Rwanda has officially written to the president of the UN Security Council in protest over what appears as a new attempt by a senior French UN diplomat to sanitise and aid the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR). 

Herve Ladsous, UN Under Secretary General for Peacekeeping Operations, requested a lifting of a travel ban for Gaston Rumuli Iyamuremye (a.k.a Victor Rumuli Byiringiro), FDLR president, to allow him travel to Rome, Italy. 

Eugene-Richard Gasana, Rwanda’s Permanent Representative, in his letter to Amb. Vitaly Churkin, president of the Security Council, said that they learned of the plan early this week. 

"The request for travel ban exemption is part of a pattern, over the last two decades, of a series of maneuvers that attempt to deny and diminish the criminal essence of the FDLR, to find excuses of its acts, to treat this genocidaire group as a notable group with legitimate political grievances and ultimately, to cleanse it from the most heinous crimes linked to its ideology, including through religious communities,” Gasana wrote. 

In seeking to lift the ban, Ladsous had stated that Iyamuremye sought to travel to Rome in order to attend a one-day meeting organized by the Sant’Egidio catholic community within two days of the request. 

While in Rome, the FDLR leader would also meet a team of special envoys and representatives, led by Mary Robinson, special envoy of the UN Secretary General for the Great Lakes Region, Frank De Connick, special envoy of Belgium for the great lakes to discuss how to accelerate the "ongoing FDLR disarmament and surrender process”. 

Amb. Gasana wrote that Rwanda found the French diplomat’s request "highly questionable, on both the procedure and on the motivation” and thus objected to the request for travel ban exemption. 

Questionable, calculated maneuvers 

The Chairperson of the 1533 Sanctions Committee, Prince Zeid Ra’ad Zeid Al-Hussein of Jordan) made it known that Ladsous’ travel ban exemption request was not approved and proceeded to inform the department of peacekeeping operations (DPKO). 

While the request of the travel ban was pending, MONUSCO transported, by helicopter, Iyamuremye from Kanyabayonga – a town in the Lubero territory of DR Congo’s North Kivu province – to provincial headquarters, Goma, where he was transported to Kinshasa, through Kisangani, in a MONUSCO aircraft. 

On the procedure related to the request to lift the travel ban, it was suspicious that the DPKO could make such a request only one day before the actual travel date, despite the fact that the meeting in Rome had been in preparation for a long time. 

"Was the DPKO trying to ambush the Security Council members, with a hope that all of them would not have enough time to consider this controversial request?” Gasana wrote. 

"The fact the DPKO preferred sending this request itself, instead of going through the Permanent Mission to the UN of the state to which the listed individual is a national (Rwanda) or resident (DR Congo) could even undermine the neutrality of the UN, "as it may suggest that some UN and DPKO senior officials are driving a hidden agenda of sanitizing the FDLR genocidaires.” 

Kigali is of the view that the request constituted in itself a gross violation of relevant resolutions of the Security Council, particularly resolutions 2098 (2013) and 2147 (2014). 

In those resolutions, the Security Council stressed the importance of addressing the sustained regional threat posed by the FDLR, a group under UN sanctions and whose leaders and members include perpetrators of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda and have continued to promote and commit ethnically-based and other killings in Rwanda and the DR Congo. 

In March 2013, the Security Council adopted a resolution 2098 to disarm the FDLR, but MONUSCO has not shown any will to make a move against the militia.

Gasana wrote that unfortunately, for 20 years, "we have observed manipulations and conspiracies” around the FDLR, which is a grave insult to the victims and survivors of the 1994 Genocide, as well as all Rwandans, that "the very body that failed our people twenty years ago would be considering today a tacit return to such a shameful past.” 

"It should be clear that Rwanda considers FDLR leaders and members who persist on the path to violence as the single biggest threat to national and regional peace. We here recall our clear policy towards FDLR, which is to stop violence, disarm, set aside their Genocide ideology and repatriate through the established DDR process, which has been most successful over more than a decade, delivering more than 10,000 former combatants, including top military leaders.” 

While Rwanda remains committed to the implementation of the peace, security and cooperation (PSC) framework agreement for the DR Congo and the region, Gasana stated, the recent actions by the DPKO threaten the effective implementation of that framework and undermine the credibility of the Security Council. 

The envoy warned that, Rwanda would consider withdrawing its participation from the PSC framework, should the DPKO continue attempts to sanitise FDLR.