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oppression and colonial conquest (Dunn 2002: 55). As noted in Chapter 3, Kabila had been a member of Lumumba’s cabinet and fought with Pierre Mulele, who led one of the biggest revolts against Mobutu and was a driving force for the creation of the Simba and Mai Mai popular militias in the 1960s.2 During the 1996 and 1998 wars, Mai Mai militias generally fought on the side of the Government to repel the RCD rebellion and the Rwandan, Ugandan and Burundian invasions. However, they remained autonomous from the army, and since the transition most groups have developed an anti
extractive context of plural authorities. Alongside the already militarised environment caused by the wars of 1996 and 1998, both North and South Kivu have been targets of unilateral UN and UN-backed military operations of the DRC and Rwanda against remaining armed groups. This is in addition to continuous proxy wars between the DRC and Rwanda, which both cooperate and antagonise at multiple levels, and a corresponding mushrooming of popular Mai Mai militias. Militarisation has also followed from the tendency to deploy the military as representatives of state authority and
authorities and the civilian population, while establishing a rationale for its presence and command. The factual veracity of these claims is not as important as what they represent for the capacity to define the problem and the solution. For instance, speaking of the success of the IB that was authorised by the UN Security Council in response to the M-23, a MONUSCO officer indicated that: ‘The UN is claiming that we won, but it is the FARDC that did most of the fighting, the IB was only supporting. The M-23 was defeated because it didn’t have Rwandan support, Western FARDC
approach against armed groups as part of the political compromises with the FDLR, CNDP and Rwanda, and as a palliative to state absence. The chapter finishes with a section examining various examples of social service provision. All these examples illustrate that surviving and mitigating the effects of dispossession are simultaneously a way to provide self-management and to rearticulate the social and political space. They reaffirm mechanisms of selfreliance and assert alternative political agendas. In all these areas, although it might not be explicitly stated, women
Legitimacy, violence and extraction resources and cross-border regulation’ (2008: 16). Hence, as shown in later chapters, they become targets of resistance. For instance, peace agreements, encouraged by donors, have granted the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP) – a Rwandan-backed armed group operating from about 2006 to 2010 – decision-making power in the Tripartite agreement to return refugees to the region.8 Although the DRC is the signatory to these agreements with the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and the governments of Tanzania and of
’ groups, with political and economic groups being the most controversially excluded from legal protection. Thus the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, for example, has held that ‘objective’ Tutsi ethnicity always trumped ‘subjective’ political identity in perpetrators’ genocidal intent during the Rwandan genocide, even though ethnic identity and political identity were
signalled significant transformations for the central and Great Lakes regions and the African continent at large. Firstly, Africa’s World War consolidated a series of hegemonic centres in Angola, South Africa and what Mbembe calls the new military principalities of Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi (2000a: 277). While there is a certain balance of power between them, the different conflicts of the DRC since the mid-1990s have proved that these regimes are willing to use violence in order to secure their interests in the region. Secondly, the policies that were tested as a result
, it is subject to the vicissitudes of chauvinism and misunderstanding. Shared worlds as we have seen in cases such as Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia and Cambodia, may easily be reframed as particularistic worlds contaminated by the presence of an unacceptable other. Ideally, recognition's intimate resonance must confront and shoulder the burden of sometimes dramatic shifts in
approach could not deal directly with some crucial forms or occasions of rights violations – it is not equipped for the outburst of extensive slaughter in Rwanda, Kosovo, East Timor, even Tiananmen. As with other approaches to rights, it is not an answer that wipes away the problem of abuse. But while often identified with the moment of greatest violence, rights violations are embedded in a complex tissue of relationships and circumstances. While the explosion of violence calls forth a necessarily very narrow range of responses, the capacity for political and social
Introduction Resistance and the liberal peace: a missing link There is no conflict between communities here. (Administrative Local Authority 2014; Association Paix et Concorde (APC) Representative (no. 180) 2014; DDRRR Officer 2014) The demobilisation programmes cannot achieve success because they are not tackling the real causes of conflict. The armed groups have the government as their main target and they are largely supported by the civilian population. (DDRRR Officer 2014) The problems we face now sparked with the Rwandan genocide, although some come from