The dead help no one living - A return to Congo

The Rwandan genocide of 1994, in which as many as 800, 000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu were killed, ended when a Tutsi-led rebel army swept down from Uganda and conquered the country, sending most of the government's forces and the civilian corps of killers into exile in neighboring Zaire. With them went hundreds of thousands of other Hutu who, though they may have been innocent of participating in the genocide, feared retribution at the hands of the new regime. Their rapidly deteriorating condition in unsanitary, makeshift camps drew widespread media attention, and the international community, which had done little more than watch as the genocide unfolded mounted a major relief operation that eventually cast a million dollars a day. The killers, however, quickly established themselves as the camps' dominant military and political force. Siphoning off money and supplies meant for the refugees, they began launching cross-border incursions into Rwanda and conducting pogroms against indigenous Zairian Tutsi, among whom were a group called the Banyamulenge. Matters came to a head in October 1996, when Rwanda invaded eastern Zaire, dispersed the camps, and sparked a revolt by the Banyamulenge that quickly drew support from a wide range of Zairians fed up With the dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko. This rebellion or incursion-it remains unclear which is the move appropriate term-progressed with uncanny rapidity from one end of the country to the other and along the way acquired a lender named Laurent Desire Kabila, a former Marxist rebel and gold smuggler of dubious credentials. Kabila's troops, the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (ADFL), entered Kinshasa on May 17, 1997, prompting guarded enthusiasm, locally and internationally, for the future of the country. But what would Kabila's accession mean far Zaire-now renamed the Democratic Republic of Conga? What challenges confronted the new regime and how did it plan to meet them, Would there be, as Kabila kept promising, democracy, an end to human rights abuses, even, perhaps, some measure of prosperity How did Zairians view the new regime? Was this, in fact, a change for the better? Was Kabila even in charge I traveled to Kinshasa in June of this year, seeking some preliminary answers to these questions.