Rwandans now weary of picking up the pieces of Kagame leadership

Antoine Roger Lokongo, pambazuka

The above headline of mine is surprisingly very civilized compared to ‘Umurabyo’ newspaper’s independent journalist Saidati Mukakibibi’s. She is now languishing in jail in Rwanda for having quite rightly compared President Paul Kagame with the Nazi German leader Adolf Hitler. She was arrested for defamation, inciting public disorder and ethnic ‘divisionism’ (Reuters, 13 July 2010) following the 1994 genocide, a trump card Kagame uses well both at home and abroad as a milking cow to keep and win new friends and to silence his critics. But for how long?

Mukakibibi is not the only one. Pascal Manirakiza, a Rwandan refugee who went missing in Uganda has been found tortured and unconscious and ‘dumped’ at a cemetery near the capital, Kampala, according to the Ugandan government which is supposed to provide him protection on the basis of the Geneva Convention. On the contrary, Manirakiza had earlier been arrested by Ugandan police on a warrant issued by Rwanda (the UN hypocritically protested the arrest). Manirakiza’s crime? He was one of four Rwandans who told the BBC last month that they were seeking asylum in Uganda. They accused the Rwandan army of forcibly recruiting them to fight in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (BBC News Africa, 27 August 2013). The BBC reminded us that in 2010, Rwanda’s ex-army chief Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa fled to South Africa. He accused Rwanda of a failed attempt to assassinate him later that year, after he was shot and wounded in Johannesburg. Rwanda denied any involvement. The shooting strained diplomatic relations between South Africa and Rwanda.

COVERING UP CRIMES

The question we ask now is: For how long the UN system, Britain and America are going to provide Museveni and Kagame cover or help cover-up crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide they are committing in the DRC? Not for too long! Belgian journalist Colette Braeckman, reporting for ‘Le Soir’ from Rwanda confirmed that ‘it is clear that there is a growing concern among the Rwandan people’ (Le Carnet de Colette Braeckman, 26 August 2013). Kagame’s leadership is now widely put into question despite recent visits by his die-hard friends such as former US president Bill Clinton who questioned the line of thinking of ‘some people in the human rights community who believe that every good thing that has happened in Rwanda should be negated by what they allege that they have done in the eastern Congo’ (BBC News Africa, 12 August 2013).

However, the fact that Rwanda and Uganda are still stubbornly committing crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide in the DRC is not helping their powerful mentors in the West save faces.

Kagame remains the real commander-in-chief of the M23 insurgents. On 15 July 2013, the Congolese army, the Forces Armées de la RDC (FARDC) repulsed an attack by M23 ‘rebels’ backed by Rwandan special units in Mutaho, North Kivu Province.

Kagame’s Hidden War in the Congo

Howard W. French, New York Review of Books

Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe
by Gérard Prunier
Oxford University Press, 529 pp., $27.95                                                  
The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa
by René Lemarchand
University of Pennsylvania Press, 327 pp., $59.95                                                  
The Congo Wars: Conflict, Myth and Reality
by Thomas Turner
Zed Books, 243 pp., $32.95 (paper)                                                  

     

Although it has been strangely ignored in the Western press, one of the most destructive wars in modern history has been going on in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa’s third-largest country. During the past eleven years millions of people have died, while armies from as many as nine different African countries fought with Congolese government forces and various rebel groups for control of land and natural resources. Much of the fighting has taken place in regions of northeastern and eastern Congo that are rich in minerals such as gold, diamonds, tin, and coltan, which is used in manufacturing electronics.

Few realize that a main force driving this conflict has been the largely Tutsi army of neighboring Rwanda, along with several Congolese groups supported by Rwanda. The reason for this involvement, according to Rwandan president Paul Kagame, is the continued threat to Rwanda posed by the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a Hutu militia that includes remnants of the army that carried out the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Until now [2009], the US and other Western powers have generally supported Kagame diplomatically. And in January [2009], Congo president Joseph Kabila, whose weak government has long had limited influence in the eastern part of the country, entered a surprise agreement with Kagame to allow Rwandan forces back into eastern Congo to fight the FDLR. But the extent of the Hutu threat to Rwanda is much debated, and observers note that Rwandan-backed forces have themselves been responsible for much of the violence in eastern Congo over the years.

Rwanda’s intervention in Congo began in 1996. Two years earlier, Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) had invaded Rwanda from neighboring Uganda, defeating the government in Kigali and ending the genocide of some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. As Kagame installed a minority Tutsi regime in Rwanda, some two million Hutu refugees fled to UN-run camps, mostly in Congo’s North and South Kivu provinces. These provinces, which occupy an area of about 48,000 square miles—slightly larger than the state of Pennsylvania—are situated along Congo’s eastern border with Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi and together have a population of more than five million people. In addition to containing rich deposits of minerals, North and South Kivu have, since the precolonial era, been subject to large waves of migration by people from Rwanda, including both Hutus and Tutsis. In recent decades these Rwandans have competed with more established residents for control of land.

Following Kagame’s consolidation of power in Rwanda, a large invasion force of Rwandan Tutsis arrived in North and South Kivu to pursue Hutu militants and to launch a war against the three-decade-long dictatorship of Congo (then known as Zaire) by Mobutu Sese Seko, whom they claimed was giving refuge to the leaders of the genocide. With Rwandan and Ugandan support, a new regime led by Laurent Kabila was installed in Kinshasa, the Congolese capital. But after Kabila ordered the Rwandan troops to leave in 1998, Kagame responded with a new and even larger invasion of the country.