I was reading a blog post from a classmate of mine about the Congolese Conflict. You can read all about it on his blog, the post is titled Breaking the Silence from Oct 18-24.
I had heard of the Rwandan conflict, but I didn’t know that the violence had spilled over into the Democratic Republic (DC) of Congo as well. Which is odd because one of my history classes focused quite a bit on genocide and it seems like this conflict had many similarities to Rwanda…
So I did some reading to find out more about it and I came across this more recent article from the BBC. It mentioned that as early as January of this year Rwanda had sent some troops into DC Congo (with permission from DC Congo) to help take care of mutual enemies. But who are the mutual enemies? Are they actually enemies or are they civilians caught in the middle?
When I was reading Wikipedia to get a general idea of the conflict, it said it ended in 2003 with over 5 million civilians dead and countless more displaced. Obviously the conflict is still going on in some form if Rwanda has sent troops into the DC Congo.
The UN is involved in the area, deploying around 15,000 troops to protect the region. There is only so much those 15,000 troops can do though. They can’t protect everyone, as much as I wish they could.
If you want to learn more about this check out these articles/sites:
Q&A: DR Congo conflict
http://afrovt.blogspot.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Congo_War
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