No Running Away
UN Peacekeeping’s Race Against Time in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
By Jean-Marie Guéhenno
President & CEO of the International Crisis Group, former UN Under-Secretary General for the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (2000–2008)
The idea of humanitarian intervention has an appealing moral clarity. In 2003, the Security Council was again confronted with the question in the Democratic Republic of Congo. For 4.5 million Congolese living in Ituri, the north-eastern corner of Congo, 2003 was the year when they came terribly close to a total breakdown, as violence spiked and the prospect of massive killings — if not genocide — became more and more real. As head of UN peacekeeping, as we also juggled crises in Côte d’Ivoire, Iraq, and Darfur, those fateful weeks of May 2003 were to be the longest in my life.
Was it all futile agitation? In the case of Congo, I continue to believe that we made a difference, but I now better understand how important luck and sometimes sheer coincidence can be, and how the moral and operational clarity of the public debate on humanitarian intervention does not really help us find our way in the fog of imperfect peace. In a protracted chess-game with the devil, there is never a checkmate moment. Abstention would be wrong, but you can never be sure that you are doing right.
Some history is vital to understand this traumatic episode of UN peacekeeping. Since 1994, after the genocide in neighbouring Rwanda, eastern Congo had been filled with hundreds of thousands of Hutus who were fleeing the revenge of Rwandan President Paul Kagame’s Tutsi forces. The contrast could not be greater between densely populated Rwanda and the loosely controlled vastness of Congo, now a haven for some of the leaders of the genocide, as well as for those who felt threatened by the new regime in Rwanda. Kagame did not accept this situation. By late 1996 and together with an anti-Mobutu rebel, Laurent-Désiré Kabila, he swiftly captured much of eastern Zaire. Many Congolese people were killed, becoming collateral victims of the Rwandan genocide. Kabila then went all the way to the capital Kinshasa in May 1997, where he was installed as president.
The alliance between the two leaders, however, quickly broke down, and in the summer of 1998, war resumed. Two rebel movements opposed to Kabila, supported respectively by Uganda and Rwanda, tried to march on Kinshasa. Meanwhile, Namibia and Zimbabwe joined the fight on Kabila’s side and would later be followed by Angola. A second full-fledged civil war then started, involving six African countries. Congo was now cut in two, and it took more than a year for the six countries and three rebel movements assembled in Lusaka to reach a ceasefire agreement that detailed the modalities for the eventual withdrawal of occupying armies and the reunification of the country.
The Security Council blessed this by adopting Resolution 1291, creating the United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC). The resolution referred to the Lusaka Agreement of 1999 but refrained from tasking the mission to “track down” the Forces Démocratiques de Liberation du Rwanda (FDLR), the core of which were the former genocidaires of Rwanda, who had now settled in the forests and mining areas of Kivu in eastern Congo. The Congolese leadership in Kinshasa wanted the UN to kick out foreign troops and help reestablish the sovereignty of the country. The Rwandan leadership expected MONUC to “track down” the genocidaires; the view of Kigali was that, since the international community had done nothing to stop the genocide, it now had a duty to pursue the genocidaires. While divided by history, the permanent members of the Security Council were united by a shared sense of guilt. But guilt did not lead to a clear strategic direction. This lack of clarity led to a long proxy war between Rwanda and Congo.
In January 2001, Laurent-Désiré Kabila was assassinated in circumstances that remain unclear to this day. While he had appeared to support military options to end the occupation of Congo by Rwanda and Uganda, his son Joseph, who succeeded him, seemed more inclined to favour political solutions. However, the mistrust between the two leaders ran deep, and when I had arrived in Kinshasa in April 2001, the country was cut in two, and Kinshasa was the capital of a country at war. The Grand Hotel was still full of officers from the countries allied with Kabila. It was part military headquarters, with officers in military fatigues who would have found it insulting to pay for their rooms, and part brothel, judging by the number of prostitutes in the corridors.
In these conditions, how to trigger the departure of foreign troops and then manage the consequences of their departure? For instance, depriving Rwanda and Uganda of any legitimate rationale to be in Congo required the elimination of the threat posed by former genocidaires. This would be very difficult. The long saga of a group of some 3,000 Rwandan Hutus who were cantoned in a military base at Kamina provided a good illustration of the problem. They did not want to go back to Rwanda, and Rwanda did not want them back; this led to endless negotiations.
