The East African - Kenya : "... Overall, it reveals the wider security crises of the Congo Basin-Great Lakes region, coming as the latest effects of US foreign policy overreach, and the contradictions in the policies and practices carried out by the regimes in Kampala and Kigali since the fall of Mobutu.
In their quest to consolidate their strategic position in the region, the US may find that they have perhaps relied a little too heavily on the perspectives offered by the local "partners" serving as implementers and guarantors.
Apart from matters of scale, the DRC's problems are not essentially different from the problems faced by most of the European-created states in the region: Trying to build a modern nation out of what was essentially someone else's economic project.
Uganda has called for a multi-nation conference to find a way beyond the failed previous peace initiative, and has appealed for international humanitarian assistance to cope with the tide of refugees.
But the country's poor record in the DRC of instigating, and then failing to resolve disastrous conflicts, mean that no honest stakeholder should take its proposals seriously. For a start, perhaps if Uganda had not first participated in the further wrecking of the wreckage already left by Mobutu, then maybe this crisis would not have emerged in the first place.
Furthermore, if the Ugandan government had found the decency to honour the 2005 UN International Court of Justice ruling to compensate the DRC to the tune of $10 billion, then perhaps some of the reasons cited for the mutinies — poor pay and conditions — would not have developed to this stage.
