One foggy Friday morning, on February 20, 2009, I sat on an old wooden bench, in deep thought reflecting on our difficult and tiring eight-hour trek through unforgiving thick jungle the day before.

Luckily, we had reached our destination, a hidden Rwandan military outpost uphill in a humid region covered by steep hills on the boundary of Masisi and Walikale territories, moments before the skies released a pounding downpour.

But I was worried; having just seen the helicopter sent to take us back home turn and fly away without its passengers. To create a smoke signal, soldiers had built fires in a clearing at the top of the hill, and added grass and green branches to smother the flames and create a spiraling dense, white smoke so that the signal could be seen from miles away.

A commander on ground talked to the pilot on his walkie-talkie as the chopper hopefully circled overhead, searching. Even though we could catch glimpses of it through dense fog, the pilot just couldn’t locate us. After a while, the commander reasoned that it was too risky for the chopper to linger around much longer.

The pilot was granted permission to fly back to Goma, the provincial capital of North Kivu in eastern DR Congo., and try again later, when the sky is clearer. I knew that in that part of the world things didn’t always go as planned.

The troops then had orders to start their more than 200-kilometre march southwards, and homewards, on foot. Having already experienced a bit of what they endure, I didn’t envy them. My muscles still ached from the previous day’s overexertion.

The chopper had just abandoned us and, clearly, the fog was not about to disappear. Will I break down after trekking 50 kilometers? What if it rains heavily? Are we going to walk day and night? Such were some of the disturbing questions on my mind when, suddenly, a man with a goat amidst a group of soldiers a few metres away distracted me. I was about to learn that ‘my worries’ were nothing, compared to the danger his community faced.

It was barely a week towards the end of operation Umoja Wetu, the short-lived joint military offensive launched by Rwanda and DR Congo against the FDLR militia, some 13 years ago.

The genesis

When the Rwanda Patriotic Army (RPA) took charge in Kigali and stopped the Genocide against the Tutsi, in July 1994, the ousted genocidal regime’s army (ex-FAR), politicians as well as Interahamwe militia who orchestrated the Genocide – runaway, en masse, to eastern DR Congo, then known as Zaire.

The ex-FAR and the Interahamwe fled with their weapons. Worse still, they arrived in Zaïre with the same ideology of exterminating the Tutsi.

Before fleeing, they had massacred more than one million people, in three months. In Zaire, they were welcomed with open arms and they never stopped spewing genocidal venom. They were given a safe sanctuary from which to plan their return to Rwanda and ‘finish the job’.

Conscious that their involvement in the genocide was damaging their image and relationship with the international community, the genocidairesmutated several times, adopting new names.

The FDLR was founded in September 2000. It is blacklisted as a terrorist group because of the horrendous crimes it committed on Congolese territory. Like others before, its recruits are indoctrinated in genocide ideology. Those who want to abandon ‘the cause’ and return to Rwanda are held hostage by hardliners.

Their presence in South Kivu and North Kivu Provinces is the raison d’être for some Congolese rebel groups, including the M23 group – story for another day – which is fighting to protect Tutsi communities from the genocidaires’ atrocities. Kinshasa refuses to listen to their plight; making things even worse for them.

But it’s not only the Congolese Tutsi population that is taking the brunt of the militia’s crimes.

They will kill us all

In Matembe hills, Ramadhan Shenyongo, a village elder, had got "bad news” that Rwandan troops were readying to return home. For him, they were "abandoning” his people to face the wrath of Rwandan genocidaires.

Shenyongo was a man on a mission that eerily morning. The goat was a gift and he had come to the camp in what appeared to be his village’s last-ditch effort at earnestly begging the Rwandans not to leave. Having earlier welcomed and lived with the Rwandan troops, the villagers feared the militia would, on return, spare no one in their reprisal killings.

Rwandan soldiers dealt the militia a heavy blow and captured many civilian dependents who were sent back to Rwanda. But the Hunde, Nyanga and Congolese Hutu inhabitants of the area were convinced that the defeated genocidal militia fighters who retreated deep into the expanse of jungle would return, sooner or later, with a vengeance.

"They are waiting for you to leave and then they come back to harass us,” Shenyongo told the soldiers.

"They will come back, and surely, they will kill us all, if you leave... we suffer so much in this country,” he said, adding: "Some [FDLR] have run away but we are very worried about what will happen to us once these soldiers leave, please save us from this misery.”

A Major laboured to allay the village emisary’s fears. The Rwanda Defence Force had done its job, the officer told the man, and the Congolese army would take over and fully secure the area.

"Your village is safe now,” the old man was told. "Do not worry.”

About an hour later, the man and his team said their goodbyes. I could not tell if they were reassured, but they left anyway.

A Lieutenant, who stood by, quietly taking in everything, told me that the best way to protect the village and others in North Kivu was to stay a little longer and force the militia to totally surrender. The [military] pressure had to be sustained instead of giving them room to breathe. He suggested that two months – the period the operation lasted – were not enough. But the call was "not ours to make.”

