeeded by his son Joseph Kabila, who remained in control throughout the period covered in this book.

The Second Congo War (1998–2003) resulted in an effective split of the country, with the eastern provinces, including the Kivus, coming under the control of the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie (RCD), essentially a proxy government for Rwanda. At the local level, Congolese Mayi-Mayi forces mobilized to protect local interests and to gain control of land and resources. Initially a product of the 1960s autonomy movements, Mayi-Mayi groups resurged during the 1996–2003 wars. Usually monoethnic, their political claims formed along identity-based lines, and their discourse generally decried the presence of foreigners, in particular Tutsi Rwandaphones.

International UN peacekeepers arrived in 1999, establishing the Mission de l’Organisation des Nations Unies en République démocratique du Congo (MONUC), which would become the largest UN peace operation at the time and would eventually transform into the Mission de l’Organisation des Nations Unies pour la stabilisation en République démocratique du Congo (MONUSCO). By 2003, the national armed forces had been reconfigured into the FARDC through a continuing process of brassage, or integration, of the former rebel groups into one national army.

Although formal peace was finally negotiated at a national level in 2003, conflict continued in eastern DRC. The 2006 presidential elections—the first in the DRC since 1960—officially ended the “postconflict transition” period and legitimized Joseph Kabila’s leadership, but they resulted in renewed political violence in the Kivus. Military offensives continued in the following years, despite various iterations of Kinshasa-led, UN-supported, and Kigali-influenced negotiations. The Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple (CNDP), a reconfiguration of the former RCD armed wing, eventually won its military offensive against the DRC government.²⁴

The Goma Peace Accords were signed in early 2008, and although the CNDP had been integrated into the national army, fighting continued. A deal brokered between Kigali and Kinshasa at the end of 2008 resulted in joint Rwanda-DRC military operations (called Umoja Wetu, or “our unity” in Kiswahili) aimed at eradicating the FDLR presence in the Kivus. This was soon followed by the FARDC-led, MONUC-supported Kimia (“quiet”) II operations, marking a fundamental shift in the politico-military balance that had held since the end of the Second Congo War. Until that time, the FDLR had largely coexisted with the DRC government and the local population. The FDLR’s presence had often been instrumentalized to the advantage of national and regional political entrepreneurs.²⁵

In direct response to the 2009 offensive, the FDLR conducted ravaging reprisals on the civilian population. The humanitarian consequences of these attacks were devastating, and the investigation of grave human rights abuses constituted much of my work in the DRC during that year.²⁶ From the beginning of the operations in January until September 2009, Human Rights Watch documented the killing of more than fourteen hundred civilians, more than seventy-five hundred cases of sexual violence against women and girls, and the forced displacement of more than nine hundred thousand people.²⁷ The FARDC also conducted attacks on the civilian population, including Hutu refugees who lived in proximity to the FDLR.

While international and regional attention remained focused on routing the FDLR in the following years, by 2012 conflict resurged, as several key CNDP leaders created the new Mouvement du 23 mars (M23) group, justifying their rebellion with the same discourses as in the past.²⁸ Following sustained fighting with the FARDC, the M23 occupied Goma in November 2012. International outcry, including about the lack of defense by the UN peacekeeping mission, led to a strong and eventually effective military response to push back the M23. A cease-fire and a new series of peace talks led to the disbanding of the M23 in November 2013. Attention could again turn back on the FDLR, and in 2014 a voluntary FDLR disarmament process was organized. It ultimately failed, and renewed military offensives began in January 2015. Called “Sukola II” (“clean up” in Lingala), this operation was unilaterally conducted by the FARDC as the UN had blacklisted several of the FARDC commanders for allegations of previous human rights abuses and thus could not offer its support to the government forces.

Since my last visit to the DRC in 2016, the various iterations of militarized violence in eastern DRC have continued.²⁹ As this book went to press, tensions in the DRC were high because of the repeated delays in presidential elections that should have been held in 2016 but still had not occurred; popular protests had been violently repressed, and renewed fighting threatened ahead of the promised elections in December 2018. The “common sense” of militarized violence that has guided Congolese politics throughout the DRC’s history continues to prevail.³⁰

CONSERVING VIOLENCE