Regional

SADC ruins Tshisekedi’s hope for troops’ deployment

2023-12-23 05:30:00

Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi has been pushing the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to deploy troops to the east of his country. The regional bloc pledged troops, but made no indication on exactly when actual deployment was to happen.

Leaders of the 16-nation regional bloc approved the deployment of the SADC Mission in DRC (SAMIDRC) at a summit in Windhoek in May 2023. Since then, SADC has been mysteriously silent about further details of the intervention. On November 17, Kinshasa signed an agreement on the status of the SADC force, giving hope that the troops might come soon.

Of the 16 countries, troops from South Africa, Tanzania and Malawi, were expected to arrive any moment in the chronically unstable region, troubled by the presence of more than 200 armed groups, both regional and foreign.

To date, no single soldier from the bloc has set foot on Congolese soil. It looks like Tshisekedi’s dream will be short lived.

Related: Will SADC bring peace to DRC?

A source from the SADC secretariat revealed to this website, that the SADC troops would not be sent to DRC due to failure of payment from Kinshasa.

When leaders met in May, it was assessed the force of some 5,000 troops, was budgeted to cost about $554-million for its first year of operation in DRC. However, Kinshasa has failed to pay its annual remittance to SADC of $10 million.

Without adequate resources, the SADC troops will not be deployed.

The development comes at a time when Kinshasa had expelled the East African Regional Force (EACRF), who began their withdrawal from east DRC on December 3. The regional force was criticized by Kinshasa for their ‘refusal to fight’ the M23 rebels. The last EACRF officers left Goma, the capital of North Kivu Province, on Thursday, December 21. The security situation in eastern DRC continues to deteriorate.

The proposed SADC mission, if it were to arrive, would not help matter since it would primarily target M23 rebels, leaving out the other armed groups including the Rwandan genocidal forces, FDLR, in eastern DRC.

Tshisekedi asked the EAC regional force to leave his country because the force refused to satisfy his wishes of attacking the M23 rebels. The bloc’s mission was only to create a buffer zone, allowing possibility of political dialogue between the warring parties.

With EACRF out of the way, Tshisekedi cast all his hopes on SADC troops to fill the void, and anticipated a heavy attack against M23.

Tshisekedi refused to dialogue with the M23 rebels, and branded them as terrorists, hoping that the rebels would be defeated militarily by the Southern Africa bloc, just like in 2013.

The failure to deploy SADC troops to eastern DRC should show Kinshasa that only a political solution will bring an end to the decades-long insecurity in the east of the country.