There was so much noise in the international community, and in Kinshasa, clamouring for Rwandan soldiers to leave eastern DR Congo, allegedly because the joint operation was creating a humanitarian catastrophe.

Once the Rwandans left, the Congolese army and the UN peacekeeping mission pretended to do something. They first launched their own joint military operation, Operation Kimia II, to fight the genocidal militia. But they never really prevented the militia’s deliberate reprisals against the population. The genocidaires continued to prey on the civilian population; pillaging, murdering and raping – a hallmark of the FDLR, with impunity.

Reprisal killings

The militia’s attack in Luofu and Kasiki villages in Lubero territory, North Kivu Province, on April 17, 2009, spoke volumes. They attacked the two villages, at night, killing at least seven civilians, including five children who burned to death in their homes. Scores of other civilians were injured.

And nearly 300 houses were burned to the ground while Congolese soldiers in both villages fled. A day after the killers left, the UN peacekeeping mission, then MONUC, dispatched a patrol. Too late. On very many occasions, this is how the UN force keeps the peace in eastern DR Congo.

Looking back at events in Matembe hills, two months earlier, I got a broader sense of perspective. I commiserated with the people in Shenyongo’s village as I then made better sense of their situation.

Being associated with genocide is no light matter. The FDLR are not just another negative militia, or rebel group, on Congolese soil. Their extermination agenda and genocide ideology sets them apart. As such, the group should be an enemy of the entire international community. Genocide, for those who don’t understand it, is a crime against humanity, and as such, a crime against the world.

There will be people, ‘green’ or not, arguing that most FDLR members are young or ‘innocent’ people who did not commit genocide in Rwanda. But Genocide ideology has no age. The main concern here is what FDLR - and whatever other name they metamorphose into in a bid to shade off their genocidal past - stand for.

They stand for a poisonous ideology that has caused so much animosity and sowed so much hate. Every alliance with them is an alliance of evil because they are a force bent on extermination.

They are not a militia that any well-intentioned peace-loving citizen of this world should call on to dialogue with Kigali, or any government.

However, with the international community looking the other way, the militia continues to create alliances with other subversive groups against Rwanda. They have used media propaganda aimed at garnering international support, spreading genocide denial and demonising the Rwandan government.

Congolese military officials and politicians, as well as the militia group, will deny their collaboration in public. But Kinshasa has supported the ex-Far/Interahamwe, and later FDLR, overtly and covertly, for the past two decades. UN experts on several occasions reported that the militia continued to benefit from support from senior Congolese officers. Cases of army commanders giving, or selling, weapons and information to the very armed militia they were supposed to be targeting are common knowledge.

The Congolese army has occasionally waged military offensives against the genocidal militia but these could never fully succeed since, other factors constant, some officers were at the same time transferring weapons and information to FDLR units. Then there are the pro-genocidaire politicians working tirelessly to ensure that their protégés are never defeated.

Besides the financing it gets through donations from faith-based charities in Western capitals, the militia has a large stake in the illegal mining business and illegal drug trade in, among others, industrial hemp, or marijuana, as a main source of profit. For long, the group’s fighters and Congolese soldiers jointly controlled the marijuana trade in Lubero, Walikale and Rutshuru areas.

Things will worsen if Congolese authorities, and the international community, continue to bury their heads in the sand. In the past two months, there was unease especially driven by appalling images, on social media, of machete-happy people pursuing Rwandans and Kinyarwanda-speaking Congolese in North and South Kivu Provinces. The same way they used the radio to disseminate genocide propaganda during the 1994 genocide, the genocidaires used mainstream media as well as social media to incite the Congolese public and call for the stigmatization and torture of Kinyarwanda-speaking Congolese, calling on them to return to Rwanda. If not stopped, the alliance and collaboration between the Congolese army and the FDLR will spell doom.

A two-pronged approach that never happened

Six days after I left the hills in Masisi, in 2009, I met Modeste Kabori, a Mwami, or traditional chief, of Bukoma, a locality in Rutchuru region, who explained how, after the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi the fleeing genocidal machinery took control over his native land and taught his erstwhile nonviolent people to kill fellow human beings, without a shed of remorse, guilt, or shame.

They wrecked his province’s customary social fabric, he said, to the extent that Congolese now found it easy to kill.

"They have been here for 15 years and it is true they have dominated and entrenched themselves within the population. Many have even intermarried,” Kabori then said.

He explained that a sustained two-pronged approach – sensibilisation of the population and military operations – should be maintained so as to totally get rid of the FDLR. That never happened.

Not surprisingly, when the Rwandan army left in February 2009, Kabori and others in his community quickly turned into anti-Tutsi radicals. Their survival instinct kicked in. 

Without help from Kinshasa, these communities know that they are at the mercy of genocidaires and they embrace the genocide ideology.

The FARDC-FDLR alliance is not only a violation of international law but an alliance of evil. The biggest threat posed by the FDLR, and its splinter groups, is not a military threat. It is their genocide ideology.