Regrets Only: An Africa Journal: Eastern Congo Violence Explodes

Friday, October 17, 2008

Eastern Congo Violence Explodes

Worldfocus correspondent Michael Kavanagh is currently reporting from the North Kivu region of eastern Congo. He is a also a journalist for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Below is a selection of recent journal entries from Michael’s reporting in Goma.

His entries lead up to the intense fighting over the last couple days.

October 11, 2008: Curfew in Goma — NGOs grow anxious
I just came home from several days in the field. When I turned on my phone again, I got a text saying there was a 6 p.m. curfew for fear that UN vehicles would be attacked - at this point, it seems anyone who’s not Congolese or driving in a white 4×4 is considered U.N.

It’s becoming incredibly difficult to operate in North Kivu. It’s not just the insecurity - tensions are so high between the government and the CNDP that aid groups are having a terrible time moving across front lines. This means it’s even worse for journalists - more than ever I need the aid groups to get around but they’ve become paranoid about transporting journalists for fear of jeopardizing their access and - more importantly - the safety of their staff.

Before I move with aid workers I need to agree to a series of rules about what I can and cannot report on. This means that most of what I’m doing I can’t write about here.

October 9, 2008: Waiting for the Rwanda invasion

The Congolese Ambassador to the U.N. just told the Security Council that Rwanda invaded eastern Congo last night, and the Rwandan army is waiting along the border outside Goma, ready to take the town over. Here in Goma — where we can see Rwanda across Lake Kivu — I live about a five-minute walk from the border, and we’re drinking tea.

Blaming Rwanda is a fallback tactic for the Congolese government and army when things go wrong. It inflames nationalist sentiment and brings up memories of past Rwandan invasions — this has the added effect of turning the population against Kinyarwanda speakers in the east, particularly against Tutsis. There may be some truth to it this time - the RDF is not at the border waiting to get in (I was back and forth over the border a few times this weekend).

But it wouldn’t be out of the question for small groups of Rwanda Defense Forces (RDF) soldiers to cross the border to help the CNDP [Nkunda's National Congress for People’s Defense]. Of course, as one prominent former government minister told me yesterday, “So what, Rwanda sends a battalion. DRC has eight brigades here. It shouldn’t be a fight.”

See the special section with more of these reports on the Worldfocus website.

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Why?

It is October, 1997. I am standing in a rubble-strewn Brazzaville street as the city returns cautiously to life after a bloody civil war. Armed men are all around me, most of them looting, occasionally firing off bursts of bullets in celebration. But I am not concentrating on this anymore. Instead, with the hand holding my microphone limp by my side, my tape running senselessly. I am looking at another corpse -- this one of a man, perhaps in his 20's, his legs charred. I know there will be no voice to record. But his lips are apart, his arms outstretched, fingers together, as if in prayer. It seems another one of Africa's dead is trying to speak to me. And I feel I owe him this one last consideration. I think maybe he wants to share his anguish, his despair, his pain. Or maybe a last word to a parent or a wife or a child. I feel badly -- because I do not know for sure. I do know though that I have seen corpses like this before -- victims of war, or of genocide, or of famine, or of sickness. A symbolic path of the dead now runs through my mind -- a personal collection reflecting the real path their corpses have left across much of Africa: from arid Somalia in the northeast, across Sudan and into northern Uganda, down through steamy Rwanda, Burundi and Congo in the center of the continent. Some have been young men in uniform, their bodies shattered by a bullet or a shell. Some have been old men, thin beyond belief, weakened by hunger or disease. Some have been women, their dresses in tatters, their faces etched with silent agony. Some have been children, too young to die, their skulls cleaved in half. Some I have met in battle-scarred streets, some in burned-out buildings. Some I have seen sprawled amidst flowers in an open field, some floating, limbs bound, in muddy water. Some I have found in groups thrown into a dirt pit, some alone in the aisles of a gutted church. I have, at times, had imaginary conversations with these dead of mine -- their unrecorded voices playing on endlessly inside my head, sometimes loud, sometimes just a whisper. I tell them I am sorry and if it were in my power, I would restore them to life. But I can't. It's not in my power. Perhaps the only help I can give is to try to tell their story.

The Reporter

Alex Belida has been in international broadcasting since 1971. He spent nearly eight years in sub-Saharan Africa as a correspondent for the Voice of America, based first in Nairobi (1993-1996) and then in Johannesburg (1996-2000). He covered conflicts and humanitarian crises in Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, Burundi, Congo-Kinshasa and Congo-Brazzaville, northern Uganda, Angola and Lesotho as well as political unrest in Zimbabwe and catastrophic flooding in Mozambique. He suffered gunshot wounds while reporting in Somalia.
While in Africa, he was elected Chairman of the East Africa Foreign Correspondents Association in Nairobi and served as Treasurer of the Foreign Correspondents Association of Southern Africa during his Johannesburg assignment.
Before going to Africa, he served as VOA's Senior White House reporter for four years following stints as coordinator of the 1988 Presidential Election coverage and as National News Editor. Before those Washington assignments, he was based in Germany, where he served as Soviet affairs, East-West security and German affairs correspondent (1982-1985).
Following Africa, he served as Pentagon correspondent. In 2004 he was named Managing Editor and in 2007 became Senior Advisor for News at VOA. He retired in 2011.
Before joining VOA, he worked for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in both New York and Munich, rising from reporter to Assistant News Director. He has a BA from Trinity College, Hartford, Conn., and a MS in Journalism from Columbia University in New York. In 2006, he received the prestigious Alumni Achievement Award from Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. He also has an honorary doctorate in communications from the Somali National University.

The views expressed here are his own.

Regrets Only: An Africa Journal

Friday, October 17, 2008

Eastern Congo Violence Explodes

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