In Eastern Congo, Complex Conflicts And High-Stakes Diplomacy (Russ Feingold)
In June last year, soon after Secretary of State John Kerry named his old Senate colleague Russ Feingold as the first American special envoy to the Great Lakes, one of Feingold's former constituents approached him with a welcome smile, and a puzzled look. Feingold had, after all, spent 19 years as a senator in the American Great Lakes. "This is terrific," the man said to Feingold, the former senator recently recalled. "What are you going to be doing, checking water levels?" "They thought I was going to be out in the middle of Lake Michigan with a stick," Feingold joked, after recounting the exchange.
When he told this story, the former senator from Wisconsin was stuck in traffic in Bukavu, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a city on the shores of Lake Kivu, one of the lakes that gives the African Great Lakes — source of the River Nile — its name. These Great Lakes are also the setting for some of Africa's most deadly conflicts. Up to 800,000 people died in Rwanda in the genocide of 1994. And in the two decades since then, an estimated 5 million people have died in Eastern Congo as a result of the violent scramble by dozens of armed groups for control of the region's fertile land and rich mineral wealth. The area is "ungoverned," Feingold says. "And people realize that you can form an armed group, come in, take what you want, treat the people how you want, and there's impunity," he says.
A Quid Pro Quo With Rwanda
Last year, the countries in the region signed an historic agreement to help get rid of the armed groups, one by one. The U.S. appointed Feingold to help hold these countries to that agreement. First up was the M23, a brutal militia that in November 2012 briefly occupied the provincial capital of Goma, allegedly with the support of weapons and troops from Rwanda. So in September 2013, Feingold met for a frank talk with Rwanda's president, Paul Kagame. "The conversation would go like this," Feingold recalled. "'Mr. President, we see a credible body of reporting that Rwanda has given external support to the M23.' They would respond, 'That's not true.' To which I would respond, 'Please stop doing it.' Very civil. Move on to the next topic."
When the M23 was roundly defeated, it was hailed as a diplomatic coup for Feingold and the other high-level envoys from Europe, the U.N. and the African Union — who started calling themselves the "E-Team," for "envoys." The optimism was palpable. The conflict in Eastern Congo had persisted for two decades, yet a major armed group was defeated and normally hostile neighbors were finally talking to each other. The E-Team had a collective feeling that this high-level attention from the outside world might be able to make some real change. So in that important September meeting with the Rwandan president, Feingold said they not only put pressure on the president, they also made him a promise: to go after a group called the FDLR, the French acronym for the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda. The FDLR was founded by some of the leaders of the Rwandan genocide of 1994. After their killing spree they fled across the border and now live with their troops and families in the ungoverned jungles of Eastern Congo. "Knowing that those individuals have not been brought to justice has to be very difficult," Feingold said. So Feingold and the E-Team offered Rwanda a diplomatic quid pro quo: Rwanda would stop funding its rebels, the M23, and then the United Nations and the Congolese army would go after the FDLR.
more at: http://www.npr.org/2014/02/06/272490157/in-eastern-congo-complex-conflicts-and-high-stakes-diplomacy
Russ Feingold (center), U.S. special envoy for the Great Lakes and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, gives a press conference in Kinshasa on the last day of his fact-finding trip to the DRC, on Jan. 28.
