October 6, 2007: For the last two months, Congo and
the UN have been accusing Rwanda of arming a Tutsi militia inside Congo, near
the Rwanda border. While Rwanda denied supplying arms to the Congo Tutsis,
there were more calls for Congo to do something about the Rwandan Hutu militias,
that formed from those who fled Rwanda after the 1994 attempt to kill all Tutsi
in Rwanda. Of late, the war of words has escalated, with Rwanda media talking
about another invasion of eastern Congo by Rwandan troops, to deal with the
Hutu guerillas once and for all. It was such an invasion in the 1990s that led
to the downfall of the decades old Mobutu dictatorship, and a civil war that
has killed millions.
September 9, 2007: In northwest Burundi, fighting
between rival factions of the last rebel group, the FNL, left at least
twenty dead, and caused over 4,000 civilians to flee the violence. The FNL
signed a peace deal with the government a year ago, but disputes within the FNL
have prevented the rebels from actually disarming and accepting amnesty. Violence
caused by the civil war within the Hutu FNL, and bandits spawned by the various
rebel groups, killed about 150 people over the Summer. Not quite peace, more
like a crime wave driven by political and ethnic differences. Both
Burundi and Rwanda have a centuries old conflict between the Hutu majority, and
the better organized Tutsi minority. Tutsi tribes live on both sides of the
Congo border with Rwanda and Burundi, and these tribes stick together whenever
any Tutsi are threatened.
