Did Russ Feingold Just End a War? [View all]

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http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/03/russ-feingold-congo-104535.html#.UyBKVD9dWBR


Did Russ Feingold Just End a War?
The unlikely story of how the former Wisconsin senator made peace in Congo.

On a Saturday morning in late January, Russ Feingold descended a tight path in the hilly forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Kahuzi-Biega National Park to look for gorillas. The former Democratic senator from Wisconsin wore a long-sleeved safari shirt over a blue polo, a coiled bracelet to repel mosquitos, a surgical mask to protect the gorillas from human germs and two pairs of socks, with his zip-off cargo pants tucked into the outer pair to keep out ants. Aside from the cool touch of Ray-Ban aviators, it was the sort of outfit Chevy Chase might have sported if Hollywood had ever gotten around to making National Lampoon’s African Vacation.

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Feingold is 61 now, and his hair has grayed a touch since 2010, when, after 18 years in the Senate, he was beaten in his reelection campaign by Ron Johnson, a millionaire Tea Partier. Feingold had lost some weight on this trip, his seventh to the region since last June, when Secretary of State John Kerry named him U.S. special envoy to the Great Lakes region and the Democratic Republic of the Congo—or “SEGL” as his staff call him, pronouncing it like “Siegel.” (“It’s perfect—a Jewish name,” Feingold said.) His mission: to end the civil war that has long engulfed the region.

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And in taking on eastern Congo, one of the most violent places on Earth, Feingold could hardly have chosen a more dead-end assignment. The conflict there dates back to 1994, when Hutu génocidaires fleeing Rwanda set up camps across the border in what was then Zaire. Rwanda then led an invasion that ended Congolese President Mobutu Sese Seko’s 31 years of dictatorial rule but also turned the newly renamed Democratic Republic of the Congo into a nightmarish battleground of foreign armies and militant groups. Although Congo’s civil war formally ended in 2003, armed rebellion has continued ever since, especially in the two eastern provinces of North and South Kivu. The United Nations peacekeeping mission in the country is the U.N.’s largest and most expensive, employing 20,000 troops at a cost of $1.5 billion a year.One 2010 study estimated that 48 women were raped in Congo every hour, and a U.N. official called it “the rape capital of the world.” Estimates of the conflict’s death toll range in the millions.

Feingold’s assignment came just as a new group of rebels, trained and equipped by Rwanda, was gaining strength in the east and even threatening to take Kinshasa, the Congolese capital. Since last summer, Feingold has undertaken a dizzying round of talks in at least eight different African capitals, cajoling leaders face to face, negotiating with skittish rebels late into the night and strategizing with fellow diplomats, all in a very uphill effort to stop a long-running conflict in a region littered with failed peace deals. “Without a doubt,” he said over coffee a few hours after the gorilla trek, “this is one of the favorite things I’ve ever done in my life.”