The little on the colossus

Observe the African map: on the one hand, a continent country, the Democratic Republic of Congo, 2.3 million km2, and at its eastern border, Rwanda, 90 times smaller. And yet, it is he who develops, who is courted, and who, supporting a rebellious movement (M23), is established in the east of the DRC. Paul Kagame, its president, notably seeks to ensure access to coveted mineral wealth worldwide.

The M23, accompanied by 4,000 Rwandan soldiers, set foot in Goma, the big city of Kivu, this torn border province. He wants to extend his grip to the south. Since the beginning of January, half a million civilians have been moved. It is the last episode of thirty years of more or less intense crises that killed millions of people in the area.

A UN force and an African regional force are there, but they are helpless. When you handle your smartphone, do you know that it probably contains the Coltan extracted from kivu mines in inhuman working conditions?

From Kinshasa, 2,600 kilometers, Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi, governing a country with a thousand problems, organize a response against M23? Uganda also advances its pawns. In Kinshasa, several embassies, including that of France, paid the cost of anger by the Congolese.

Does a regional war threaten? In 1994, after the genocide in Rwanda, hundreds of thousands of Hutus had fled to Kivu where many Tutsis already lived, the Banyamulenge. Real solidarity and a pretext to set up, Paul Kagame supported M23. Playing on the demotivation of the Congolese army and the fracturing of multiple rebel groups, Rwanda seems to want to establish a buffer zone.

This Kivu, which a missionary once described to me as a paradise on earth, has become one of the forgotten areas of the world where the suffering of innocent is the greatest. Like Sudan, Kivu would need a strong and effective UN, not the law of the strongest.