Editor,

Allow me to react to the Editorial, "Congolese civilians deserve no less” (The New Times, January 17).

I think we should thank Monusco that they have, for once, stated clearly in what light they see the FDLR: as a valued client. I, for one, am grateful that Monusco has finally dropped its habitual mask and its forked tongue language to describing who really are its clients in the DRC.

Hint: it is neither the regional states to whose security it claims they are there to contribute to, nor the innocent civilian population whose protection they claim they are there to assure. They have singularly failed at both.

But these were always merely the convenient, publicly acceptable alibi that enabled the establishment and year-after-year renewals of the Monuc/Monusco mandate. Whose needs has Monusco really been most solicitous to, whether in flying in top-notch medical experts to see to the needs of ailing FDLR supremos in the DRCongo jungles, providing helicopter flights to Goma, special aircraft transportation to Kinshasa, and from there, first class travel to Rome? Why? FDLR senior executives, of course.

For as all rational business executives know, you never antagonize or impoverish a client; your own prosperity—nay, survival and existence—is intrinsically dependent on your clients also continuing to thrive.

And therein lies the fundamental flaw in the Monusco design: the imperative need for its own self-preservation militates against its achievement of its raison d’être: fulfilling its mandate to eradicate the FDLR (the most dangerous armed group and the root cause of the formation of most other ethnic militias to defend against the insecurity the FDLR causes by its very presence, its widespread killings, wholesale rapes and looting) would spell its own end, its huge budget, the tens of thousands of jobs and the power and global status that go with all of this.

And, therefore, the bottom line: Monusco will not do anything to antagonise its principal client, the FDLR.

Mwene Kalinda