ABSTRACT
The Great Lakes region of Central Africa has been in turmoil since the beginning of this decade and has slid into a macabre cycle of violence. Political and ethnic conflict, killings of colossal proportions, huge refugee flows, humanitarian disaster: these have been the fate of Rwanda, Burundi and the Congolese Kivu provinces during the last several years. In this chapter, these momentous events serve only as a background, even if a particularly gruesome one, to the topic we wish to address. Our interest centres on Belgium’s foreign policy and development co-operation policies, and in particular the coherence or otherwise of these policies. Rwanda, Burundi and Congo (ex-Zaire) have historically been the major recipients of Belgian aid and the main focus of its diplomacy. The political, social and military upheavals that have taken place in the Central African region have thus been of direct relevance to Belgian foreign policy and aid policy. They have confronted Belgium’s bilateral relations, both in terms of diplomacy and development co-operation, with fundamental challenges. A major difficulty has been to respond in an adequate manner to rapidly changing situations: navigating between structural and emergency aid, applying political conditionality in an incremental fashion at a time when this instrument was far from developed, employing diplomacy in the attempt to arrive at negotiated settlements, and even resorting to a military presence which turned out to be disastrous.
