The New York Times does right by the Congo (for now)

This morning the New York Times (on its front page) finally pays attention to that other war in Africa: in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The paper also corrects some of its own misrepresentations of that complex war.

Since 1996 more than four million people have died ‘mainly of disease and hunger’ related to this war. In the last month almost half a million people have been displaced by new fighting between the ‘democratically elected’ government of Joseph Kabila (son and heir of Laurent) and ‘rebels’ in the country’s northeast.

The story is actually quite decent by Times standards for recent coverage on Africa. Equally remarkable was them printing a summary of the multiple and complex causes at the heart of the conflict.

‘ … The Congo civil war traces its roots directly to the Rwandan genocide. The perpetrators of the slaughter of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus fled, along with more than a million Rwandan Hutu refugees, spilling across the border into Congo in 1994.

The Tutsi-led Rwandan government sponsored a rebel group to pursue them into Congo, then called Zaire, in 1996. Congo’s longtime ruler, Mobutu Sese Seko, presided over an increasingly unstable nation rotted through by his autocratic rule. Neighboring countries like Angola and Uganda, sensing a chance to cash in on Congo’s mineral riches, jumped into the fray.

In 1997 Mr. Mobutu was forced into exile, and the rebel leader Laurent D. Kabila became president. A year later, though, he split with his Rwandan backers, who then sponsored another rebellion, this time against Mr. Kabila. It would set off a second civil war, throwing the region into turmoil as neighboring countries backed different sides.’

The current crisis again risks drawing in Congo’s neighbors, especially Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi.

Full story here.

This of course represents an important break with how the editors’ of the Times interpreted and represented that conflict back in the late 1990s as its former West Africa correspondent Howard French has argued in his memoir A Continent for the Taking. The Tragedy and Hope of Africa.