EngRegional
UN Group of Experts or UN Group of Detractors?
The UN
Group of Experts (GoE) continues to engage in a determined political campaign
to tarnish Rwanda, blaming the country for the DRC conflicts.
Echoing
Rwanda every time they release a report on DRC has turned out to be the GoE’s
manipulative tool to win the heart of a mineral-rich but ill-fated country. They
embrace Kinshasa’s anti-Rwanda narrative and hide behind their ‘experts’ tag to
mislead the world about what is really happening in eastern DRC while glossing
over issues and deliberately avoiding to shed light on the root causes of the
endless conflicts.
The leaked
final report by the United Nations Group of Experts on DRC dated June 13, claimed
that the self-proclaimed experts obtained evidence of direct interventions by
the Rwanda Defence Force (RDF) on DRC’s soil. They claim that Rwandan troops
are there to “reinforce M23 combatants or to conduct military operations
against the FDLR and local armed groups.”
The
UN system that these so-called experts work for is the same UN that deployed
troops to DRC mandated to restore peace, protect the Congolese population and
eliminate armed groups including the genocidal militia FDLR which poses a serious
threat to DRC’s Rwandophones. However, the incompetent, corrupt, most expensive,
and well-equipped MONUSCO failed to, for over 20 years, accomplish its mission in
the country.
To
cover their failures, a powerless country like Rwanda is their best scapegoat.
In addition
to normalizing the FDLR presence in DRC and their close collaboration with the
Congolese army, UN experts shifted all the blame of endless conflict in eastern
Congo to Rwanda and M23. Worse still, they call the looming genocide against
Congolese Tutsi a “narrative” invented by the M23 rebels and their alleged
backers, Rwanda.
“The
Group of Experts notes that, while incidents of violence against Rwandophone
communities were beyond doubt, the manipulation of the genocide narrative by
M23 and the Rwandan authorities has significantly increased the risk of
civilians being targeted and could trigger widespread inter-ethnic violence
between communities.”
At
any rate, the UN knows very well that Rwandophones were subjected to targeted killings
and discrimination since the 1960s but they choose to ignore the evidence. They
also knows that Rwandan genocidaires – members of the FDLR – who were given a
safe haven in DRC transferred the anti-Tutsi genocide ideology to DRC, thereby worsening
the existing hateful discourse, discrimination, and killings targeting the
Congolese Tutsi.
The ‘experts’
overlooked the facts and chose to team with Kinshasa in its political campaign
against Rwanda. They advance the narrative of balkanization by alleging that
one of the reasons that Rwanda allegedly supports M23 is “to secure control
over mine sites and gain political influence in the Democratic Republic of the
Congo”.
Rwanda
has been clear on this, several times.
“One
thing we are not and that makes us resilient is that we are not thieves. We
work for what we have and what we gets,” said President Paul Kagame, adding
that if it were to be true that Rwanda was looting minerals in DRC, it could do
it easier if the relations between the two countries were good.
Even
though the authors claim to have "used evidentiary standards recommended
by the report of the Informal Working Group of the Security Council on General
Issues of Sanctions", the report is riddled with intentional lies,
inaccuracies, bias, and stereotypes that have characterized self-styled experts
who have reported on Rwanda in the past.
A
keen reader will quickly notice that the report’s authors have a hidden agenda against
the Rwandan government.
