Terrible war brewing in the Congo

clipped from www.nytimes.com SAKE, Congo — A major confrontation between the Congolese Army and a renegade general is plunging the country back toward war, threatening to undermine the fledgling democratic state and set off a new regional conflict on a scale not seen here in years. The battle turns on many of the same issues that caused Congo’s civil war, which supposedly ended in 2003. It was Africa’s deadliest modern war, fueled by the ethnic tensions between Hutus and Tutsis, Another factor was the quest to control Congo’s unusually rich endowment of minerals and farmland, especially here in North Kivu Province. The violence is also unfolding despite years of military and diplomatic intervention by the United Nations, the European Union and the United States to stem the tide of blood “The fundamental issues that led to the Congo war have never really been dealt with,” said Anneke Van Woudenberg of Human Rights Watch. “We are seeing the results of that now.”