CONGO:Congo is a vast country with a history of vast personalities , and renegade general Laurent Nkunda is the latest well-armed megalomaniac, writes Stephanie McCrummenin Kichanga, Congo
On the way to the mountain headquarters of renegade Congolese general Laurent Nkunda, there are villages patrolled by Nkunda's police and checkpoints where Nkunda's soldiers demand that truck drivers pay a tax to support their leader's cause.
Local residents can settle disputes these days in Nkunda's courts or attend church with a priest appointed by Nkunda, who is wanted on war crimes charges but lately has been wearing a button that reads "Rebels for Christ". What amounts to Radio Free Nkunda broadcasts from a mountaintop around here.
And though the general denies it, villagers said that earlier this year Nkunda hoisted a flag and declared his mountain fiefdom a new country: Land of the Volcanoes.
"Is it really Nkunda who is the problem?" asked Nkunda, who carries a gold-tipped baton and often refers to himself in the third person.
"They want to keep me as the problem so that they can explain all the problems in Congo through Nkunda . . . But I will protect myself, and I will protect these small number of Tutsis who are here."
Congo is a vast country with a history of vast personalities. Mobutu Sese Seko, who renamed the nation Zaire and ruled for almost four decades, ordered news broadcasts to open with an image of himself descending god-like from the clouds, and some here consider Laurent Nkunda to be the country's latest well-armed megalomaniac.
UN officials blame the general for forcing an estimated 230,000 people from their homes since January and creating a humanitarian disaster that is the worst Congo has experienced since the peak of its decade of civil war.
Displacement camps filled with sick, hungry and injured people are scattered across the east once again, and UN officials warn that Congo is on the brink of another all-out conflict.
But Nkunda, an admirer of such diverse leaders as Gandhi and George W Bush, says he is fighting for a cause greater than himself: protecting Congolese Tutsis, whose story is wrapped up in the aftermath of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, evidence of which still litters the rolling, green forests here.
"The government can get rid of Nkunda," said Joseph Sebagisha, a leader in the Tutsi community, which backs Nkunda heavily and includes some of the region's wealthiest businessmen. "But the reasons why he is doing what he is doing will continue to exist."
Though it is difficult to speak of a minority in a country with more than 400 tribes, the Tutsis have for decades considered themselves a vulnerable group.
As is common across Africa, the ethnic group was divided by arbitrary colonial borders, with most of its members living in what became Rwanda and others in eastern Congo.
During Rwanda's independence struggle, many wealthy Rwandan Tutsis fled into eastern Congo and, over the years, politicians here have frequently cast Tutsis as outsiders.
Ethnic clashes targeting the Tutsis broke out in eastern Congo in 1993. A year later, following the Rwandan genocide in which 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed, more than a million Hutu refugees and genocidal Hutu militiamen poured across the border and continued to massacre Congolese Tutsis.
The Rwandan army, allied with the Tutsi-dominated rebel forces of Congo's future president, Laurent Kabila, soon followed, carrying out massacres in Hutu refugee camps and villages.
Among Kabila's anti-Mobutu forces at the time was a young, Rwandan-trained intelligence officer named Laurent Nkunda, a Tutsi who had lost members of his family in ethnic clashes.
After the Rwandan invasion, anti-Tutsi sentiment ran high. One politician gave a speech urging Congolese people to "exterminate the vermin", referring to Tutsis. And Kabila, after overthrowing Mobutu, turned on his Rwandan backers, arming the genocidal Hutu militiamen to fight them.
One of the century's bloodiest wars followed, with nine African nations eventually engaged in a mad scramble for eastern Congo's abundant mineral riches. Some researchers have estimated that at least four million people died during the war years, mostly from disease, hunger and the collapse of human services associated with the fighting.
Although a peace agreement was signed in 2004, militia groups have continued to plague eastern Congo, including at least 6,000 Rwandan Hutu militiamen who were never disarmed. By now, some of them have blended into village life, starting farms and marrying Congolese women.
Others, however, have remained organised under genocidal leaders in the thick eastern forests, living off whatever they can pillage from the local residents.
"The root causes of the wars in eastern Congo have never been solved," said Jason Stearns, an analyst with the Brussels-based International Crisis Group. "The problem of the Tutsis and of the Rwandan Hutus has not been addressed."
The continued presence of the Hutu militias provided Nkunda with a cause. In 2005, the general refused an order by the Congolese army to deploy to another area of the country and officially became a renegade.
His argument: the Tutsis of eastern Congo needed his protection. For a while, Nkunda had the support of Rwanda, which considered his forces a necessary bulwark against Hutu militiamen. Though Rwanda says it no longer supports him, its sympathy for Nkunda's activities borders on justification. "Rwanda cannot establish a relationship with such a person, but we can understand why Nkunda is Nkunda," Rwandan foreign minister Charles Murigande said in an interview. "We can understand his argument."
Armed with a sense of righteousness fortified by visiting American evangelical Christian groups, Nkunda has in recent months been carrying out attacks against village after village.
Eastern Congo is a sordid tangle of violence, but even within that context, villagers say, Nkunda's men have distinguished themselves.
In one forsaken camp of banana-leaf huts sprawled across volcanic rocks near the provincial capital of Goma, people who had run for their lives told different versions of the same story: that before attacking with machetes and guns, Nkunda's soldiers had accused them of harbouring Hutu militiamen.
"They consider us like the Interahamwe," said Nayino Faraziya (70), referring to the Hutu militia that she said had taken up residence around her village, Bufamando.
Faraziya said Nkunda's soldiers burned down houses and called about two-dozen people, including her, to a "meeting" at the local Catholic church. Then, she said, they set the building on fire. "People were crying and screaming," said Faraziya, who escaped through a window and has burns across her back, neck and arms.
More than 2,000 people have arrived at the camp since January, said the camp's chief, Mahoro Faustin, and more are arriving daily, some missing legs and arms and most with little more than the torn clothes on their backs. The notion that Nkunda is offering people some kind of protection from Hutu militias is "a masquerade", he said.
"He wants everyone to join him against the government," said Faustin. "His people were preaching that we need to liberate ourselves and make our own country. He even put his flag in our village."
In recent months, Nkunda has forcefully recruited soldiers, including children, inside Rwanda, according to UN officials who repatriated at least 500 of them.
The general has also boosted his military position since the Congolese army agreed in January to mix several of its brigades with his. The deal was intended by the national government to diminish Nkunda's power, but instead has increased it: the soldiers are now deployed across a wider area while remaining loyal to him.
