Truths Kinshasa doesn’t want the world to know about M23 rebels

Author: Emma Mukasa

• 2023-02-28 05:23:00

Since the resurgence of the March 23 Movement in late 2021, Kinshasa has been creating and spreading lies to confuse the International Community about the real cause of the conflict between the government and the rebels.

Congolese leaders first said that the rebels are Rwandan militia who want to balkanize part of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). They later changed to calling them terrorists who want to destabilize the volatile eastern part of the country.

Now, again, the current narrative is that M23 are actually the Rwandan army that seeks to exploit the country’s minerals.

Scapegoating Rwanda in the current insecurity crisis in eastern DRC is still being used as a weapon by President Felix Tshisekedi and his government to evade the reality. They want the world to believe that he has not failed to protect his people but Rwanda has weakened him to stop him from delivering on his mandate since assuming office.

The conflict between M23 rebels and Kinshasa has nothing to do with Rwanda.

 It stems from the long time discrimination against Rwandophones whose rights to be recognized as Congolese citizens were denied by their government. The Rwandophones have lived in DRC for centuries but they are harassed and killed only because they speak Kinyarwanda.

The M23 is not a terrorist movement as Kinshasa says. It is a Congolese rebel group, which took up arms to fight for a legitimate cause. Among their grievances are the continued harassment of Congolese Tutsi, lack of security and discrimination of their community which resulted in thousands of Rwandophones becoming refugees in Africa and beyond.

Congolese officials know all of this but do nothing about it. The M23 repeatedly presented their complaints to Kinshasa, but have been ignored. The world needs to listen to these rebels otherwise this issue will resurrect over and over.

There are more than one million Rwandophone refugees and asylum-seekers in countries bordering DRC who have lived in in exile for more than 20 years. Nearly half of them are sheltered in Uganda (479,400). Others are scattered in Burundi 87,500; Tanzania 80,000; Rwanda 72,200; Zambia 52,100; the Republic of the Congo 28,600 and Angola 23,200.

Approximately 9,000 and 17,000 refugees who were in Rwanda and Uganda respectively, were resettled in Western countries but those refugees were replaced by new ones. In 2022 alone, Rwanda and Uganda received more than 100,000 refugees from eastern DRC fleeing persecution and a consistent threat to their lives.

These refugees need a place to call home, but Kinshasa continues to ignore them and refuse to recognize their rights. If the DRC government doesn’t want to listen to them, what does it expect from them? To just sit, close their arms and accept to live in exile forever? Hardly can that happen.

Congolese leaders needs to pay attention to the real issues at hand including conducive conditions for the repatriation of all these refugees.

The international community needs to realize that the United Nations peacekeeping mission has failed. For more than two decades, MONUSCO has brought no positive change in DRC but costed millions of dollars. The UN peacekeepers have consistently failed the Congolese population, with the latter often protesting against their presence.

The genocidal militia from Rwanda, FDLR, have killed hundreds of Congolese Tutsi over the years, at times hacking them to death with machetes or hoes, or burning them to death in their homes. They have committed countless rapes and other acts of sexual violence in eastern DRC but MONUSCO has continuously failed, or refused, to put an end to the militia’s atrocities.

The M23 has achieved more in less than eight months what the United Nations didn’t manage to do for decades. They have created a safe environment for DRC citizens. People who live in areas controlled by M23 are the living proof of how the rebels are a peaceful movement and a reliable partner now and in future.