Sunday, January 4, 2009

 

 

BREAKING THE BIG LIE ABOUT THE KIVU TRAGEDY

 

During this week, television has been a great advocate of the D.R. Congo better than the UN in the past twelve years. The horrible images of Congolese fleeing Goma in North Kivu Province , Eastern Congo, by fear of being killed by Rwandese troops and militias led by Laurent Nkunda have pushed many people around the world to ask what is going on in the D.R. Congo? How come we were not told that Congo was agressed by Rwanda and Uganda and that as consequence of this agression 5,4 millions of Congolese have been killed, 50 000 women raped and genitally mutilated by Rwandese gangs and militias in the last twelve years? What is the UN doing? Is the USA aware of this? What is the position of the European Union and the former colonial master Belgium? Is there any government in the D.R. Congo? These provocative questions pushed me to shed some light to what I call

the big lie covering the Kivu tragedy. It is my conviction that unless the truth of what is really happening in the D.R. Congo is told and defended forcefully, the violence in Kivu will escalate and the crisis will remain open-ended. There is a saying that “Proper diagnosis, proper cure”. In this long survey told from first hand experience and under the shock of the humanitarian crisis in North Kivu Province I intend to show why millions of innocent Congolese are dying, being raped and savagely mutilated, displaced, on the road to nowhere, at the watch of the UN peacekeepers. Our goal is to highlight some objective facts that can help many people who are learning of the Kivu tragedy now to grasp its reality by putting it in the international and regional framework. Those who read French can go on our website www.benilubero.com where they will find hundreds of postings about the real story of the Kivu tragedy. Our assumption is as simple as this: The D.R. Congo is under aggression of Rwanda and Uganda with the support of many Big Powers of the Western world. Because of this aggression, there is no rebellion in the D.R. Congo. I agree with Smis and Oyatambwe who speak of the “so-called rebels” in the D.R. Congo because they are “anything but a coherent group.

 

[1]  Instead, they are instruments of external powers not only for the looting of the Congolese mineral resources ( especially the Coltan= Columbite Tantalite) but also for the establishment of a new geopolitical order in the Great Lakes region of Africa. Unless this truth is brought forward in the discussions going now and focusing on humanitarian needs rather than the root causes of the crisis , the D.R. Congo is doomed to lose the case of lasting peace for its citizens.

 

I Why there are no real rebels in Congo?
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Most of the dictionaries define rebellion as an act of disobeying and resisting violently the recognized authority. Understood in this way, a rebellion is an internal conflict opposing a portion of the population to the central and established authority. A rebellion can oppose also the civil authorities to the military authorities, a section of the army to the army authority. A rebellion seeks by its disobedience a change or a revolution in the way of doing politics or of administering the community, the state, etc.

 

[2]  The so-called rebel movements in the D.R. Congo do not fit the above description. For example, some of them are called “Foreign Rebels” such as FDLR, NALU, ADF, SPLA, etc. Instead of seeing these foreign rebels directing their rebellious activities towards their countries of origin, we see them directing their violence against the Congolese population, imposing their rule in some territories up to perceiving taxes, etc. One striking thing with these foreign rebels is that they do not speak, write; there is rarely an image on their faces, no exact description of where they are hiding in the Congo jungle, etc. Some people have given themselves the duty of talking for them. Brief, they are a real nebulous and cloudy phenomenon in the name of which horrible atrocities have been committed onn the innocent congolese populations.
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The other so-called rebel movements are also only Congolese because of their manpower but not their ideology, their leadership, their funding sources, etc.( RCD-Goma, MLC, RCD-K-ML, RCD-N, UPC, FNI, etc.).

The only thing the so-called rebel movements in the D. R. Congo have in common with the real rebel movements is their violent activities that destabilize the peace of the whole country. As we said earlier on, their violence is not directed towards the recognized authority but towards the congolese population.
 

If the true rebels are by definition against the established government, in the D.R. Congo you find rebel movements owned or supported by the government (Mai-Mai) or some members of the government (CNDP, FPC, RUD , TPD, etc. owned by Tutsi and Hutu members of the Congolese government). Four examples in this regard are worthy noticing.

