The United Nations Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide, Alice Wairimu Nderitu, has stressed that the Congolese government has the responsibility to protect the Tutsi and Banyamulenge communities who are targeted for their identity. In an exclusive interview with The New Times, Nderitu, who was in Rwanda for the 30th commemoration of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, echoed her warning that there are "risk factors for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity,” in eastern DR Congo.
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Nderitu’s office has documented the violence in eastern DR Congo, especially the persecution of the Tutsi communities who are targeted by groups like the FDLR, a Rwandan militia group linked to the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. The group was formed by remnants of the perpetrators of the 1994 genocide.
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"The primary role of protection of any population belongs to this state. We must first ask the government of DRC its primary role of protecting its own population because every government has that role,” she said.
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In November 2022, Nderitu said the violence against the Tutsi and Banyamulenge was "a warning sign” in a region that had a history of genocide.
"I issued quite a number of statements in the run-up to the [2023] elections in DRC, [highlighting] this consistent narrative against the people who are perceived to be of Tutsi descent, the Banyamulenge,” Nderitu told The New Times.
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"There is a consistent narrative of hate speech. We need to say, very firmly, that the colonial borders that created DRC, that created Rwanda, found the people who are of Tutsi descent in DRC. They are indigenous to DRC; that is their country.”
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"All these attempts to expel them and to advance genocide ideology on them, and the genocide that already happened to the Tutsi in [Rwanda] to advance it in DRC are completely unacceptable,” she said.
Bernard Maingain, a Belgian lawyer has, in the past, condemned hate speech in eastern DR Congo and called on the international community to put aside other interests and finance an effective justice system to deal with hate speech in the country, to no avail.
"The hate ideology has been there for years and it was amplified within the past months but in reality, the issue is that there was never a process to completely eradicate such ideology and we are seeing the consequences,” Maingain said in a televised show on the national broadcaster on December 27, 2022.
The roots of the conflict, the persecution and violence against Kinyarwanda-speaking Tutsi communities, sometimes referred to as Banyamulenge – this is just one of the Kinyarwanda-speaking groups in question – can be traced as far back as the early 1960s, when the vast country gained independence. Instead of addressing the root causes of insecurity in eastern DR Congo, the United Nations Security Council preferred to focus on the consequences of the Rwandan genocidal militia’s presence in eastern DR Congo.
The nationality of the communities, which found themselves within the borders of Congo after the 1885 Berlin Conference, has been contentious.
African leaders including Tanzania’s former president late Julius Nyerere, and South Africa’s former President Thabo Mbeki, have spoken out on the issue of the Congolese Tutsi communities.
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Nderitu, who has previously condemned the violence against the Kinyarwanda-speaking communities, said she had "changed” the wording to be "more specific” about who are targeted.
"Now, when I speak, I'm very specific,” she noted, "I say Banyamulenge, I say Tutsi of Congolese descent because the FDLR also speak Kinyarwanda. I will try to be even more specific because the people who are targeted are not everybody who came from Rwanda. If anything, the FDLR is a part of those targeting these people; the Tutsi and the Banyamulenge in eastern DRC.”
Nderitu could not understand how the international community has not learnt a lesson from the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi three decades after it was stopped.
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For years, the Rwandan government had expressed its concerns about the collaboration of the FDLR and the Congolese government and the genocidal group’s integration into the Congolese armed forces.
Nderitu said the Congolese government needed to stop giving sanctuary to people implicated in the Genocide against the Tutsi. "The government of DRC needs to hold accountable any genocidaire who escaped to DRC. They need to be held accountable for what they did, even if it was 30 years ago,” she said.
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The UN official said her office would not ignore the people spreading genocide ideology and denialism in the region and beyond.
"What I tell them is that we are watching you. You are not doing this in isolation. And for us to say that there’s a commitment for a genocide never to happen again against the Tutsi to whom it was targeted, we are very serious.”