Latest Updates

The continued existence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo of 8,000 to 10,000 Hutu rebels with links to the 1994 genocide in their home country, Rwanda, is a key source of regional instability.

As it approaches the end of its second year, the Congo's transition risks breaking apart on the unreconciled ambitions of the former civil war belligerents. Inability to resolve political differences in Kinshasa have been mirrored by new military tensions that the parties, as well as Rwanda, have stirred up in the Kivus, the birthplace of both wars that ravaged the country in the past decade.

Both wars that devastated the Congo (Democratic Republic) in the past decade and led to some 3.8 million deaths began when Rwandan troops crossed the border into that giant country's unstable eastern region, the Kivus. History may be repeating itself in recent weeks as a Rwandan incursion stirs fears of a third catastrophe, but the situation can still be saved.

The international community is slowly awakening to the grim realisation that collapse of the Congo peace process and return to war are real prospects in that giant country, several millions of whose citizens died in the conflicts of the past decade.

The crisis provoked by the struggle in late May and early June 2004 for control of Bukavu, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo's strategically sensitive South Kivu province that borders Rwanda, is a stark reminder that the political transition agreed in May 2003 is not synonymous with peace.