jpmba must not know a lick about what he's talking about and has probably never been to Rwanda or Congo in the last few years. Most people who write on these forums likely haven't. If you were to look closer at the arrest of Rose Kabuye or Kagame's comments / actions in regards to the Congo you would see how complicated the situation truly is for Rwanda. And you'd also probably see that Rwanda - not France - is probably the only country attempting to officially handle this situation rationally and responsibly. Kagame has been clear about Rwanda's interests in terms of the Congo, and what he hopes the international community will do to help the situation. If there is a finger to be pointed here, it is first at the Congolese government, and second at the French. The UN, as always, will be that ghost looming over everything but never really aiding the solution. After all, it was the UN and the French who left Rwanda to be ravaged in 1994. Of course Kagame has reason to be skeptical. I think this will certainly be a challenge for Barack to face after he faces the many other domestic issues that he'll certainly be forced to confront first.
Africa’s Other Holocaust
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Barack Obama spoke often and passionately about Darfur while campaigning. But the African holocaust that will confront him first is the ongoing slaughter in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. More than 5 million have died in that conflict since 1996, and there's no sign of a letup. As rebels commanded by Laurent Nkunda, a renegade Congolese Army general, closed in on the city of Goma in recent weeks, the United Nations' 17,000 troops— its largest peacekeeping force in the world—proved too weak to stop the push or to prevent a rampage of rape and looting by government forces who were there to defend the city. The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously last week to send in 3,100 more troops, but "you would need a minimum of 100,000 soldiers to have a credible peacekeeping force in Congo," says Knox Chitiyo, an Africa expert at the Royal United Services Institute, a London think tank. Chitiyo thinks only an envoy of Obama's stature might be able to impose a settlement.
What keeps the war going is eastern Congo's vast mineral wealth—gold, diamonds, tin and coltan, a vital component in mobile phones. Nkunda imposes a tax on illegal miners in his area; other militias do their own digging. Either way, the puny salaries offered if fighters disarm and join the national Army provide scant incentive to give up mining. Most of the take is smuggled out through Rwanda—and that may be a key. Enforcing a ban on minerals from militia-held areas might at least slow the fighting. Still, it's a tall order. "If there were something easy that could fix the Congo, it would have been done," says Anneke Van Woudenberg of Human Rights Watch. "There's no magic bullet."
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