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The East African Community should support an M23-controlled buffer zone in eastern DRC

The idea that Tshisekedi could suddenly become a reliable partner simply has no basis in reality
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In a recent article, I argued that the M23 is the perfect buffer between Rwanda and Congo, given its ideological clarity and the fact that it shares a common enemy with Rwanda: the FDLR, a genocidal group formed by the perpetrators of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, which has gone on to kill Congolese Tutsi and wreak havoc in eastern Congo. Many have asked whether my advocacy ignores the government of the DRC, which, as the nominal authority on Congolese territory, they see as an important actor in ensuring that once achieved, peace will be sustainable. Even Kigali seems to be counting on cooperation with Kinshasa to eradicate the FDLR. However, I believe that Kinshasa cannot be trusted. In fact, successive Congolese governments have proven to be unreliable partners for Rwanda in the pursuit of peace in the region. The Tshisekedi administration is no different.

Betrayal

In October 1990, Kinshasa and Paris were the first to send troops on the ground to repel the first incursion by the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) into Rwanda. The RPF had just launched its armed struggle against the Habyarimana regime, which had earlier on refused to repatriate Rwandans in exile and which after the RPA attack, began rounding up and killing Tutsis in Kigali and other parts of the country. The fact that the genocidal regime sent a clear message that it regarded the Tutsi inside the country as hostages to be exterminated at a time of its choosing did not weaken the support it enjoyed in Paris and Kinshasa. On the contrary, Paris stepped up its military and diplomatic support, becoming a de facto accomplice in the genocide that ended in July 1994.

Having failed to prevent the collapse of the genocidal regime, even after launching Operation Turquoise, Paris refused to back down, cut its losses and distance itself from the mass murderers. French soldiers organised the retreat of the defeated genocidal forces to Zaire. For his part, Mobutu Sese Seko, President of Zaire at the time, proved his loyalty to his old friends in Rwanda, even after they had organized the massacre of over a million Tutsis, by refusing to disarm them. Instead, he allowed them to take control of the refugee camps in North and South Kivu, from where they reorganised, recruited new fighters and launched attacks against Rwanda and deadly expeditions against Congolese Tutsi in the Kivus seeking to uproot them.

Despite repeated warnings from the new authorities in Kigali between 1994 and 1996, Mobutu looked the other way as the genocidaires killed his kinyarwanda-speaking compatriots and led incursions into Rwanda, targeting genocide survivors and refugees who dared to leave the camps and return to their homes. The genocidaires had vowed to regain power in Rwanda and ‘finish the job’ of exterminating Tutsi. If they failed, their minimum objective was to make Rwanda such a living hell that the RPF-led government would have no choice but to negotiate a power-sharing deal. These were the forces that Paris and Kinshasa saw as allies. That Paris had no qualms about partnering with mass murderers came as no surprise. African lives carried no weight in France’s geopolitical calculations. But Mobutu should have known better. Even as Mandela and Nyerere armed Rwanda to defend itself, he chose to betray his fellow Africans one time too many.

Laurent Desire Kabila, whom the Rwandans had armed and helped to oust Mobutu, proved to be no different from his predecessor. Only a year and a half after taking power, he descended into a nationalist frenzy, posing as the defender of Congo’s interests, breaking the alliance with the Rwandans, demanding that they withdraw their troops, and accusing them of plundering the country’s minerals.

Interestingly, Kabila failed to explain what deals he had made with the Rwandans in his personal quest for power, and no one seemed to want to know. Yet the Rwandans had helped him realise his decades-old dream of leading Congo, using their very limited and extremely valuable human, financial and material resources. Yet here he was, claiming that his now former allies were looting his country. He demanded that they withdraw and instead offered mineral deals to new allies, Zimbabwe. He also armed the very forces that had fought for Mobutu and that Rwanda had come to defeat. The genocidal forces were reinforced, peaking at an estimated 100,000 men, at a time when they were waging an insurgency within Rwanda’s borders. This development also led to the emergence of another rebellion in Congo, the RCD. Rwanda, for its part, was betrayed and had to start from scratch.

