This is a guest post by Brooke Bocast, a PhD candidate in anthropology at Temple University and a visiting predoctoral fellow at Northwestern University. She is currently writing her doctoral dissertation on gender, consumption, and higher education in Uganda. Read more »

This is a guest post by Brooke Bocast, a PhD candidate in anthropology at Temple University and a visiting predoctoral fellow at Northwestern University. She is currently writing her doctoral dissertation on gender, consumption, and higher education in Uganda. 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 »

The Department of Defense announced on Feb 5 that the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) headquarters will remain in Stuttgart, Germany.

According to Stars and Stripes, the decision to stay in Germany rather than relocate to the United States was based on “operational needs.” Read more »

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has been active in sub-Saharan Africa. Seven investigations have been launched in Uganda, Kenya, Sudan, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ivory Coast, and Mali. Four prominent Kenyan politicians are due for trial in The Hague in April 2013. One of them, Uhuru Kenyatta, is a leading candidate in the upcoming Kenya presidential elections. Should he win, the new Kenyan head of state would start his term under ICC indictment. About half of sub-Saharan Africa accepts ICC jurisdiction. The United States does not. 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 »

M23, a rebel group active in the eastern Congo, advanced on the provincial capital of Goma over the weekend, but has subsequently pulled back. Instead of an attack on Goma, the rebels presented a list of demands to the Kinshasa government that include de-militarization of the city and its airport. It is also demanding the opening of a border post with Uganda, in the town of Bunagana. Read more »

The UN office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports that internally displaced people (IDP) in Congo-Kinshasa numbers more than two million, as of March 31.  That is up from 1.7 million IDPs at the end of December. Most of this increase is in the two eastern provinces of North and South Kivu. The UN Stabilization Mission in Congo (MONUSCO) is stepping up efforts to protect civilians, especially in North Kivu, in the aftermath of a mutiny led by Bosco Ntaganda. Ntaganda is a Tutsi warlord whose forces had been incompletely incorporated into the regular Congolese army as part of a deal between Kinshasa and Kigali.  MONUSCO refers to “significant” displacement of civilians and refugee flows into Uganda and Rwanda. Read more »