In June 2014 a massacre took place in Mutarule, a village close to the Rwandan and Burundi border, leaving 35 people dead. It was the fourth massacre in two years. Despite many indications from local authorities, the UN and the Congolese army about the unstable situation in the region, neither the UN-troops or the Congolese army were able to prevent the massacre. Does uncertainty and violence continue in Eastern Congo because too many local and international players are involved in the conflicts? Do they benefit from them or prevent them from getting worse?

In Congo, like in many other former colonies, independence could never cultivate a stable government — not to mention a functioning civil society. The ruined traditional and civil society structures and absent state monopolies have been superseded by western financed parallel structures: the NGOs and the UN peace missions. Denounced as merely self-sustaining, fatally entangled in the respective power systems of neocolonial apparatuses, the NGOs and the UN missions currently find themselves in a crisis of legitimacy. Is the peacekeeping policy of the international community co-responsible for the continuing conflict?