These people have seen refugee camps before after the Rwandan genocide of 1994, when hundreds of thousands of Rwandans fled to Goma and they did not like what they saw: squalor, cholera, bloodshed.

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The end of the cold war in 1989 raised hopes that human rights would be more widely respected, and the 1990s became the decade of democracy yet it also brought horrors such as the Rwandan genocide and the ethnic cleansing of the Balkans.

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The Rwandan government, for its part, is satisfied with a military situation that gives it de facto control over almost half the country and enables it to pursue the Rwandan militiamen responsible for the 1994 genocide.

ECONOMIST: War and peace in Congo | The