UN GoE report uncovered MONUSCO’s lies

Author: Kalembe Josephine

• 2024-05-23 05:30:00

In February 2024, fighting flared between M23 rebels and Congolese government forces near Goma, the capital and largest city of North Kivu Province, in eastern DRC.

During the fighting, on February 2, a United Nations Mission MONUSCO helicopter carrying out a medical evacuation came under fire near Karuba, in Masisi territory. The attack wounded two UN peacekeepers, one of them seriously.

The Congolese government, MONUSCO, and the international community all blamed the M23 rebels for the incident. Others went as far as blaming Rwanda, which they accuse of supporting the rebels, an accusation Kigali has vehemently denied.

In a statement released shortly afterwards, the head of MONUSCO, Bintou Keita, ‘strongly condemned’ the attack and reiterated her call to the M23 to cease hostilities and unconditionally disarm.

A few months after the incident, the truth came out, no matter how hard UN peacekeepers in DRC tried to hide it.

In a ‘leaked’ report by the UN Group of experts on DRC, it was revealed it was the Congolese Republican Guard’s Special Unit in Kimoka that used commercial drones equipped with mortar shells or other explosives - including IEDs against MONUSCO.

“The group reiterates that these attacks on UN peacekeepers and staff constitute of sanctionable acts,” read part of the report.

Kinshasa blaming the M23 rebels for all the insecurity in the east is not new, and it now looks like the UN peacekeepers have joined the blame games trend. MONUSCO purposely chose not to conduct any investigation after the incident, because it found it convenient to solely blame the M23 rebels for the attacks and the death of their peacekeepers.

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

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

When MONUSCO blamed M23 rebels for deadly attacks, it was just a cover-up for their security failures, and the mission’s failure to protect the Congolese population, like the Kinyarwanda speaking community, especially the Congolese Tutsi.

Congolese Tutsi communities, whom M23 rebels are fighting to protect, are being persecuted, killed and subjected to hate speech, by the Congolese army's coalition of Burundian troops, SADC troops, Wazalendo militia, eastern European mercenaries, and the Rwandan genocidal militia, FDLR, with the support of MONUSCO.

The blue helmets have been operating in DRC since 1999. Currently, 12,800 of the initial 20,000 troops are still deployed in different regions of DRC, on a budget of more than $1 billion a year. It is the most expensive peacekeeping mission in the UN’s history, despite the fact that for more than two decades of operations in eastern DRC, it has brought no positive change. Armed groups multiplied from about five to over 260, as of 2024.