Close to three decades after the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, some of the perpetrators of the genocide are still wreaking havoc in neighboring DRC where they terrorize the local population and continue profiting from the country’s natural resources.

 

But why, or how, has this genocidal militia group -FDLR- survived in eastern DRC for nearly three decades despite all of its crimes against humanity? Who protects it?

 

The answer is simple.

 

The FDLR has had a long standing relationship with the DRC government, its army, politicians and civilian authorities.

 

The Congolese army and the Rwandan genocidal militia have a connection, and a strong relationship, dating as far back as 1990, when the RPF/RPA launched the liberation struggle. At the time, then President Mobutu Sese Seko, sent hundreds of troops from his elite Special Presidential Division (SPD) charged with his personal security, to Rwanda to assist the government of Juvénal Habyarimana.

 

Officers of the then Forces Armées Rwandaises (FAR), and the Congolese officers from Forces Armées Zaïroises (FAZ), have been colleagues for a long-time.

 

They attended the same Belgian military schools.

 

So, it only made sense that they come to the rescue of their Rwandan counterparts who were attacked by the ‘enemy’ from Uganda.

 

Led by Col Donatien Mahele, the contingent sent by Mobutu, helped the FAR in repelling the first offensive of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), and it was during a fight against the FAZ that the first military leader of the RPF, Maj Gen Fred Rwigema, died.

 

Fast forward to 1994, after the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, the defeated ex-FAR and Interahamwe militia who were responsible for killing more than one million people fled to DRC with all their weapons, money, and everything they could possibly carry.

 

Mobutu welcomed them, helped them settle in and started helping them to plan their attacks on Rwanda.

 

Their mission was to reorganize, rearm and force their way back to Rwanda to continue their genocidal agenda. The Tutsi had to whipped out, not only in Rwanda but everywhere, including in DRC.

 

After being welcomed with open arms in then Zaire, they never stopped spewing genocidal venom. They were given a safe sanctuary from which to plan their return to Rwanda and ‘finish the job’. Since 1995, they launched attacks on Rwanda but failed in their ultimate objective.

 

To shed off their genocidal hue, they formed the FDLR in September 2000.

 

This genocidal militia group and the Congolese army, FARDC, have worked together on numerous occasions, the latest being their present collaboration in fighting the M23 rebels.

 

In October 2022, Human Rights Watch published a report pinning the FARDC on supplying arms and ammunitions to the FDLR. Congolese army officers attended secret meetings with the genocidal group’s leaders and provided the armed groups with direct support.

 

“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.

 

The FARDC-FDLR alliance is not only a violation of international law but an alliance of evil.

 

But today, the biggest threat posed by the FDLR, and its splinter groups, is not a military threat. It is their genocide ideology, which has spread like a cancer in the Congolese population.

 

After the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, the fleeing genocidal machinery took control over DRC’s east. They mingled and intermarried then dominated and rooted themselves within the population.

 

This made it easy for them to spread their genocide ideology.

 

The long standing relationship and ideology between the FDLR and the Congolese government is not by coincidence, but a choice.

 

According to Bernard Maingain, a Belgian lawyer who has condemned the anti-Tutsi hate speeches in eastern DRC, the plan to complete the extermination of the Tutsi was never lost sight of by the genocidaires who managed to stay in the country and mingle with the population.

 

In an interview with French veteran journalist Jean-Francois Dupaquier, Maingain recalls how Théoneste Bagosora, the 'architect of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, and one of the main defendants before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, expressed their genocidal programme most clearly in various writings and during his trial. Bagosora is infamously known for saying: "We have lost the war in Rwanda for the time being, but we will come back to power sooner or later because that is the way of history.”

 

Maingain said: "This is the ideology we are facing today. I will remember for a long time the image of a new generation of extremists, shouting at the big barrier in Goma on 15 June 2022, that they will cross to complete the genocide in Rwanda... How can these words be uttered today?"

 

In the DRC, he noted, the plan to complete the extermination of the Tutsi was never lost sight of by the genocidaires.

 

The discourse had been formulated and refined in Rwanda since 1959: "The Tutsi are a predatory race, the only solution is to eliminate them, from the child to the old man.”

 

With the emergence of social networks, the lawyer noted, this discourse is taken up again and again and is growing in the DRC, but much further afield, as hate speech can be found in Belgium, France, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States.

 

Eastern DRC is also a region where the population lives in great economic precariousness and is permeable to the scapegoat strategy.

 

And the easy scapegoat is the Tutsi, Maingain noted.