Many of the genocidaires managed to escape through the cracks of the ‘U’ and deeper into Zaire. The RPA pursued them, leading to what would later be known as the First Congo War.

Many Congolese people like to speak of the Congo Mapping Report as proof of 5, 6 and at times 10 million dead in DRC’s two-decades-long armed conflicts. Two things, the mapping report and the five million victims’ figures need clarification.

One: The Congo Mapping Report: 

The mapping report doesn’t speak about Congolese victims, it speaks about Rwandan refugees.  

Essentially, the report is a double genocide theory funded by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, to get even with the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) which stopped the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and executed by researchers who were opposed to the new Rwandan government – I will explain why further in the article. 

Their reasoning at the time was that if the RPF is accused of committing a genocide too, then that would justify the UN’s failure to act to save Tutsi and their declarations at the time that what is taking place in Rwanda is merely killings on both sides. 

During the genocide, Kofi Annan was the head of the peacekeeping department at the UN, and under France’s instructions, he ignored calls by the then head of the peacekeeping mission in Rwanda, General Romeo Dallaire, to send a bigger force and capacity to stop the genocide. 

After the genocide, France rewarded him to be the next UN Secretary-General. 

The mapping report was his last action before he left office in December 2006.

When the draft of the report came out in June 2009, it was supposed to be submitted to the High Commissioner for Human Rights for review, comments, and finalization and potential approval. 

Instead, it was first leaked to NGOs and international media, who ran with it as final before it was approved.

The report was marred with major methodological errors and subjectivity, which made it easy to debunk. 

The draft mapping report had accused Rwanda of most heinous crimes and called for immediate international prosecution of RPF officials in the most hyperbolic of terms. 

But, a month later, the government of Rwanda published their rejoinder of it, pointing to past anti-Rwanda bias of many of its authors, the methodological flaws, including fabricated data, allegations without proof, and the ridiculous choice of genocide perpetrators and militiamen as key informants, the report was dismissed.

Based on the rejoinder, the UN Human Rights Council too dismissed most of the accusations in the report which researchers had failed to substantiate and approved a significantly watered-down version. 

The UN was embarrassed, and the report shelved.

NGOs, however, continued to run with the rejected version – as originally intended by its authors.

They did so for a while until they too gave up after no action came of it. The report was recently resuscitated by Dr. Denis Mukwege, a Nobel peace prize laureate from South Kivu, Eastern DRC. 

However, it seems he forgot to read it. As a result, he is convinced that the report documents the alleged five million Congolese victims; it doesn’t.

Two: The figure of five million Congolese victims

The figure was anecdotally mentioned in a report by Doctors Without Borders (MSF), as a rule of thumb for fundraising purposes, with no prior research.  

The figure raised so much concern worldwide that people actually went into villages in the DRC and conducted research, here is what they found:

A study funded by the European Union showed flaws in the death estimates. Swedish Uppsala University, however, found that it was impossible to tell the numbers as the MSF claim was based on conflating the death toll of all the natural deaths, poverty, disease, neglect, and indeed war. 

‘The Human Security Report 2009/2010: The Causes of Peace and the Shrinking Cost of War’ also found out that the death toll was the same in frontline zones as in areas that never experienced conflict. 

Another study conducted by the Canadian Human Security Project concluded that many deaths reported by MSF could have occurred even without the conflict. 

There are many more similar studies which dispute that figure, many were silenced so the media and NGOs could keep inflating it at wish to fulfill their various agendas.

Three: biased experts:

Now, why were the researchers that Kofi Annan selected, against the RPF-led Rwandan government?

Until recently in 2017, when President Paul Kagame, freshly elected for a third term declared that Rwanda, for the first time controls its own narrative, the government of Rwanda had been in a two-decades open conflict with western NGOs and media. 

The conflict started a year or two after the Genocide against the Tutsi. 

In the immediate aftermath of the genocide against the Tutsi, there were over 300 NGOs based in Rwanda, catering for internally displaced persons. 

The new Rwandan government decided to send people in IDP camps back to their villages so that they can be assisted from there, start farming, trading, etc., and allow the country to start rebuilding itself. The NGOs were opposed to this.

The government would close one IDP camp, and NGOs would encourage people to move to another one instead of going home, etc.: ‘If you go to your villages, away from our sight, the RPF will kill you’, they were told. Some of the IDPs were genocide perpetrators and soldiers of the defeated army still heavily armed and in charge of the camps. 

This went on and on until all congregated in the Kibeho mass IDP camp in southern Rwanda.

When the Rwanda Patriotic Army (RPA) decided to close the Kibeho camp and send everybody home, they used a ‘U-strategy’ where the only one way left is out of the camp, they faced a brief armed resistance from soldiers and militiamen hiding in the camp, the camp was emptied and everyone was sent home including most of the 300 NGOs. 

The expelled NGOs went on to write a damning report accusing the RPF of mass atrocities in the Kibeho camp. 

A joint UN and Government of Rwanda investigation found out that most of the accusations were fabricated. All this is explained and referenced in the sixth chapter of the recent book ‘Transforming Rwanda’ by Jean-Paul Kimonyo.

The expelled NGOs then set up shop just across, in the Mugunga and other refugee camps in Goma, Eastern DRC, a few kilometers from the Rwanda border, where hundreds of thousands of Rwandan refugees were settled.

That was an even more lucrative business since donors were spending over $2 million daily on the refugee camps.

There was one problem: less than 30 kilometers was too close to the Rwanda border, and these camps served as a rear base to the defeated soldiers and genocidaires who had never been disarmed by then Zairian government. They used the camp to train and conduct nightly incursions into the Rwandan territory and kill genocide survivors.

Again, the Rwandan government asked for the refugees to be repatriated or relocated far away from the Rwandan border in respect of the UN refugee convention, and again the NGOs refused.  

‘You will rule over the hills and forests’ once declared an NGO expert who advised the planned forceful exodus of the whole population into Zaire. 

And again one evening, in a sting operation led by Gen. James Kabarebe, the RPA crossed into Goma and applied their signature ‘U-Strategy’ to the refugees and marched everyone across the border into Rwanda and on to their respective villages in the same night.

The first NGO staff to arrive at the camps the next morning couldn’t believe their eyes. 

The scene was incredible; a shoe left behind by its owner who departed in haste with its twin; a saucepan whose content never had time to mature and feed its masters; it was as though God himself had descended in the night and took everyone to heaven. 

Many of the genocidaires managed to escape through the cracks of the ‘U’ and deeper into Zaire. The RPA pursued them, leading to what would later be known as the First Congo War.

Most of the NGO staff had to give up hefty hazard pay, shut down their operations overnight and book a one-way ticket back to Europe and America. 

Others, however, became great lakes specialists for Human Rights Watch, reporters without borders, Amnesty International, the State Department, and the like, or Great Lakes correspondents for western media. 

Not before they wrote another screaming report alleging that the RPA committed atrocities on the refugees. This report too was investigated by the UN and found to be frivolous.

These are the people who were hired by Kofi Annan to write the infamous Congo mapping report.

In the next article, I will explain their modus operandi, while working for Human Rights groups and media houses.