Word: kivu
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Drive west through Rwanda, threading past hills of eucalyptus, down to the shores of Lake Kivu and the Congolese border and you'll see real, actual signs of trouble. Every few hundred yards are hand-painted signboards marking the sites of massacres during Rwanda's 1994 genocide. Here, 532 were killed. There, 318. Here, "+/? 5,000." The word JENOSIDE is painted in scarlet, and after you've seen it--and the redness of the earth--a few times, it's hard not to wonder about the great flood of blood that bathed Rwanda when 800,000 people were slaughtered...
...latest chapter in the crisis began in October 2008 when Tutsi rebel leader Laurent Nkunda launched an offensive, taking advantage of the weak Congolese President, Joseph Kabila, and his collapsing army. Nkunda quickly doubled his territory in the province of North Kivu and threatened to march on the capital, Kinshasa. The U.N. says a quarter of North Kivu's 4 million people are now refugees as a result. "This is war" was Nkunda's explanation...
...combination of things. There is a huge amount of genuine frustration. Then there's the recent outbreak of fresh hostilities. Sometimes the popular frustration is manipulated by political forces to advance their own agenda. The problem is simply practical. There are 10 million people in North and South Kivu, and we have less than 10,000 soldiers there. In Liberia I had the same amount of troops as I have for Congo, and [Liberia] is less than one-hundredth of the size. Congo is the size of Western Europe, without roads. That's the scale of the problem. We cannot...
...irrelevance in their lives. I would agree with that. We would like to be more present. You have situations where there is a population of 60,000, and we have 120 soldiers in a base. In those circumstances, they might well say that they have not seen us. North Kivu is twice the size of Belgium, and a third of our forces are there, though for obvious reasons, they are mostly in and around Goma. I can understand the frustration. But you can see the scale of the problem, and we're just trying to manage these realities and these...
...much is MONUC feeling its way here? Is MONUC an experiment? R2P is a huge step forward ... But the question remains: How do we actually do it? We have come up against the sharp end of R2P. We can claim that responsibility, but actually doing that in North Kivu, with a collapsing army, a resurgence of ethnic groups - well, that raises fundamental questions. When we make these statements, we have to be careful that we have the means to match our mandate...