Back in New York, the ambassadors of the United Kingdom and France to the UN, Jeremy Greenstock and Jean-David Lévitte, understood that the positions of their respective countries could have a great impact on relations between Kigali and Kinshasa, which are on opposite sides of Africa’s divide between post-colonial Anglophone and Francophone spheres of influence. The two ambassadors then convinced their respective foreign ministers, Jack Straw and Hubert Védrine, to undertake a joint visit to Congo and to Rwanda in January 2002. It was a great success on several counts. The mere fact of a Franco-British joint effort was deeply disturbing, in a very positive way: it challenged the basic assumptions underpinning the hardline positions that Congo and Rwanda took on their bilateral relations.
I would have a flavour of the tone of the meeting a few weeks later, when I had my own personal encounter with President Kagame in Kigali. The president appeared exactly on time. The message of control and organised power was not lost on me. The conversation lasted an hour and a half, and I understood why Kagame is one of the most respected, but also the most feared, leaders of Africa. There was no small talk, nothing gratuitous in what he said and all his points were woven together in an impeccable logic. He reminded me that getting rid of the genocidaires was an international responsibility and that Rwanda was doing what the international community should do, what Congo was apparently unable to do. When I told him that the extended presence of Rwanda in Congo was not making friends for his country there, and was undermining the Congolese ally of Rwanda, the RCD-Goma, he cut me off sharply: “We are not in Congo to be liked!”
In July 2002, inter-Congolese dialogue brought together all Congolese factions at a summit in the South African city of Durban. South African President Mbeki used the momentum of the summit to organise a meeting between President Kagame and President Kabila. Three weeks later, in Pretoria on 30 July, the two presidents signed a far-reaching agreement: Rwanda pledged to withdraw its troops from Congo, while Congo pledged to “track down” the Hutu fighters, known as ex-FAR (Rwandan Armed Forces) Interahamwe, who had been members of the armed forces of Rwanda during the 1994 genocide. The government of Congo took action against FDLR leaders, declaring twenty-five of them persona non grata and arresting and transferring a well-known genocidaire to an international court. On September 17, President Kagame made the spectacular announcement that Rwanda was starting to pull out its troops from Congo. Two weeks later, on October 5, the withdrawal of 23,000 Rwandese troops was completed.
The Crisis in Ituri
The situation was however much more complex in Ituri, a remote district of rolling hills in the north-eastern corner of Congo that was occupied by Ugandan troops. It traditionally feels neglected by Kinshasa, but it is the richest district of the Orientale Province and has easy connections to both Uganda and Rwanda. Ethnically, this district of roughly three million people is complicated. While much has been made of the opposition between the Hemas, who are of Nilotic ethnicity and are often compared to the Tutsis, and the Lendus, who are Bantus and often compared to the Hutus, the existence of many other ethnic groups has historically been a stabilising factor preventing the dangerous ethnic polarisation between Tutsis and Hutus that tore apart Rwanda and Burundi. But in 2002–2003, the appetite for the vast resources of Ituri and the manipulation of traditional ethnic tensions were a deadly combination.
As Ituri changed hands and thousands were displaced, the news that reached New York was horrific. Acts of cannibalism were perpetrated by the same militias whose leaders were negotiating the future of Congo in the luxurious South African resort of Sun City. I was confronted for the first time with a dilemma that is at the heart of peacekeeping: the choice between the risk of a failed intervention and the risk of abstention in a situation where intervention could have prevented mass atrocities. I decided for intervention, the most important decision of my tenure. It was a huge gamble. A battalion of Uruguayan blue helmets would move from elsewhere in Congo.
From the moment the UN made this decision, implementation was a race against time. As soon as the troops began to deploy, thousands of desperate displaced persons made their way to the airstrip where they were landing and to the UN compound in the centre of the city. The battalion had no capacity to support itself, the only way to bring troops to Bunia, the capital of Ituri, was by air, and the airstrip was in poor condition. Our troops provided limited protection to thousands of terrified Congolese who were huddling near our camps, people were getting killed by mortar shells, the sanitary situation was appalling, and women and children with horrific wounds caused by machetes found limited relief in an emergency room which had been improvised in a decrepit building. By the end of April, I knew that the UN alone would not be able to stop the horror. The only hope was the deployment of a strong multinational force that would send a clear message to all actors that this time, the international community was not going to run away, as it had done nine years before in Rwanda.
I raised the alarm in the Security Council on Monday, 5 May and now needed the support of the United States (U.S.) and the engagement of France. In the U.S. mission to the UN, the deputy ambassador following African affairs was “Rick” Williamson. In those critical weeks, he became a strong ally, pleading the case of Congo in Washington because he believed it was the right thing to do.
