U.N. Chief and African Leaders Seek Congo Peace - NYTimes.com

U.N. Chief and African Leaders Seek Congo Peace - NYTimes.com
Hello? Why was Laurent Nkunda not invited to the meeting? How in the world do you try to come up with a peace agreement between two parties when one of them isn't present? I hope they come up with something good, though I'm really skeptical. This looks like another UN cosmetic solution. Hey, we're doing something! But the rebels won't stop fighting!

This is all too hauntingly similar to what happened with the Rwandan Massacres of 1994. But then, the storyline is so similar because it's from the same book of Central Africa's Hutu and Tutsi Conflict. The Congo War is just the next chapter after Rwanda's. The story hasn't ended! What started this gruesome story? What made this region into what has been repeatedly said the place of humanitarian disaster?

The early chapters of this book would probably start with the arrival of the European empires, who, in their attempts to colonise or in the case of Congo, loot (do read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness) the region of its wealth, also organized the African tribes residing there. The Central African kingdoms that the Europeans found in the 19th century were controlled by Tutsi warriors who lorded over Hutus cattle herders and peasants. Although it's difficult to tell them apart now, some characteristics of the archetype is that the Tutsis were light skinned, thin-nosed, and lanky; the Hutus were dark-skinned, flat-nosed, and stocky. The Europeans thought it was perfect, because it fit into the Hamitic race theory that had been sweeping across the Western world for a while. This is the same theory that was used to jusify slavery in America. Anyway, the Europeans divided up the Africans into separate Tutsis and Hutus, going so far as to issue id's that declared whether one was a Tutsi or a Hutu (this wretched system was then abused in 1994 when the Hutus used it to hunt down Tutsi minority in Rwanda). The Tutsis were the higher class, under the Europeans of course. Thus, originally, the difference between the Tutsis and the Hutus was mostly socio-economic. By the time Rwanda and Congo had become independent after WWII, the difference had become ethnic. After so many years being the lower class, Hutu anger was building, and two years after the Hutu Manifesto, that called the Hutu majority to kick out the Tutsis and regain control, was published, the first ethnic conflict between the Hutus and Tutsis exploded in 1959. This conflict has gone on ever since.

Jump to the ending of the Rwandan Massacres from 1996 on.
The Hutu government that had started the genocide had been toppled. A Tutsi general/president was in control and stabilizing the country. This general Kagame was determined to arrest/kill the ex-Hutu powers and their killer robots who fled to the neighboring nations surrounding Rwanda. One of the nations was Congo, which was called Zaire back then.

Because of time constraints, I'm going to cut this summarized history even shorter. Some ex-Rwandan Hutu murderers were captured, but a lot of the leaders remained free because of the way the UN and other countries dealt with Rwanda and the situation. What happened from this was a regional war in central Africa that was contained then flared up again in certain hotspots. Congo was one of the regions heavily influenced by the ripples from Rwanda. Civil was has been going on for a long time now. And unless the international community start taking Africa more seriously, things are just going to continue being bad, and the consequent ramifications may affect everyone.

Come on, no one would be this blasé if something like this erupted in Europe, or anywhere else in the world.