Global Policy Forum

By Ian Fisher

Goma, Congo -- The search for peace in Congo depends on disarming the very men who attacked a young woman named Alima Asami a week ago. Her scalp looks like a baseball coming unseamed, with brown stitches holding together three slices from a machete. Two fingers on her right hand, and one on her left, were hacked off. "Because I was a woman and had a baby I could not escape," she said, sitting on a hospital bed here.

The men demanded money. Three of them raped her, she said. They killed her little girl, Shakuru, who was 4, along with 22 other people on their way to a market not far from here. Ms. Asami had wanted to buy beans. She said the attackers, who spoke with Rwandan accents, appeared to be Hutu former soldiers or militiamen, groups of whom killed at least 500,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu in Rwanda in 1994 before fleeing to neighboring countries to carry out raids on their homeland.

Now they have become the key element in the cease-fire plan to end the war in Congo but an unpredictable one that, many experts on Africa say, represents the biggest threat to peace. "They are the wild card at this point," said Hannelie de Beer, senior researcher at the Institute for Strategic Studies in South Africa.

The peace accord, drafted in mid-July, optimistically calls for the warring parties in Congo to disarm these groups, some of the most violent guerrillas fighting in some of the world's harshest terrain. The United Nations has pledged peacekeepers in the region, but almost no one believes their mandate will include the dangerous job of disarming. "It will be very difficult to disarm them, if not impossible," Ms. de Beer said. "If you disarm them, what are you going to promise them? How are they going to fit in?"

Among the many problems, Ms. de Beer and other experts say, is that given the groups' status as international outlaws, there is no way to provide incentives in the cease-fire for them to stop their war against the Tutsi-led Government of Rwanda. Rwanda, in fact, wants to bring the leaders back to stand trial. And perhaps paradoxically, the guerrillas -- known here as the interahamwe -- may be even more potent now than they were a year ago, when the most recent war in Congo broke out. The reason is that the President of Congo, Laurent Kabila, recruited thousands of Hutu guerrillas to help him fend off rebels who rose up against his new Government. He gave the Hutu arms and military training.

"That has undoubtedly strengthened them, in terms of equipment and training," a Western diplomat said. Rwandan Government officials say that Zimbabwe, one of Kabila's allies in the Congo war, has also provided training and arms, and may be unwilling to disarm them.

"If Zimbabwe is committed, this is going to be a very easy process," said Emmanuel Ndahiro, a top defense official in Rwanda. But he said: "Zimbabwe has already indicated that it is not obliged. If people think signing an agreement is enough, that's a mistake."

Zimbabwe is one of six nations with troops in Congo that signed the cease-fire agreement, along with Rwanda, Uganda, Angola, Namibia and Congo itself. The cease-fire agreement -- despite Ndahiro's accusations -- obliges each country to track down members of the interahamwe as well as members of other rebel groups. But the cease-fire has not gone into effect because rebel groups are still deciding whether to sign.

The war in Congo is in part the latest chapter of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Among the most dedicated killers of Tutsis then were the interahamwe (the word is often translated from the Kinyarwanda language as "those who attack together"). Along with Hutu soldiers in the Rwandan Army, they fled across the border into Congo as the 1994 war ended. But they still made attacks into Rwanda.

That prompted the new Tutsi-led Government of Rwanda to oppose a powerful ally of the Hutu, Mobutu Sese Seko, the dictator of the nation then known as Zaire. They backed a rebellion against him in 1996. The cycle of bloodshed and revenge wore on. The rebels in Zaire, led by Kabila, and the Rwandans were accused of massacring Hutus inside Congo. Raids into Rwanda continued.

A year ago, Rwanda covertly supported a second rebellion, this time aimed at overthrowing Kabila, who by then had made his own alliance with the Hutu guerrillas. Rwanda said its intention was not to change the Government, but only to stop the attacks. "If that is accomplished, our role in Congo will be significantly diminished," Ndahiro said. "We need Congo as a state, not as a situation of anarchy."

Estimates of the number of Hutu guerrillas and former Rwandan Army soldiers in Congo vary widely, ranging from 5,000 to 25,000. Rwanda says several hundred have been trained in Zimbabwe.

Few experts doubt that they have fought around Congo against the rebels trying to overthrow Kabila. Maj. Gen. Augustin Bizimungu, the Hutu defense chief at the time of the mass killings, is reported to be the commander of Hutu troops in the diamond-producing city of Mbuji-Mayi, a key target for the rebels.

Critics of Rwanda say that there can be no real solution to the interahamwe until the Rwandan Government greatly expands power sharing with the Hutu majority. The United States also comes under heavy criticism in the region -- and much suspicion in Congo itself -- for its close friendship with the Rwandan Government.

These critics say that by setting the second rebellion into motion, Rwanda strengthened the interahamwe not just militarily but in popular support and organization.

Many Congolese are convinced that Rwanda wants to annex eastern Congo, and that has created the sense that the Hutu guerrillas "are a resistance force, that they are trying to stop the expansion of this empire," said one aid official with long experience in the region. "These forces in the field don't represent very much," said the official. "But the question we should be asking ourselves is: has this war allowed these extremist forces to develop a political structure, if not an ideology?"

There is recent evidence that the Hutu guerrillas may be simply too violent to sustain that support -- a development that may help the peace agreement. Several experts said local Congolese fighters known as the Mayi Mayi -- allies of the Hutu guerrillas because of their shared hatred for Tutsis -- may be now distancing themselves. This would be a problem for the guerrillas because they have depended on the Mayi Mayi to forge good will with local Congolese who provide money and food.

That perception was supported by a man from the city of Bukavu, in eastern Congo, who sought out reporters recently saying that he spoke on behalf of Mayi Mayi groups looking for greater legitimacy. The man, a local politician who asked to be identified by part of his name, Mukange, said that the guerrillas' philosophy seemed to be, "You meet somebody and you kill them. "The Mayi Mayi didn't want to be like that," he said.

The aid official said he believed that the international community should send more money to eastern Congo instead of disarming the guerrillas. The money could rebuild roads or markets -- projects to pull local people away from war and, thus, the guerrillas.

In the hospital here, just outside the ward where Ms. Asami lay, a man on crutches named Bagenga Sanvula, 22, needed no convincing. Five months ago, a group of 15 guerrillas attacked a car he was driving in with his two brothers, he said. They asked for money. "We didn't have any," Sanvula said. "They said, 'Since you don't have any money, we are going to kill you.' Then they shot." His two brothers were killed. He survived with a bullet in his left leg.

"They must go back to Rwanda," Sanvula said, "and let peace happen here."