 

 

1 The TPD (Tous Pour le Développement) in the North Kivu Province is an armed group founded by Eugene Serufuli at the watch of the UN forces. Despite of this, Mr. Eugene Serufuli was lastly appointed by the government as the actual National Director of the Electricity Board.

 

2 The Bundu dia Kongo (The people of Kongo) in the Province of Bas-Congo is a religiously motivated armed group under the leadership of Ne Mwanda Nsemi, a current representative in the National Parliament. Whatsoever the violence that the members of this armed group inflict to the innocent civilians of the Bas-Congo Province, the National Police, etc., its founder has not lost his seat in the parliament.

 

3 Some members of the government have defended the interests and the people of Rwanda instead of defending the interests and the Congolese population. The historical example for this mischief is Azarias Ruberwa, a tutsi, rwandophone, who when he was the Vice-President in charge of security in the D.R. Congo, accused the government in which he was serving, as responsible for a massacre of foreign Tutsi refugees in Gatumba ( Burundi), near the border with the D.R. Congo, on August 13, 2004. This example is one out of many about how some Congolese leaders in the government or in the rebel movements, represent not the interests of the D.R. Congo as a nation, but the interests of foreign countries or corporations.

 

4 Recent analysis such as the one of Guy de Boeck of Belgium has shown that the methods of violence used by some of these rebel movements are not Congolese but found historically and more in use in Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi. This is the case of sterilizing . rape, sexual torture, homosexuality, etc.)

 

[3]  These foreign forms of atrocities unheard of in the D.R. Congo before the aggression of 1996, constitute another example that Congolese rebels are under the influence of people who are from the countries where these practices are traditionally practiced or were recently practiced. Guy de Boeck continues in the same article saying that the rebel movements in the D.R. Congo seem to be involved in a slow genocide aiming at an extermination of the Congolese population. There is no mystery, continues De Boeck, that this slow genocide is going on in the parts of the country rich in mineral resources ( Coltan, Gas, Gold, diamond, oil, etc.). This assumption is more and more shared by many analysts today who have denounced the violence of the so-called rebels in the D.R. Congo as ethnically oriented, targeting the non-rwandese Congolese populations of Eastern Congo. In Bas-Congo, the Bundu dia Kongo was stopped while vowing to expel all the non-bakongo people from their province.

II The rebels as instruments of the aggression and occupation
 

More than 12 years since the appearance of the so-called rebel movements on the Congolese scene, their social and political agenda is not clear. Because of this, people, unless forced, do not sympathize with them and consider them as their enemy number one. The 5,4 millions Congolese dead have died in the region controlled by them, not as victims of the fight between the rebels and the Congolese army, but as innocent victims of the violence of the rebels against civilians. This a clear demonstration of what is called now a slow genocide of Congolese population perpetrated by the rebel movements and their master minds in order to pave the way for the Tutsi settlement in the Coltan Kingdom of Congo.

 

That’s why, the goal of this survey is to demonstrate that the rebels movements in the D.R. Congo are not real rebel movements but instruments of the aggression and the occupation of the D.R. Congo since 1996 by Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda. Any analysis of what they are or do, will indeed find that their activities make them less rebels than aggressors, or terrorists. Our conclusion is that rebellion in the D.R. Congo is a tree that hides the forest. Instead of rebellion, we should speak instead of terrorism understood as a systematic use of terror, a means of coercion, and intending by its acts to create fear (terror), perpetrating an ideological goal, deliberately targeting or disregarding the safety of non-combatants, the civilians. Terrorism is also a form of unconventional warfare and psychological warfare.

 

[4]  This is what fit the rebel movement of Laurent Nkunda in North Kivu.

Using the word “rebel movements” to designate the armed groups in the D.R. Congo is a way of hiding the reality of the aggression by Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda from 1996 to present, using Congolese puppet rebel movements and a rhetoric which conceals their reality. This assumption supposes that what are called rebel movements are not real rebel movements and they operate under a hidden double agenda, namely, the creation of a new geopolitical order in the Great Lakes region,

 

[5] and the national interests of external regional and international powers. All what is said to be the motivations for the aggression of the D.R. Congo is simply an alibi. The main alibi used by all the countries that invaded the D.R. Congo in 1996 was that rebels groups against their respective governments were operating from within D.R. Congo. But, when they continued their presence in the D.R. Congo, even after the dismantlement of these rebel groups, it became clear that their aggression of the D.R. Congo was motivated by their respective national interests and those of their allies in the international community.

