Africa's peace seekers: Petronille Vaweka
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Her pitch to militia chiefs was simple. They had three self-interested reasons to disarm: It would boost their legitimacy, help their soldiers have better lives, and improve their popularity with locals, which could help in upcoming elections. The argument largely worked. With some 15,000 militia members having started demobilization, the province is as calm as it's been in years.
Yet Vaweka is hardly a pacifist at any price. There's a great need, she says, for the national Army - as the legitimate repository for Ituri's guns. And she supports the UN in its new aggressive stance toward militias. "At some point we had to face [with force] the people who wouldn't listen - the people who think weapons are power," she says.
For now, she plays a kind of "good cop" to the UN's "bad cop." She meets with militias - including the FRPI - and encourages them to cooperate with authorities and lay down their weapons. The UN goes after those that don't.
But ultimately, she says, the UN and its guns can't solve Ituri's problems: "No outside force can help Iturians if they can't understand they must not use weapons."
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The burned-out hulk of a one-story building, with its collapsed tin roof and strewn-about bricks, says everything about the central challenge Vaweka now faces.
It's the sweltering morning of Aug. 5, 2005, and Vaweka has just landed in the northern Ituri town of Aru in a giant UN helicopter. Now she's standing in front of the charred building. Until two days ago, this was the government's main office in town. Then it went up in flames. There's little doubt it was arson.
As she walks closer to the building, she passes an honor guard of ex-militia men, who've joined the new Army. With rifles slung over their shoulders, they salute Vaweka. Their commander grasps what's supposed to be a ceremonial sword - but is merely a long piece of wood, wrapped in tinfoil. What might be comical under other circumstances is an earnest attempt at normalcy here.
With fighting on the decline, the Kinshasa-based national government is trying to establish order in long-lawless Ituri - to collect taxes, administer services, and more. But the militias who have been in charge consider that a threat - and see Vaweka, the government's local leader, as the source of their troubles.
Inside the building's ash-filled file room Vaweka walks past destroyed records of militia atrocities around Aru. It will be much harder to punish or prosecute with those records gone. Also incinerated were voter records for national elections that the government, with UN help, is organizing for next year.
Even Ituri's antagonistic Hema and Lendu ethnic militias - who have fought each other viciously for years - are uniting against their new common enemy, the Kinshasa government. The remaining armed groups "are doing their best to stop her," says Joel Bisubu of the Bunia-based advocacy group Justice Plus. They accuse her of being a puppet of the Kinshasa government - and of being a politician, not a peacemaker.
Back in the UN helicopter, on the flight from Aru to Bunia, Vaweka seems unperturbed by all the challenges. Of the apparent arson she says simply, "Nobody died, so it's not so bad." She asked Aru officials to draw up plans for the building's reconstruction.
Of her role as a politician, she says, with a piercing look that might make her grandmother proud, "Some people say what I'm doing now is politics, but I say it's what I've always been doing: Trying to protect the people."
1948 Born in Ituri Province of then-Belgian Congo
1979 Widowed, then married Paul Ciongo, her son's guitar teacher
2000 Worked for Oxfam as hygiene promoter
2000 Started Foundation for Everlasting Peace
2003 Appointed President of Ituri interim assembly
2004 Appointed Ituri District Commissioner
A musical family
The Ciongo-Vawekas recorded a 3-song CD entitled "Mekadishkem" or "God Who Makes us Holy."