Kabila the son also failed to break with the legacy of both Mobutu and his father. This was despite the withdrawal of Rwandan troops from Congo in 2003 and an agreement to end the RCD rebellion, both of which were conditional on Kinshasa’s commitment to cut ties with and neutralise the FDLR.

In 2009, Kabila temporarily agreed to mend fences with Rwanda only because he wanted Kigali to help him end the Nkunda-led CNDP rebellion. It is worth noting that the CNDP rebellion had broken out because Kabila’s promise to RCD members to neutralise the FDLR had not been kept and hundreds of thousands of Congolese Tutsis were still trapped in refugee camps in Rwanda and Uganda.

Rwanda again played its part, sending an expeditionary force to capture Nkunda and using its influence to persuade other CNDP commanders to negotiate with Kinshasa. These negotiations would culminate in the 23 March 2009 agreement between the Congolese government and the CNDP. Shortly afterwards, the joint RDF-FARDC military operations Umoja wetu began, which significantly weakened the FDLR.

But once again Kabila proved untrustworthy. Not only did he fail to fend off US interference in the process of integrating CNDP fighters into the Congolese army, he also violated key provisions of the agreement he had signed with the former rebels. As a result, a new rebellion, the March 23 Movement, broke out and Umoja Wetu’s operations were suspended. Rather than stay the course of normalisation with Rwanda, Kabila decided to recruit the FDLR to fight the new rebellion. Once again, Rwanda had been betrayed after having gone out of its way to help Congo solve its internal problems.

Tshisekedi is more of the same

Tshisekedi has shown every sign of being deceitful and duplicitous.

In mid-2020, he invited M23 leaders to Kinshasa. For 14 months, his envoys held talks with these leaders and tasked them with setting up four brigades to pacify the Kivus. But only a few days after the M23 delegation left the capital with the promise that the pacification plan would be implemented, Tshisekedi ordered the FARDC to attack M23 positions.

In private conversations with his African counterparts, he acknowledges that M23 members are Congolese, but in his populist public speeches he portrays them as Rwandans.

When the EAC forces were deployed in 2022, he misrepresented the objectives of these deployments as primarily militaristic and targeting M23 rebels, when in fact the primary objective was to create the necessary conditions for dialogue between the DRC government and Congolese armed groups, including the M23. When the EAC forces refused to do his bidding, he sent them packing for ‘failing to uphold their mandate’, broke the ceasefire they had brokered and brought SADC forces into the fray.

More recently, he has reneged on the plan agreed by Angolan, Congolese and Rwandan security experts to neutralise the FDLR. He is now pretending to carry out military operations against the group, which he refused to sign up to in the framework decided by the Angolan mediation, while at the same time inviting to Congo convicted genocidaires who have served their sentences and settled in Niger. The circus looks suspiciously like an attempt to plant stories in the media about the FARDC fighting the FDLR, which would then give Tshisekedi grounds to demand that Rwanda review its defence mechanisms.

In short, the idea that Tshisekedi could suddenly become a reliable partner for Rwanda simply has no basis in reality. Hence the need for an M23-controlled buffer zone between Congo and Rwanda, since the M23 and Rwanda share the same existential threat in the FDLR.

Establishing such a buffer zone has its own challenges. Ideally, MONUSCO and SADC troops would help the M23 in this endeavour. Or at least they would stand aside and let events take their natural course. Neither scenario is likely to happen. The M23/AFC alliance will have to force its way into South Kivu, along the border with Rwanda, for this buffer zone to ever materialise.

Certainly, such extreme measures would not be necessary if Congolese leaders were held accountable for their role in perpetuating a state of insecurity in the Great Lakes region in order to serve their own narrow interests.

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