Negotiating to save lives.

• Author: Bright, Nancee Oku
• Position: Essay

In November 2008, former President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, searching for ways to ease a catastrophic crisis in the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), came under intense criticism for calling the Congolese general, Laurent Nkunda, "my brother." Nkunda was accused by the DRC Government of war crimes and was under investigation by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. At the time, I led the Great Lakes Team in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations in New York and was responsible for oversight of the United Nations Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC), and the United Nations Integrated Office in I3urundi (BINUB). Nkunda occupied much of my thoughts.

Some months before, in late August, clashes between Nkunda's troops--the rebel Congres National pour la Defense du Peuple (CNDP)--and the national army--the Forces Armees de la Republique Democratique du Congo (FARDC)--had rendered moot a ceasefire which had been in place since the signing on 23 January 2008 of a peace agreement between the DRC Government, Nkunda's movement, and armed groups in both North and South Kivu provinces. The renewal of hostilities also reopened a long-festering regional sore: Nkunda claimed that his forces were protecting the minority Tutsi population in the Kivus from the Forces Democratiques de Liberation du Rwanda, or FDLR, the rebel movement which had evolved from the Interahamwe Hutu militia that fled to the DRC in 1994 after orchestrating the genocide in Rwanda that claimed the lives of approximately 800,000 people, the majority of them Tutsis.

Despite Nkunda's rhetoric about protection, his CNDP forces swept through, seizing wide swathes of fertile and mineral-rich land. Units from the FARDC (itself a cocktail army made up of both trained soldiers and undisciplined elements of former rebel groups which had signed various accords) collapsed in the face of a more robust and better organized CNDP. Within two months, the fighting had wreaked havoc on hundreds of thousands of civilian lives in North Kivu. Rapes were committed by all sides, with CNDP forces taking the lead in killing civilians and leaving terrorized populations in their wake.

Although Nkunda declared a unilateral ceasefire on 29 October, the fragility of the situation and the fact that MONUC was woefully overstretched meant that by then everything was on the table: from a request from Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to the Security Council to authorize an additional 3,000 troops and police to help deter fighting; to a request to the European Union to deploy an interim military force to North Kivu; to sending a high-level Special Envoy to the region to broker a long term and sustainable peace agreement. There was fear in many quarters that an escalation of the conflict might begin which could bring in other actors in the region.

When the CNDP threatened to march into Goma, the provincial capital of North Kivu, the need to find a high-level negotiator who could bring Nkunda on board became urgent. It was essential to identify someone who would have the respect of the DRC authorities as well as of other regional governments, and one to whom Nkunda would have a hard time showing disrespect. It was into this scenario that President Obasanjo entered, after being named by the Secretary-General as his Special Envoy for the Great Lakes. President Obasanjo travelled the region seeking the commitment of various presidents to help defuse growing tensions. It was, however, his meeting with Nkunda that...