Meet the f*ckers: a newbie’s guide to armed groups in the Kivus

So here they are, the dramatis personae of the Kivus. I won’t bother breaking out the acronyms – it’s too much work and you don’t care what they call themselves anyway. Just a quick who’s who of marauding gangs of war criminals:

FARDC: The national army of Congo. Ill-equipped, badly trained and rarely paid, they are among the worst human rights abusers in the country.

CNDP: Breakaway group of dissident soldiers led by Laurent Nkunda, a Congolese Tutsi backed by Rwanda. He claims to be protecting his ethnic group against the predations of the FDLR.

FDLR: A predominantly Hutu rebel group founded by the Interahamwe, the genocidaires of Rwanda. Notorious for being the most brutal of the armed groups (a hotly contested title).

Mai-Mai: Traditional self-defence militias of the Congo. Most of the current batch were mobilized to defend their villages against the FDLR. Since then, many of them have rather lost touch with their roots, themselves becoming a source of insecurity.

PARECO: A Mai-Mai group gone especially awry, loosely (and ironically) allied with the FDLR.

Rastas: Small-scale militia predominantly active in South Kivu, allegedly affiliated with the FDLR.

Each of these groups regularly clashes will all of the others. Primary fault lines are FARDC-CNDP and CNDP-FDLR, but the winds are blowing such that the FARDC is under enormous pressure to launch a major offensive against the FDLR, seen by many to be the root of the problems. If that happens, the CNDP may well take advantage of the opportunity to gain some ground against the FDLR, opening additional fronts in the province. But if they get too close to the FARDC, their traditional enemy, there will be blood. Since North Kivu is more or less carved up between these three main entities, the picture is pretty grim.

With so many belligerents, it’s easy to see how MONUC finds itself a bit overwhelmed. Instead of a single referee separating two prize fighters, as peacekeeping was intended to do, MONUC is a single referee trying to break up a bar brawl. The problem is even more acute if you start factoring in the rebel groups in the other provinces – and there are many.

Violence on a scale like this is hard to imagine. It all seems so epic, so distant, until you come face-to-face with somebody who has survived it. Today I visited an orphanage in the town of Bunia, further north in Ituri district. The first child we saw was a little boy of about six who approached us shyly, pushing a tire along with a stick. I noticed the scars on his head immediately, shiny curves breaking up the dark fuzz of his hair. I didn’t need to be told what they were, but the NGO worker I was there with told me anyway. The sister than runs the orphanage found him about three years ago, curled up beside the bodies of his parents, slowly bleeding to death from the machete wounds in his skull. Now here he is in the orphanage – a miserable, stinking, sorrow-drenched place. And his being here is a triumph, something worth celebrating.

Actually, there are lots of things worth celebrating here once you realize how resilient people can be. It’s not all doom and gloom. Peace is slowly returning to Ituri, even if it hasn’t yet set foot in North Kivu. The people are still poor and sick, but there’s tranquility in this town, where neighbors chat between the corn stalks in their front yard, and children squeal and splash among the adults washing clothes in the river. It’s almost… normal.

It’s done me good to see it. You can get bogged down in North Kivu, overwhelmed with the enormity of it and unable to see how it could possibly get better. Ituri is still fragile. It could all unravel. But right now it’s working, and that’s inspiring.