Ituri: DRC’s forgotten conflict zone

Matthias Witt, who studied post-conflict reconstruction and humanitarian response at Georgetown University, currently works in public health and emergency programming for an international NGO in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)’s Ituri district.  He reports:

The DRC has been covered in the news extensively since fighting flared up again in November 2012, when the M23 rebel movement took over Goma.  This was yet another reminder of the international community’s  failed efforts to stabilize the region and keep the “peace.”

The events were not without consequences; they led to the Kampala peace negotiations between a variety of armed groups and the Congolese government, and they catalyzed an African Union summit paper aimed, as so often before, at supporting regional stability. It also led to the creation of yet another UN post – the Special Envoy of the Secretary General to the Great Lakes,  a role now occupied by Ireland’s Mary Robinson – and the extension of the mandate of the UN Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO).  The Security Council added some extra firepower in the form of a “Special Intervention Brigade” authorized to seek out and eliminate armed rebel movements in the country’s troubled East. The almost comical international legalese of this particular resolution aside – the mandate of the Special Brigade is apparently “unprecedented, yet without setting a precedent” – the dynamics coming out of this decision could make for some dramatic developments in the region, for better or worse.

When I last visited Bunia, Ituri’s capital, the impending arrival of the Special Brigade in Goma and its potential spillover effects were on everyone’s lips – the greater my surprise to find that it was getting little to no attention in the international press. Ituri remains the DR Congo’s forgotten problem child, the arena that humanitarian actors, conflict scholars, and the central government in Kinshasa equally love to forget about. The district, bordering both South Sudan and Uganda, saw some of the worst atrocities of the Second Congo War between 1999 and 2007. When rebel groups began to lay down their arms in 2007 and violent tribal conflicts seemed to be put to a tentative end, it was Joseph Kony’s LRA marching through northern Ituri and Haut-Uélé, killing tens of thousands along the way, raping women and children, and burning down villages. In 2013, the environment is relatively quiet. To confuse this calm with a stable peace, however, could be a crucial mistake.

Almost all drivers of the original Ituri conflict are still in place. In the absence of a reconciliation process, the decades-old tribal tensions between Hema and Lendu in the territories around Bunia have not disappeared. The district continues to be the DRC’s Fort Knox, with the lucrative gold mines of Kilo-Moto, plenty of small artisanal mines, and even more untapped gold ore underneath its mountains in the northwest. The weakness of the country’s central government is painfully obvious in Ituri, a territory much further away from Kinshasa than it is from either Kampala, Kigali, Juba, or even Nairobi, for that matter. Public infrastructure is a disaster, the health sector vastly underdeveloped, and poverty a constant threat to the approximately 5 million inhabitants of an area three times the size of Belgium.

Of the major rebel commanders of the Ituri conflict, some have been put in front of the International Criminal Court, most notably Thomas Lubanga and Bosco Ntaganda. Others have been arrested and put on trial nationally, like “Commander Jerome” Kakwavu, whose FAPC forces terrorized most of Mahagi and Aru territories for years. Only “Cobra” Matata, who was integrated into the national army (FARDC) as part of the original peace agreement, has returned to Ituri to take up arms again. While his Ituri Patriotic Resistance Force (FRPI) has not staged attacks of the same magnitude as the M23 in North Kivu, it has nonetheless ensured that violence continues to be a daily reality in Ituri, and renewed conflict remains anything but unthinkable.  

If the FRPI wasn’t enough, Ituri is still struggling with resurfacing uprisings on a smaller scale, mostly reflecting regional struggles and inadequacies rather than a grand political or ideological vision. Paul “Morgan” Sadala’s Mai-Mai militia groups still roam Mambasa territory in Ituri’s southwest, occasionally running into firefights with the FARDC. The Kakwa chefferie around Ingbokolo and Adi in the utmost north of the district, bordering South Sudan and Uganda, has seen its own increase in violence and internal displacement with the formation of an unorganized but angry armed group in October 2012, unrest that is beginning to escalate on a growing scale.

The Special Brigade’s arrival in neighboring North Kivu will therefore be closely monitored in Bunia, and whether or not the operation can curb the influence of armed groups and contribute to increased stability in Goma will influence the FRPI’s future course of action in Ituri as well. A few weeks ago, Cobra Matata failed to show up to a meeting with the new governor of Province Orientale, Jean Bamanisa, to discuss potential terms for peace and the reintroduction of him and his men into the army – a topic he has been publicly addressing for more than a year already. His motivation for skipping this meeting is unclear, but it is conceivable that he is weighing his options and awaiting the outcome of the more recent developments in North Kivu – a failure of the Special Brigade would improve his bargaining position vis-à-vis Kisangani and Kinshasa for negotiations to come.

The fact that firearms still proliferate freely around the country, and that smaller rebellions like the ones in Mambasa and Ingbokolo can spend months organizing themselves before Kinshasa even notices, does not bode well for the prospects of a stable and sustained peace in Ituri. In the long run, the constitutionally foreseen decentralization of the DRC, which would turn Ituri into a province by itself, could contribute a lot to the strengthening of state institutions and reduce the risk of renewed conflict. So would, unquestionably, growing regional trade and economic interdependency between the quarreling tribal groups. For the moment, however, the peace remains fragile, and the outcome of what is developing in North Kivu will undoubtedly have a strong signaling effect on the district’s foreseeable future.