 

According to Filip Reyntjens, the motivation of Rwanda invasion of Congo was removed in November 1996 after the dismantling of the Refugees’ camps in Eastern Congo.

After the fall of Beni and of Bunia to the AFDL coalition, the alibi of Uganda was removed, because these two towns were considered by Uganda as the safe haven for the ADF Ugandan rebels leaders.

When the AFDL took power in Kinshasa in May 1997, the question of Banyamulenge nationality became obsolete.

 

But the collapse of AFDL led to the creation of RCD rebel movement. When RCD entered the government of transition, the CNDP of Laurent Nkunda was created. When the CNDP signed the Amani peace agreement in January 2008, the FPC has been created in North Kivu. And recently, the CNDP became MLTC in September 2008, just before the current attacks on the Rumangabo military base and Goma. This means that there will always be rebellion in the D.R. Congo till the motivation of the aggressors is satisfied….

 

 

What about the claims of democracy?
 

The Congo conflict is not either a struggle of rebels for democracy, because after the successful democratic transition coupled with democratic elections in 2006, the conflict is continuing with the same rebels movements creating new ones to avoid the democratic rule. It is absurd to see that the UN and the USA, the UE, the UK which supported the elections in the D.R.Congo have been supporting the rebel movement of Laurent Nkunda who is a renegade of the Congolese army and who refused to participate in the elections. I agree that elections’ results can exacerbate the ethnic divide. But this was not the case in the D.R.Congo. Those who won the 2006 elections accommodated the Tutsi population by sharing their power with them. In the capital city of Kinshasa, Moise Nyarugabo, a radical tutsi, was elected senator. In the Nord-Kivu province, the provincial assembly extended the seats of the Bureau to Tutsi even though they had failed in the elections. There many other examples of this reaching out to Tutsi in the sharing of power

 

What about the claim of the Tutsi Banyamulenge minority?
 

The Congo conflict cannot be presented as a war against a minority ethnic group called Banyamulenge or Tutsi, Rwandese, because in Congo with more than 400 ethnic groups, there is no minority. Every tribe or ethnic group is a minority. According to Patricia DALEY, “ The significance of ethnicity is often overplayed by external observers particularly in relation to conflicts in Burundi and DRC… While ethnicity is a factor in the manifestation of violence, it is often used instrumentally by members of the political elite who are driven more by personal politics than commitment to any group identity or cause.

 

[6] This leads many scholars to the conclusion that foreign, international, regional, and internal wars are being fought simultaneously on the territory of the D.R. Congo on short-term interests.

 

[7] This international scramble for the mineral resources of the D.R. Congo benefits clearly from a weak or failed state in the D.R. Congo. This can explain the low profile of the D.R. Congo on the international level such as the UN where it plays a passive role in the resolution of a conflict happening on its own soil. Indeed, the D.R. Congo is given at the negotiating table the same status as the rebel movements ( such as in Lusaka and Sun City), and even forced to accept that the rebels opposed to itself are “ good rebels” ( AFDL, RCD-Goma, MLC, RCD-K-ML, RCD-N) but those opposed to Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda as “ bad rebels”, “ negative forces”(Hutu militias, Mai-Mai), etc

 

[8]  Because of this, we take seriously the assumption of scholars who say that, the flexibility of the Congolese parties involved in the conflict, the 5,4 millions dead as consequences of the conflict, the good will of the Congolese people shown in the peaceful elections of 2006, have proven so small to end the conflict, leading to the assumption that foreign powers involved in the D.R. Congo are the one deciding its future, and not yet ready to let the international law be applied to the D.R. Congo conflict or let the Congolese people design their future. According to Smis and Oyatambwe, ” Foreign powers involved in the conflict are not yet ready to make the compromises because, for many, war is more lucrative than peace. They still have an interest in maintaining instability and will probably come to a settlement only when they agree on a common interest in keeping the DRC weak while deciding the borders of their zones of influence.

 

 

Based on the work of Vincent machozi (Boston)