War is raging in the Congo, with government troops gradually losing ground to Tutsi rebels led by General Laurent Nkunda. The largest peacekeeping force in the world, the 17,000-strong UN peacekeeping force in Congo, is stretched to the limits and urgently in need of reinforcements. The poorest country in the world is getting poorer, and the massacre which finished in Rwanda in 1994 is still being played out today across the border in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The Rwandan genocide (essentially involving Hutus slaughtering Tutsis) ended in July 1994 when the Rwandan Patriotic Front (Tutsis) seized control of Rwanda. Around 2 million Hutu refugees fled Rwanda, mostly to the area around Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo, creating an enormous humanitarian crisis. Hutu militias from the refugee camps undertook cross-border raids, and the Congo government did nothing to prevent them. As a consequence, the Rwandan and Ugandan governments supported the rebel forces led by Laurent Kabila in the First Congo War which resulted in the overthrow of the Congo government in 1997.
However, Kabila had a falling out with his allies and the Rwandan government backed a Goma-based rebel movement in the Second Congo War, a war which lasted five years, featured atrocities against civilians on an unparalleled scale, and resulted in more than 5 million deaths, making it the most deadly conflict since the second world war. Now it seems that General Nkunda, who claims to be a pentecostal Seventh Day Adventist priest, wants to “restore Congo’s dignity” by starting a Third Congo War, and his troops are marching on Goma.