Regional
Why Congolese army-FDLR alliance is an evil enterprise
The
FDLR was formed by individuals responsible for the Genocide against the Tutsi.
One
foggy Friday morning, on February 20, 2009, I sat on an old wooden bench,
in deep thought reflecting on our difficult and tiring eight-hour trek through
unforgiving thick jungle the day before.
Luckily,
we had reached our destination, a hidden Rwandan military outpost uphill in a
humid region covered by steep hills on the boundary of Masisi and Walikale
territories, moments before the skies released a pounding downpour.
But
I was worried; having just seen the helicopter sent to take us back home turn
and fly away without its passengers. To create a smoke signal, soldiers had
built fires in a clearing at the top of the hill, and added grass and green
branches to smother the flames and create a spiraling dense, white smoke so
that the signal could be seen from miles away.
A
commander on ground talked to the pilot on his walkie-talkie as the chopper
hopefully circled overhead, searching. Even though we could catch glimpses of
it through dense fog, the pilot just couldn’t locate us. After a while, the
commander reasoned that it was too risky for the chopper to linger around much
longer.
The
pilot was granted permission to fly back to Goma, the provincial capital of
North Kivu in eastern DR Congo., and try again later, when the sky is clearer.
I knew that in that part of the world things didn’t always go as planned.
The
troops then had orders to start their more than 200-kilometre march southwards,
and homewards, on foot. Having already experienced a bit of what they endure, I
didn’t envy them. My muscles still ached from the previous day’s overexertion.
The
chopper had just abandoned us and, clearly, the fog was not about to disappear.
Will I break down after trekking 50 kilometers? What if it rains heavily? Are
we going to walk day and night? Such were some of the disturbing questions on
my mind when, suddenly, a man with a goat amidst a group of soldiers a few
metres away distracted me. I was about to learn that ‘my worries’ were nothing,
compared to the danger his community faced.
It
was barely a week towards the end of operation Umoja Wetu, the
short-lived joint military offensive launched by Rwanda and DR Congo against
the FDLR militia, some 13 years ago.
The
genesis
When
the Rwanda Patriotic Army (RPA) took charge in Kigali and stopped the Genocide
against the Tutsi, in July 1994, the ousted genocidal regime’s army (ex-FAR),
politicians as well as Interahamwe militia who orchestrated
the Genocide – runaway, en masse, to eastern DR Congo, then known as Zaire.
The
ex-FAR and the Interahamwe fled with their weapons. Worse still, they arrived
in Zaïre with the same ideology of exterminating the Tutsi.
Before
fleeing, they had massacred more than one million people, in three months. In
Zaire, they were welcomed with open arms and they never stopped spewing
genocidal venom. They were given a safe sanctuary from which to plan their
return to Rwanda and ‘finish the job’.
Conscious
that their involvement in the genocide was damaging their image and
relationship with the international community, the genocidairesmutated
several times, adopting new names.
The
FDLR was founded in September 2000. It is blacklisted as a terrorist group
because of the horrendous crimes it committed on Congolese territory. Like
others before, its recruits are indoctrinated in genocide ideology. Those who
want to abandon ‘the cause’ and return to Rwanda are held hostage by hardliners.
Their
presence in South Kivu and North Kivu Provinces is the raison d’être for some
Congolese rebel groups, including the M23 group – story for another day – which
is fighting to protect Tutsi communities from the genocidaires’ atrocities.
Kinshasa refuses to listen to their plight; making things even worse for them.
But
it’s not only the Congolese Tutsi population that is taking the brunt of the
militia’s crimes.
They
will kill us all
In
Matembe hills, Ramadhan Shenyongo, a village elder, had got “bad news” that
Rwandan troops were readying to return home. For him, they were “abandoning”
his people to face the wrath of Rwandan genocidaires.
Shenyongo
was a man on a mission that eerily morning. The goat was a gift and he had come
to the camp in what appeared to be his village’s last-ditch effort at earnestly
begging the Rwandans not to leave. Having earlier welcomed and lived with the
Rwandan troops, the villagers feared the militia would, on return, spare no one
in their reprisal killings.
Rwandan
soldiers dealt the militia a heavy blow and captured many civilian dependents
who were sent back to Rwanda. But the Hunde, Nyanga and Congolese Hutu
inhabitants of the area were convinced that the defeated genocidal militia
fighters who retreated deep into the expanse of jungle would return, sooner or
later, with a vengeance.
“They
are waiting for you to leave and then they come back to harass us,” Shenyongo
told the soldiers.
“They
will come back, and surely, they will kill us all, if you leave... we suffer so
much in this country,” he said, adding: “Some [FDLR] have run away but we are
very worried about what will happen to us once these soldiers leave, please
save us from this misery.”
A
Major laboured to allay the village emisary’s fears. The Rwanda Defence Force
had done its job, the officer told the man, and the Congolese army would take
over and fully secure the area.
“Your
village is safe now,” the old man was told. “Do not worry.” About an hour
later, the man and his team said their goodbyes. I could not tell if they were
reassured, but they left anyway.
A
Lieutenant, who stood by, quietly taking in everything, told me that the best
way to protect the village and others in North Kivu was to stay a little longer
and force the militia to totally surrender. The [military] pressure had to be
sustained instead of giving them room to breathe. He suggested that two months
– the period the operation lasted – were not enough. But the call was “not ours
to make.”
