Is there a "Kivu conspiracy" to undermine Congo? Hardly

Guest blogger Laura Seay, during visit to the Congolese city of Goma, looks into allegations that the ongoing rebellion of Bosco Ntaganda is a conspiracy to undermine Congolese control.

By Laura Seay,?Guest blogger / June 14, 2012

A Congolese government soldier stands guard at a military outpost between Kachiru village and Mbuzi hill, in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, May 25.

Siegfried Modola/REUTERS

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Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo

???A version of this post appeared on the blog "Texas in Africa."?The views expressed are the author's own.

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A new rebellion is underway in Congo's North Kivu province, and while most of the actors are familiar, the story is slightly different. Two months ago, groups of soldiers in the Congolese national army, the FARDC, began to defect from the ranks. These soldiers are all former members of a rebel-movement-turned-political-party called the CNDP. The CNDP is notorious for having been led by warlord Laurent Nkunda, who, with backing from Rwanda, almost took over the province a few years ago. Rwanda, however, arrested Nkunda, made an agreement with the Congolese president to stop backing the movement, and CNDP forces were integrated into the FARDC. Nkunda's former second-in-command, Bosco Ntaganda, took over the military leadership of the movement, which maintained parallel chains of command within the FARDC ranks. Ntaganda became a warlord and amassed large quantities of wealth as a result of this arrangement; his ability to operate despite being wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court was taken by many as evidence that he was the lynchpin of regional stability, likely because his role in controlling cross-border trade between North Kivu and Rwanda maintained Rwanda's ability to benefit from Congolese mineral resources without maintaining a formal military presence in the province. Ntaganda, like many of his ex-CNDP counterparts, is a Kinyarwanda-speaking Congolese Tutsi, and Tutsis and Hutu Kinyarwanda-speaking Congolese are at the forefront of the mutiny, which has christened itself M23.

There is no such thing as a unified "Tutsi position" on M23, Bosco Ntaganda's leadership, or the RPF government in Kigali. This is a common misconception that is sometimes glossed over in media reports from the region, but it's an important one. While many non-Rwandaphone Congolese are convinced that there is a "Tutsi project" - that is, a conspiracy? to take control of the Kivu provinces under Kigali's rule - there is actually wide variation of opinion in the Rwandan and Congolese Tutsi communities, as well as among Congolese Rwandaphone Hutus

(To read more about what precipitated the M23 mutiny, click here to read a new piece on the M23 rebellion up at Warscapes?this week.)

This is not an accurate reflection of current reality. While we know that during the war some Tutsis apparently had the idea of expanding into a "greater Rwanda" (most famously expressed through the publication of a map of said territory in the Rwandair Express inflight magazine during the war), today, there is a high degree of tension in relationships between and among the Anglophone Tutsi leadership in Kigali, other Tutsis in and exiled from Rwanda, and Congolese Tutsis and Hutus. This variety of viewpoint extends through civilian and military life and is present within the ranks of the ex-/CNDP's military and political leaderships. ?For example, some ex-CNDP soldiers remained loyal to Nkunda over the course of the last three years, while others have more?confidence?in Ntaganda's leadership.

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