今日头条:In Congo, an Increasing Risk of War as Violence Worsens
刚果形势恶化战争风险增加
By LYDIA POLGREEN
Published: December 13, 2007
SAKE, Congo — A major confrontation between the Congolese Army and a renegade Tutsi general is plunging the country back toward war, threatening to undermine the fledgling democratic state and set off a new regional conflict on a scale not seen here in years.
The battle between government troops and the rebel general, Laurent Nkunda, turns on many of the same bedeviling issues that caused Congo’s civil war, which supposedly ended in 2003. It was Africa’s deadliest modern war, fueled by the ethnic tensions between Hutus and Tutsis that led to the Rwandan genocide, and by the quest to control the nation’s unusually rich endowment of minerals and farmland, especially here in the rolling, green patch of earth known as North Kivu Province.
None of those flash points have been fully resolved, and the recent violence they have spurred has pushed 425,000 people from their homes in the past year alone, including the residents of this strategic provincial town. On Tuesday, they flooded out of town in a vast river of suffering, bedrolls and clothing bundles atop their heads, children toddling at their sides.
Many were running for the second time in two weeks, as General Nkunda’s forces, which have vowed to protect Congolese Tutsis against Rwandan Hutu militias at all cost, routed army troops in towns they had taken just days before, and threatened to take Sake as well. That pivotal loss was just barely staved off by United Nations peacekeepers, who swept in late Tuesday to occupy the town as the Congolese Army fled.
The fight comes only a year after Western nations helped organize and pay for a historic election that produced Congo’s first democratically chosen government. The violence is also unfolding despite years of military and diplomatic intervention by the United Nations, the European Union and the United States to stem the tide of blood here and create, for the first time since its independence from Belgium in 1960, a stable and prosperous Congo.
On Tuesday, Colonel Kahimbi acknowledged that his troops had suffered a serious setback, saying at the front line, “In war, you win some and you lose some, but we will win.”
Soldiers who just a week ago seemed disciplined and in high spirits quickly degenerated into drunken, rowdy rabble as they bid a hasty retreat from Kingi, following hundreds of families seeking sanctuary from the fighting and preying upon them for food.
