Since the 1960s, and arguably before, Africa has been a hotbed of global geopolitical competition, and nowhere is this more evident than in the Sahel and Great Lakes regions. Here, the legacy and architecture of European colonialism cannot be quantified; it has locked societies within the hasty, greed-inspired, arbitrary borders drawn in 1885, where bad governance and neo-colonialism feed on festering tribalism to sustain themselves. For Africans to have a clear idea of what’s going on, two things have to happen at once. One, Africans need to see the similarities between the struggles of the people against bad governance and neo-colonialism in the two regions. Two, that the Western disinformation campaign is designed to prevent Africans from seeing these similarities as a means of preserving the status quo. Here’s why.
The arsonists who posed as fire fighters
One striking similarity is the responsibility of two Western predators, the US and France, backed by their allies, for the plight and misery of Africans in the Sahel and Great Lakes regions. In 2011, these two countries destroyed Libya and set the Sahel on fire. The US and France then sent their troops to the region, and a UN peacekeeping mission, MINUSMA, was set up in Mali, ostensibly to help defeat the terrorism created by the two Western powers. Instead of solving the problem, terrorism worsened under the noses of these forces. Years later, Africans in Burkina, Niger and Mali decided that the arsonists could not really be the firefighters to put out the fire that was spreading across their borders. They have asked UN peacekeepers and US and French soldiers to pack up and leave.
Similarly, 30 years ago, France set the Great Lakes region on fire by siding with the genocidaires. In the midst of the genocide, France sent in a force codenamed Operation Turquoise, ostensibly to bring back peace, but actually to restore its ally, the genocidal government, to power. When this plan failed, France decided to exfiltrate its allies into the former Zaire in 1994, an act that continues to provoke conflicts between Congo and Rwanda. In 1999, a UN peacekeeping mission, Monuc, renamed Monusco in 2010, was set up to help resolve these conflicts and, in particular, to neutralise the FDLR. 25 years on, the FDRL is still there, and the number of armed groups and the terrorism associated with their proliferation has increased dramatically. Meanwhile, the US, France’s partner in crime in the Sahel, seems intent on sabotaging any chance of peace between the DRC and Rwanda. And while France has apparently mended fences with Rwanda, its role in creating the conditions for war between Congo and Rwanda is never mentioned.
Clearly, the media in the US and France are the reason why these similarities and patterns behind the plight and suffering of Africans in the Sahel and Great Lakes region remain relatively obscure to most of us in Africa, erased from the mainstream by the malignant plague of disinformation, solipsism and propaganda aimed at advancing Western economic interests. These media, with the support of the US State Department, are currently shielding a genocidal group, the FDLR in the Democratic Republic of Congo – while labelling Rwanda as the aggressor.
Rwanda and Congo: FDLR is the core issue
To lucidly understand the tensions between Rwanda and Congo, it’s important to understand what the FDLR is. The FDLR is an armed militia group formed by those who supervised the slaughter of over a million Tutsi – including women and children – and then fled into the DRC after Paul Kagame’s led Rwanda Patriotic Army (RPA) forces defeated them and put an end to the genocide in 1994. One would expect that in a sane global society in line with international law and normal human decency, those who have committed a crime as horrendous as genocide would be -at the barest minimum- disarmed. However, sadly, this hasn’t been the case for the FDLR.
The FDLR has continued to operate with impunity under the noses of the Congolese government and the Western-funded UN peacekeeping mission in Congo, MONUSCO. Successive Congolese governments have refused to disarm this genocidal force, often choosing to use it in their feuds with Rwanda, while MONUSCO has never engaged it militarily, even though uprooting the FDLR was one of the most important aspects of its mission. The situation in Congo contrasts with what happened in Tanzania in 1996. Following the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, many of the genocidaires who had sought refuge in Tanzania were disarmed, expelled by the Tanzanian government and the refugees forcibly repatriated to Rwanda. Under the spiritual leadership of Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, Tanzania refused to be a host to genocidaires. Yet those who call themselves the “vanguard of human rights and democracy” did nothing to force Congo (then Zaire) to emulate Tanzania’s laudable actions. Worse, France was busy rearming the genocidal forces who controlled the refugee camps. It took a war between Rwanda and Congo to forcibly repatriate most of the refugees, including the genocidaires. 30 years later, the US, backed by Belgium (Congo’s former colonial master), still doesn’t want the FDRL to be eradicated and peace to return between the two African countries. We must ask ourselves why.
Rwanda is a useful scapegoat
It is clear that the presence of the FDLR in the DRC and the resulting conflicts between Congo and Rwanda are a microcosm of a larger problem: the wanton plundering of Africa’s mineral wealth in the DRC to satisfy the insatiable capitalist demands of the imperial core. International business interests such as Chinese, American, Israeli, and Canadian mining companies have sat on the bitterly won sovereignty that people like Patrice Lumumba, Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito fought fiercely for and paid the ultimate price for, pulling the strings through their puppets in Kinshasa to exploit mineral resources and channel them to their societies. Of course, Rwanda is not responsible, these companies and their lackeys in Kinshasa are, they are responsible for child labour and the proliferation of over a hundred armed militias in the DRC, and they are responsible for the destabilisation of Congo. They, not Rwanda, are the ultimate instigators and beneficiaries of instability in Congo. It is convenient for those interested in maintaining the status quo to say that Rwanda is the aggressor and to engage the public in endless and unproductive debates about it, while corruption festers and looting continues in Congo. Preserving the FDLR, and thus keeping Congo and Rwanda in a permanent state of conflict, is a ploy to divert attention from the real issue: imperialism in the heart of Africa. As Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah prophetically suggested in his book The Challenge of the Congo, foreign pressure in an independent African state is the order of the day, and Congo is sadly a typical example.
History has taught us time and again that there are no European or American solutions to African problems, only Africans working together can put an end to the problems they face. Tanzania’s role in disarming the genocidaires has set the tone: Africa should not queue behind Western handouts and paternalism to solve its problems.