There
was so much noise in the international community, and in Kinshasa, clamouring
for Rwandan soldiers to leave eastern DR Congo, allegedly because the joint
operation was creating a humanitarian catastrophe.
Once
the Rwandans left, the Congolese army and the UN peacekeeping mission pretended
to do something. They first launched their own joint military operation, Operation
Kimia II, to fight the genocidal militia. But they never really
prevented the militia’s deliberate reprisals against the population. The genocidaires continued
to prey on the civilian population; pillaging, murdering and raping – a
hallmark of the FDLR, with impunity.
Reprisal
killings
The
militia’s attack in Luofu and Kasiki villages in Lubero territory, North Kivu
Province, on April 17, 2009, spoke volumes. They attacked the two villages, at
night, killing at least seven civilians, including five children who burned to
death in their homes. Scores of other civilians were injured.
And
nearly 300 houses were burned to the ground while Congolese soldiers in both villages
fled. A day after the killers left, the UN peacekeeping mission, then MONUC,
dispatched a patrol. Too late. On very many occasions, this is how the UN force
keeps the peace in eastern DR Congo.
Looking
back at events in Matembe hills, two months earlier, I got a broader sense of
perspective. I commiserated with the people in Shenyongo’s village as I then
made better sense of their situation.
Being
associated with genocide is no light matter. The FDLR are not just another
negative militia, or rebel group, on Congolese soil. Their extermination agenda
and genocide ideology sets them apart. As such, the group should be an enemy of
the entire international community. Genocide, for those who don’t understand
it, is a crime against humanity, and as such, a crime against the world.
There
will be people, ‘green’ or not, arguing that most FDLR members are young or
‘innocent’ people who did not commit genocide in Rwanda. But Genocide ideology
has no age. The main concern here is what FDLR - and whatever other name they
metamorphose into in a bid to shade off their genocidal past - stand for.
They
stand for a poisonous ideology that has caused so much animosity and sowed so
much hate. Every alliance with them is an alliance of evil because they are a
force bent on extermination.
They
are not a militia that any well-intentioned peace-loving citizen of this world
should call on to dialogue with Kigali, or any government.
However,
with the international community looking the other way, the militia continues
to create alliances with other subversive groups against Rwanda. They have used
media propaganda aimed at garnering international support, spreading genocide
denial and demonising the Rwandan government.
Congolese
military officials and politicians, as well as the militia group, will deny
their collaboration in public. But Kinshasa has supported the
ex-Far/Interahamwe, and later FDLR, overtly and covertly, for the past two
decades. UN experts on several occasions reported that the militia continued to
benefit from support from senior Congolese officers. Cases of army commanders
giving, or selling, weapons and information to the very armed militia they were
supposed to be targeting are common knowledge.
The
Congolese army has occasionally waged military offensives against the genocidal
militia but these could never fully succeed since, other factors constant, some
officers were at the same time transferring weapons and information to FDLR
units. Then there are the pro-genocidaire politicians working tirelessly to
ensure that their protégés are never defeated.
Besides
the financing it gets through donations from faith-based charities in Western
capitals, the militia has a large stake in the illegal mining business and
illegal drug trade in, among others, industrial hemp, or marijuana, as a main
source of profit. For long, the group’s fighters and Congolese soldiers jointly
controlled the marijuana trade in Lubero, Walikale and Rutshuru areas.
Things
will worsen if Congolese authorities, and the international community, continue
to bury their heads in the sand. In the past two months, there was unease
especially driven by appalling images, on social media, of machete-happy people
pursuing Rwandans and Kinyarwanda-speaking Congolese in North and South Kivu
Provinces. The same way they used the radio to disseminate genocide propaganda
during the 1994 genocide, the genocidaires used mainstream
media as well as social media to incite the Congolese public and call for the
stigmatization and torture of Kinyarwanda-speaking Congolese, calling on them
to return to Rwanda. If not stopped, the alliance and collaboration between the
Congolese army and the FDLR will spell doom.
A
two-pronged approach that never happened
Six
days after I left the hills in Masisi, in 2009, I met Modeste Kabori, a Mwami,
or traditional chief, of Bukoma, a locality in Rutchuru region, who explained
how, after the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi the fleeing genocidal machinery
took control over his native land and taught his erstwhile nonviolent people to
kill fellow human beings, without a shed of remorse, guilt, or shame.
They
wrecked his province’s customary social fabric, he said, to the extent that
Congolese now found it easy to kill.
“They
have been here for 15 years and it is true they have dominated and entrenched
themselves within the population. Many have even intermarried,” Kabori then
said.
He
explained that a sustained two-pronged approach – sensibilisation of the
population and military operations – should be maintained so as to totally get
rid of the FDLR. That never happened.
Not
surprisingly, when the Rwandan army left in February 2009, Kabori and others in
his community quickly turned into anti-Tutsi radicals. Their survival instinct
kicked in.
Without
help from Kinshasa, these communities know that they are at the mercy of genocidaires and
they embrace the genocide ideology.
The
FARDC-FDLR alliance is not only a violation of international law but an
alliance of evil. The biggest threat posed by the FDLR, and its splinter
groups, is not a military threat. It is their genocide ideology.
Source:
www.newtimes.co.rw