UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon reported to the UN Security Council Group of Experts, who monitor the Libyan arms embargo, that Joseph Koney and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) are funding themselves through elephant poaching, as are other armed rebel groups. He commented that Libyan heavy weapons, formerly in Muammar Ghaddafi’s Libyan arsenal, and now scattered prolifically across sub-Saharan conflict areas, are making the poachers more efficient. His report added weight to the growing security concerns associated with elephant poaching, especially across Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, Gabon, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Read more »

Africa has had many secessionist movements in the post-colonial period. Only South Sudan and the Republic of Somaliland have so far been successful, and the latter lacks international recognition. Some secessionist movements never really go away. Katanga, currently the southernmost province in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), established itself as a state separate from the rest of the former Belgian Congo in the years immediately after independence, allegedly with Belgian connivance. Read more »

Friends of Africa often anoint “for the moment” selected leaders from that continent as heroes. Nigeria’s Olusegun Obasanjo, Congo’s Mobutu Sese-Seko, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, and Rwanda’s Paul Kagame have all enjoyed that status at one time or another. Often the “hero” immediately follows a tyrant–or chaos. Obasanjo followed a generation of military rulers, and his immediate predecessor was the “tyrant” Sani Abacha who resorted to judicial murder; Mobutu emerged from Congo’s domestic chaos and civil war and promised inoculation against the Communists; Mugabe followed the racist regime of Ian Smith and promised racial reconciliation; and Paul Kagame “ended” the genocide in Rwanda. Read more »

Search for Common Ground, a distinguished Washington-based NGO devoted to international conflict resolution and peace building that has long focused on the Great Lakes Region, organized a special two-day meeting of the Great Lakes Policy Forum (GLPF) earlier this week–the 165th meeting of the Forum. The Council on Foreign Relations and the Nitze School of International Studies at Johns Hopkins hosted and participated, along with many other Congo-watchers from the executive and legislative branches, NGOs, and academia. Search for Common Ground arranged for the presence of experts from the Congo, and there were representatives of the Congolese diaspora in the United States. Read more »

There is a useful new feature on cfr.org, the Council on Foreign Relations’ website. Ask a CFR Expert invites members of the public to submit questions on U.S. foreign policy, and CFR fellows respond to questions that pertain to their own areas of expertise and research. Read more »

Richard Joseph is the John Evans Professor of International History and Politics at Northwestern University and a Senior Fellow with the Program on Global Economy and  Development of The Brookings Institution.  He has been deeply engaged with American policy toward Africa for a generation.  In his guest post below, Dr. Joseph analyzes the Obama administration’s June 2012 policy paper on Africa and he provides specific policy recommendations for the President’s second term. Read more »

The situation in the eastern Congo is no less obscure than before the regional leaders met for negotiations over the weekend. M23 stated they would leave the city of Goma, captured on November 20, by November 27. They are still there. Now they claim they will hold a handover ceremony and pull back to Rutshuru, their original stronghold, on Friday, November 30; but only so long as M23 troops remain at the Goma airport. And possibly, that their political wing remain in Goma itself. Read more »

Since I blogged yesterday about the fighting around the city of Goma between the army of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) supported by UN forces and the M23 rebels, the situation has deteriorated.

Yesterday, the rebels had pulled back to await a response from Kinshasa to its demands that Goma be de-militarized and that a border post with Uganda be reopened. Kinshasa did not accept the M23 ultimatum, and the rebels have now occupied the city and its international and military airports for the first time since 2003. In the general melee, DRC soldiers shelled a neighboring Rwanda district, killing two, according to Rwanda sources. That same Rwanda source says, however, that Kinshasa has apologized. If so, Kinshasa and Kigali may be trying to avoid any cross border escalation, a positive development. Read more »

This is a guest post by Asch Harwood. Asch is the Council on Foreign Relations Africa program research associate.

The Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy have released their 2012 Failed States Index. Fourteen of the twenty states listed as “critical” are found in sub-Saharan Africa. Among the highest scores (bad) are Somalia, DRC, Chad, Zimbabwe, and Sudan. Read more »

The ongoing tragedy in eastern Congo is closely related to the history of genocide in Rwanda. Herman J. Cohen, former assistant secretary of state for Africa, former ambassador to Senegal and Gambia and once deputy chief of mission in Congo-Kinshasa, has just published a must-read article (gated): “Rwanda: Fifty Years of Ethnic Conflict on Steroids.” Cohen shows that the 1994 genocide in Rwanda was not a one-off event but part of an ethnic conflict that started in 1959. Its root causes included overpopulation, poverty, and bad colonial policies, especially with respect to sharpening ethnic differences and identities. Read more »