On the French side, it was more complicated. I knew I would be better off going directly to the decision-makers in Paris, rather than through the French mission at the UN, which was all-too-well aware of the potential difficulties of a Congo operation. I felt I could have an ally with the chief of staff of the French army, General Henri Bentégeat; he had been involved in several operations in Africa, he knew how to evaluate risk, and he was not afraid of speaking his mind to politicians. Once the groundwork had been laid with him, a phone call between Kofi Annan and Jacques Chirac was arranged. From Annan’s jubilant smile, I immediately knew the conversation had gone well. The timing could not have been better. The first phase had succeeded: we now had a green light from the top.
France’s diplomats did establish a list of conditions for the country’s engagement. The first condition — a deployment limited to Bunia — was very worrying, and some on my staff thought we should reject the French offer. Their concern was that a French deployment limited to Bunia might well displace rather than stop the violence. I was concerned about that scenario, as well, but I believed that if it happened, the French force would be compelled politically and operationally to go beyond Ituri’s capital.
The second condition, a strict time limit on the deployment, would be more problematic. We could not afford a security vacuum when the multinational force left, and it was important to have some overlap with a follow-on force. But how could we possibly deploy the follow-on troops by late September? This would require a new resolution authorising a bigger mission, enormous goodwill from the troop contributors who would replace the multinational force, and a massive logistical effort.
A role for Europe
Moreover, I agreed with Paris that it was very important that this not be a “French operation”. In the ten following days, I spoke to officials in more than twenty countries, extracting a valuable special forces company from Sweden, transport planes from Portugal and Belgium, and a small unit from the United Kingdom. As a committed European, I also thought that a European force willing to deploy to Ituri, would send a badly needed signal that the European Union was beginning to repair the wounds caused by the bitter debate that had preceded the Iraq war. An EU operation could provide a great opportunity for the Europeans to move on. Javier Solana, the EU’s high representative for foreign and security policy, immediately agreed, and the Ituri deployment, later known as “Operation Artemis”, became the first test of UN-EU cooperation in Africa.
Meanwhile, in Bunia, the perimeter of the airport was not really secured, and thousands of displaced people were sleeping in tents along the runway. The market, usually bustling with activity, was deserted. The only human presence was of young men with guns; a child, barely twelve years old, was trying to carry a machine gun and a round of ammunition obviously too heavy for him. The “hospital” was a big room in which the “operating room” was just a corner isolated by a curtain. Women lying on cots with their children, a little cupboard with some medication, men with an arm or a leg missing and extraordinarily committed nurses and doctors.
The situation was deteriorating and I knew that the clock was ticking for this new deployment. But there would be no UN resolution authorising it without a letter from President Kagame. In the plane taking me to Rwanda, I immersed myself in the works of Machiavelli. His writings, like Shakespeare’s plays, are as good an introduction to the politics of the Great Lakes as any learned book on the tribal make-up of Congo. But Kagame would not have received me if he was ready to precipitate a crisis. His letter was brought to the council chamber that afternoon, and two weeks later, on 10 June, the first elements of the multinational force landed in Bunia.
We had bought ourselves a window of calm, but another race against time had now started: what force would we be able to deploy after the multinational force left, and when? I had tried to convince the European Union to agree to keep an “over the horizon” force, in case things went wrong. The troops would have been stationed in Europe, but would have been sent to Congo if warranted. I also tried to convince Sweden to transfer to MONUC its Special Forces Company when the multinational force left. These requests were rejected, however, and it became all the more important to have as strong a UN force as possible to replace the multinational force.
On 28 July 2003, the council agreed to bring the numbers of MONUC up to 10,800 and expand its mandate. The vacuum I had feared was avoided. From now on it would be a completely different mission, although I was well aware that the brigade in Ituri, with less than 5,000 troops would have a hard time dealing with the whole district. We would need to have good troops, good command, and a very strategic use of force if we wanted to maintain the credibility that the international community had just acquired, and which it was now bestowing on the UN. As usual, the UN was expected to do more with less.
Progress without True Reconciliation
Military force has its own limitations, and without an effective political process, it was bound to disappoint. By March 2004, the situation in eastern Congo was again deteriorating. After the creation in 2003 of a government of national unity that was supposed to bring together the former enemy factions, an agreement on the senior posts in the army had eventually been reached. But the fundamental ambiguities of the Congolese transition government were playing out at all levels of the army, where the former enemies were jockeying for influence and control.
The simmering conflict came to a head in Bukavu, the capital of South Kivu — a city of critical importance in eastern Congo. Fighting broke out between factions loyal to the Kabila government and those close to Rwanda. The blue helmets of MONUC, which favoured a political solution, issued an ultimatum announcing that it would use force. But an order from Kinshasa was given to the UN troops not to take a blocking position, even though the commanding officer was prepared to stand his ground. I was on the other side of the Atlantic, and learned only after about that disastrous reversal. The consequences were catastrophic: from 2 to 9 June, Bukavu was under the control of forces that had openly challenged the government of national unity. Several hundred people were killed, and MONUC had shown its impotence.
