Declarations and proclamations, cease-fires and even treaties signed, sealed, ratified, and delivered by the combatants are useless in the fight to preserve human rights when one or even more parties to them decide they can be ignored.

That's exactly what Laurent Nkunda has done to the January 2008 peace accords he signed to end the strife in Kivu provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo. His forces continue to rape and pillage the region despite his vow to abide by the agreement. The rights of civilians in the Congo mean nothing without a champion to enforce them. The United Nations has tried, but MUNOC forces are spread thin trying to control an alphabet soup of rebels, war lords, and garden-variety gangsters in the eastern provinces.

Nkunda is a former psychology student who traveled to Rwanda to join the RPF and overthrow the genocidal Hutu-led government in 1995. After the Tutsi forces gained control of Rwanda, Nkunda returned to the DRC to fight alongside Laurent Kabila, who successfully overthrew Mobutu.

When the Second Congo War broke out in 2000, Nkunda became a Major in the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RDC), a group allied with Rwandan, Ugandan, Burundian, and other Tutsi-aligned forces operating in the DRC. This period of great unrest is the backdrop for my novel, Heart of Diamonds.

When the war officially ended in 2003, Nkunda joined his forces with the DRC army, but he soon rejected the government's authority and rebelled, taking his troops with him. It is believed that Nkunda is being at least partially funded by the government of Rwanda. In September 2005 he was indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court. Refugees International reports that his troops murder, rape, and pillage civilian populations in areas under his control and Amnesty International says his troops have adbucted children as young as 12, forcing them to serve as child soldiers.

The January peace deal provides the CNDP (Comité Nationale pour la Defence du Peuple, Nkunda's group) and other signatories with a general amnesty for "acts of war", but does not cover war crimes and crimes against humanity. Bloody clashes continue in North Kivu despite the peace agreement, with all sides in the conflict accused of gross human rights abuses. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that some 800,000 people have been displaced by fighting in North Kivu out of a population of 4.2 million.

For more thoughts on the state of human rights in the Democratic Republic of Congo and elsewhere, read all my contributions to “Bloggers Unite for Human Rights”

Rape - A Weapon Of Terror
Toys of Destruction
Human Rights Criminal On The Loose
Human Rights – Major Theme In Heart of Diamonds
Children of the Congo – Soldiers Still
A Century of Horror – Red Room
God Is Love
Eager To Learn
Is America A Human Rights Weakling?

To see what it’s all about, read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights then, to do your part, see these sixteen ways to make a difference.