EngRegional
Would DRC’s Kinyarwanda speaking communities be better off with a homeland of their own?
Of the countless egregious crimes that the Kinshasa regime is
perpetrating against the DR Congo’s Tutsi citizens, one stands out for the
sheer tribal prejudices that inform it (and that provide Kinshasa the fuel for
its ongoing campaign of genocide against the beleaguered people). This is the
relentless efforts to deprive the Congolese Tutsi – composed primarily of
Kinyarwanda-speaking pastoralist or herder communities in the east of the
country – of their citizenship, their nationality.
Senior-most members of the Congolese government basically have
declared their Tutsi compatriots “Rwandans”. Ba-Rwandais!
To give just one of thousands of possible examples across
Africa, it is as if the government of Kenya today were to wake up, and declare
all its Somali citizens to be foreigners! Everyone knows Kenyan Somalis are
nationals of the country just as the Kalenjins, the Gikuyu, the Abaluhya, the
Maasai, and dozens of other ethnicities. Their commonality is that one morning
in 1885 they all woke to find themselves under an entity called Kenya, after
Europeans sitting in Berlin drew lines on a map of Africa.
It is only in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that they
pretend to ignore the realities of their colonially created entity,
purposefully to disenfranchise a whole section of the country’s people.
Congolese authorities – under the guise of fighting the M23 movement – use that lie to incite masses of ordinary Congolese of other ethnicities against their Tutsi compatriots. Take a few minutes to listen to the audio clip, and the blood-curdling calls to genocide. It is hate speech that, in this region, last was deployed against Rwanda’s Tutsi population in the period 1990-94. In fact, there is no difference between it and RTLM broadcasts circa 1994.
This is no coincidence. FDLR, the offshoot of the forces that
were the main perpetrators of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda
(the ex-FAR and Interahamwe militias) are in the thick of today’s genocidal
activity in eastern DR Congo, ahead of other militias like the so-called Wazalendo (patriots).
Kinshasa looks very determined to exterminate, or expel a whole
section of its citizenry – Banyarwanda
ba rudi kwawo! – using genocide as the means. In that, they couldn’t have
found better partners than FDLR.
The claims by the inciters of hate that they are doing this
“because the M23 is fighting the government” is just one of the countless
untenable fallacies that you will hear emanating from the DR Congo’s
authorities.
Let alone questions like how a rebel group’s activities
supposedly are justification for wholesale slaughter of civilian populations,
one may ask: who exactly is “fighting” who?
The M23, as any knowledgeable observer may know, only took up
arms once the central government in Kinshasa – under the previous regime of
Joseph Kabila – threatened the rights of their communities. That also was after
Kabila reneged on an agreement to integrate troops from the
Kinyarwanda-speaking communities into the national army.
For some context, one has to remember how the defeated genocidal
regime in Rwanda exported their ideology to the then Zaire, now DR Congo, and
found a willing host in the government of President Mobutu Sese Seko. They had
suffered defeat at the hands of the Rwandese Patriotic Front and fled, in
hyperchaotic scenes, across the border. Once across, their immediate goal was
to re-launch attacks into Rwanda. And so they embarked on building a force in
the vast Mugunga refugee camp, with the active help of Mobutu, and the
government of former French president Francois Mitterrand.
There is a clear causal link between the failures of the Mobutu government, and the perpetual insecurity that has bedeviled the east of the vast country. Mobutu, rather than dealing decisively with the ex-FAR and Interahamwe problem, meaning to disarm them, arrest their ringleaders, and state in no uncertain terms that Zaire wasn’t going to be a safe haven for illegal armed activity, instead chose to work with them. Kabila “First” and “Second” too chose to work with the genocidal forces, who continued to wreak havoc, and to target the pastoralist, herder communities in particular, because of who they are.
With the Tshisekedi regime’s recourse to genocide, one can see
another highly cynical calculus at play; one informed by the thinking that
targeting people and falsely labeling them “Rwandan foreigners” is the surest
way to gain votes. Tshisekedi has, since he took power in January 2019,
presided over an ever-deteriorating economy, higher crime rates than any
predecessor, and levels of corruption that would startle Mobutu himself.
With this record of abject failure, and faced with a
presidential election in about two months’ time, inciting hate against the
Tutsi population, but also constantly blaming Rwanda as a means to deflect from
this woeful record, is all Tshisekedi has.
Will the DR Congo’s Tutsi communities survive Tshisekedi?
And in case they do, what then? Who will guarantee their
security, long term?
At this point who would blame them if they were to think of a separate homeland?
