Ghost Watch

Author’s note

While Ghost Watch is a work of fction, there’s plenty of fact woven into the narrative. The Democratic Republic of Congo is a mess and has been for a very long time. Since 1994, when the genocide going on in Rwanda officially ended there and moved across the border, it’s estimated more than four million people, mostly innocent citizens and bystanders, have been slaughtered in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

There’s a recently expanded UN force (MONUC) of twenty thousand operating in the North Kivu area of the DRC, where much of Ghost Watch takes place, but reports suggest that it is largely ineffective at curbing the violence between the warring Tutsi and Hutus and other factions and interests. And sometimes actually exacerbates it.

The situation has been made worse in recent years with the realization by First World nations the United States, China and Russia that there’s significant and diverse mineral wealth in the area, and each promotes its interests by supporting a local army (there are at least six fighting in the DRC) with money, logistical support, training and arms.

You wouldn’t want to live there.

I’ve been aware of the misery going on in the Congo since 1987, when a buddy of mine decided that he was going to Zaire (as the DRC was then called) to check out the gorillas made famous by the late Dian Fossey.

Vaguely interested in perhaps making this trek myself, I started to poke around through various news sources. They painted a pretty horrendous picture. My pal changed his mind and went to South America instead. I went to Amsterdam.

All these years later, I can’t say definitively why I decided to send Cooper to Africa. It might have been the rumour I’d heard that the US had a secret training base in Rwanda, on the border with the DRC. But the discovery of a new US military command being formed to oversee America’s national interests on the African continent (AFRICOM) sealed it.

I have to say that I found researching the recent history of the DRC, and the eyewitness reports of massacres happening there, harrowing to say the least.

Ghost Watch contains some pretty grizzly scenes based on that research, but they don’t compare to the gruesome reality. Frankly, had I not pulled my punches a little, I fear I might have taken this story somewhere else.

A couple of months into the writing of Ghost Watch, Laurant Nkunda, the former DRC general who went on to form and lead the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP), a Tutsi militia supported by Rwanda, was arrested in Rwanda. Nkunda’s arrest came at the insistence of his former employer, the government of the DRC. The charges against him relate to various human rights violations and war crimes including rape, murder, the use of child soldiers and so on. He’s being held under house arrest somewhere in Rwanda.

As one of my characters says in the story’s narrative, I don’t think he will ever come to trial, or be handed over to the DRC. I’ll be surprised if this monster doesn’t simply disappear. If ever there was a war criminal that deserved justice, it’s Laurant Nkunda.