A letter from the Democratic Republic of Congo
The Democratic Republic of the Congo has a long history of war, and despite a formal end to the so-called Second Congo War in 2003, instability remains. Violence and human rights abuses continue every day in the east of the country. Ethnic tensions, regional interferences, economic interests, the presence of armed groups, natural resources and a fragile state make this “conflict” extremely complex and persistent.
At the University and as an intern at the Permanent Representative of the Netherlands to the United Nations, I got more familiar with the Great Lakes Region and the complexity of the Kivu area. These experiences motivated me to work and live in the Kivus, to get a grasp of the reality on the ground. In November 2010 I moved to Bukavu, the capital of the South-Kivu province. Here I work for a Swedish organisation that accompanies local NGO’s so that they can play a positive role in transforming conflicts between (ethnic) communities in North and South Kivu. After an extensive conflict analyses, the different actors and stakeholders are brought together to come to a common understanding about the conflict and to formulate suitable solutions. This so-called action plan is the result of several years of research and work with and through the communities, armed groups and local and national authorities. Subsequently, the actions to transform the conflict are initiated and implemented by the local communities. For example in the South of South Kivu, after a round table that brought together the members of different local communities in conflict, four local structures were founded, the so called CCI (“Cadres de Concentrations Inter Communautaires”) bringing together 65 members of the Fizi and Uvira communities. The specific questions at the root of the conflicts in that zone, like the transhumance and the communities’ support to the armed groups, are being addressed by the members of these local structures.
During my work I often visit the villages and remote areas where the communities are in conflict and the armed groups closely linked to these communities are active. Neither at the University, nor at the United Nations Headquarters, did I ever realize the local dimension of a conflict with so many international and regional interests. Although inevitably linked, these local conflicts have their own dimension, with its own stakes and interests. For the normal villagers living in the Kivus, the main interest is to survive. For example (and enormously simplified) a farmer who sees a cow eating his harvest, sees directly a Tutsi man, who he has perceived as an enemy since his birth, because as long as he remembers, the cows of the cattle breeders were devastating their fields. What matters for the farmer is that his beans are devastated and what matters for the cattle breeder is that his cows have nowhere to go since he has no access to a field. Due to the absence of a state authority and the lack of a functioning national army, both of them will demand the support of the armed group that defends their community rights respectively. Of course, this is a huge simplification of a very complex reality, but my point is that at a local level, the “Kivu conflict” has its own dimensions, with its own interests to survive, fed with persistent perceptions about the different communities due to years of civil war.
One of the first things I learned here is that at the local level, there is no conflict, there are several conflicts, opposing different communities, with different interests at stake. If I would talk to a Congolese about the conflict in Eastern Congo, he would immediately ask, which conflict are you talking about? All these local conflicts are linked, and from an international political perspective, with good reasons, these conflicts form one and the same conflict.
Lotte Hoex
Former LPIS student