The UN mission had lost whatever credibility and momentum Operation Artemis had created. But I was determined to use this crisis to deepen the engagement of the international community. I knew that no reinforcement of MONUC would ever be sufficient to bring peace in a country as big as Congo, but military capacity was one of the foundations of political leverage, and it could be used strategically to achieve political goals, and to help bring about more stability. Eventually, due to the intensive lobbying of the secretary-general, the Security Council agreed on an overall ceiling of 17,000 troops.
It was now essential to have a general who would push the troops to take a more dynamic posture. And I had the right person for the job: the Dutch marine general, Patrick Cammaert, who had led the UN deployment in Eritrea and had been the military adviser of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations for the past two years. He was familiar with Congolese military challenges and was respected by our major troop contributors.
The operational tempo changed quickly. The mission now had the initiative, it could shape perceptions and build political momentum. But the new posture carried risks. In March 2005, the force was tragically tested; north of Bunia, a patrol was ambushed and nine Bangladeshi soldiers were killed. Bangladesh took the loss with great courage, and General Cammaert reacted swiftly. Several dozen militia fighters were killed in a counter-operation. At the beginning of April, the force issued an ultimatum to the militias of Ituri to disarm, and it acted on its ultimatum: the military credibility of MONUC was restored. Eventually, 15,000 militia members would disarm, and the military actions of the UN transformed the situation in Ituri.
An Electoral Challenge
As the year was coming to an end, however, the UN was confronted with a military challenge of a different order of magnitude: it was to ensure the security of elections in a country of 60 million — a country that had been deprived of multiparty elections for forty years.
Could we turn again to the European Union? The Europeans had good memories of their operation in Bunia, which had been an extraordinary success, operationally and politically. It had helped MONUC recover from a desperate situation, it had sent a salutary message of European commitment and watchfulness to the Congolese and their neighbours, and it had begun to familiarise the European Union, as an institution, with Africa. This time, it would not be an emergency deployment, but a well-prepared reinforcement during the election period. Javier Solana saw the benefits for the nascent European common foreign and security policy and agreed to deploy troops during the Congolese elections.
It turned out to be an extraordinarily successful psychological operation. The deployment was limited to Kinshasa, and the number of fighting forces actually deployed during the elections was minuscule, with no more than two companies. But the existence of an over the horizon force and the public information campaign that accompanied the deployment massively amplified the perceived capacities of force.
The Limits of UN Military Action
Operation Artemis in 2003, the Ituri campaign of General Cammaert in 2005, the EU deployment in support of the elections in 2006: these were the three moments when military force made a difference in Congo during the last fifteen years. It is important not to draw the wrong conclusions from these examples of success. No decisive battle was won; no militia was crushed. A force was deployed, and in some instances used, essentially to create momentum, to shape perceptions, by astutely picking fights that it was sure to win, by putting up a show that was sufficiently intimidating to transform the political dynamics. It was largely a political theatre, and that “show”, more than the immediate impact of a specific operation, made the difference between success and failure.
In the end, robust peacekeeping is an empty concept if it is not supported by a robust political posture. The UN does not have the capacity to enforce peace. And actually no nation has that capacity. What the UN has, that no nation has, is the capacity to create trust in its fairness and impartiality. That requires a very rigorous and disciplined use of force. If civilians are killed under the UN’s watch, and the peacekeepers are seen to be passive, not only has the UN failed in its mission to save lives, but its political credibility is destroyed, which will prevent it from playing an effective role in promoting a political process. But if the UN becomes the auxiliary of a government whose legitimacy and representativeness is still questioned, it may lose not only its military credibility but its political legitimacy, putting at risk what is potentially its most valuable contribution: the capacity to foster compromise among various groups as the indispensable base of lasting peace. In Congo, although the leaders are now elected, that contribution is still much needed. Stability requires much more than crushing the former genocidaires, and lasting peace depends on how the government of Congo will assert its authority throughout the country. Recruiting criminals to defeat other criminals, as it did in the past, will not end the cycle of violence. Building a professional and accountable army will. The most difficult challenge in Congo has never been a military challenge: it is to build trusted institutions.
This article is based on Chapters 5 and 6 of Jean-Marie Guéhenno’s book The Fog of Peace: A Memoir of International Peacekeeping in the 21st Century (Brookings Institute Press, Washington DC, May 2015).
