There is an old hawker's line still heard outside of baseball stadiums in the US: You can't tell the players without a program! The line is designed to convince members of the crowd to spend a couple of dollars on a program with the two teams' rosters and a lot of other information to help observers follow the game. Anyone trying to follow events in the Democratic Republic of Congo could be excused for looking for a hawker with a similar program detailing not just two but the various teams that are contending for control over that strife-ridden country that has been at the mercy of so many groups of varying sizes, shapes and ethnicities that it is rarely clear just who is in control of what. From the mapping of the Congo River basin by Henry Stanley in the mid-1870s to its “acquisition” by King Leopold of Belgium to its independence in the early 1960 and for the following 50 years, stability always came at the end of a gun and “stability” was always relative. The arrest of Tutsi rebel leader Laurent Nkunda last week could be a harbinger of greater stability, at least, in the short run. Nkunda purported to be protecting the Tutsi minority in Congo which was supposedly suffering at the hands of both Hutu militias driven from Rwanda and the Congolese government forces. Congo had, at one point, allowed the Hutu inside its borders but they refused to leave when it became apparent that there was great mineral wealth to be had there. Nkunda had been allied, or so it seemed, with both the Tutsi-led Rwandan government and the Congolese government of Joseph Kabila until he overplayed his hand in October when his forces launched a lightning attack that routed the Congolese army in North Kivu and threatened to overrun the city of Goma, the headquarters of the UN mission and the center of international aid operations in the region. Now, no one wants Nkunda on their side and both Kinshasa and Kigali are ready to prosecute him. Taking Nkunda out of the game may be the first step toward a lasting peace in Congo. But there are many more to go before the game is over. __
