ABSTRACT
Africa, Frantz Fanon once said, has the shape of a gun and its trigger is Congo. Its dense jungles have often been the site of various, interlocked conflicts that seem to come and go, continually, in the African Great Lakes region. Fugitive rebel movements find shelter there, regroup and resume their struggles from well concealed bases. Among them have been the Interahamwe from Rwanda — militia that carried out the genocide that, between April and July 1994, left over 800,000 people dead — Burundian rebels, militarised Congolese movements and, in late 2005, the notorious Lord's Resistance Army. Run ragged by Uganda's armed forces, this mysterious cluster of child fighters left the no man's land of northern Uganda and southern Sudan and sought refuge in the sheltering jungles of the Congo. Once again, the vastness of sub-Saharan Africa's largest country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC, formerly Zaire), had once again attracted fugitive guerrillas — adding further complication to a complex of interlocking regional wars being fought on Congolese soil.
