DRC crisis: MONUSCO evacuating FDLR’s casualties, complicit in mass killings

Author: Samson Kasujja

• 2024-02-28 14:39:00

The UN mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, MONUSCO, has been evacuating and treating casualties of FDLR, a Rwandan terrorist group supporting the Congolese national army coalition to fight M23 rebels.

Sources say the Congolese army coalition has lost a large number of soldiers in recent battles in areas around Sake, Kalehe, Minova, and Bweramana, in North Province.

On February 27, MONUSCO provided a helicopter that carried 44 soldiers of FDLR and Congolese army who were wounded in heavy clashes around Sake, for their treatment in Bukavu, South Kivu Province.

Among the casualties, 40 soldiers were seriously wounded.

For more than two years since the M23 retook arms in late 2021, the Congolese army coalition of the Burundian national army, SADC troops, Eastern European mercenaries, MONUSCO, Wazalendo militias, and the Rwandan genocidal militia, FDLR, failed to defeat the rebel group.

In early November 2023, MONUSCO and Congolese national army launched codenamed operation springbok allegedly to protect Goma, the capital of North Kivu, from falling in hands of M23 rebels.

Since then, the coalition carried out heavy attacks against M23, and the rebel group accused the coalition of using heavy artilleries while shelling in populated areas.

Formed in mid 2000 by remnants of the perpetrators of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, FDLR spread its genocide ideology in eastern DRC, and has carried out mass killings targeting Congolese Tutsi.

The October 2022 report by Human Rights Watch noted that “FDLR fighters have killed hundreds of civilians over the years in eastern DRC, at times hacked them to death with machetes or hoes, or burned them in their homes.”

“The fighters have committed countless rapes and other acts of sexual violence,” HRW reported.

Evacuating and treating FDLR’s wounded soldiers and preparing them ready for returning to the battleground, shows MONUSCO’s complicity in mass killings targeting Congolese Tutsi in eastern DRC.

The blue helmets have registered no single achievement in fulfilling their mission in the volatile mineral-rich country.  With their presence, armed groups in eastern DRC multiplied from about five to more than 260.

Hundreds thousands of Congolese have been killed while millions of others are displaced.

The MONUCO’s failures have angered Congolese citizens, and on different occasions, they protested asking the mission to leave their country as it failed them.

Civil societies have been alleging MONUSCO officials of involving in creation of armed groups, to secure mining sites exploited by Western mining companies. The mission is more staying in DRC for economic motives, not restoring peace and security.