In the annals of disgraceful behavior by high-ranking officials of a government targeting the dignitaries of another state, surely nothing tops the rant Saturday last week of DR Congo’s justice minister Constant Mutamba against Rwanda, against the President of Rwanda himself, and against ‘Banyarwanda’ – the latter by which he obviously meant Congolese of Tutsi ethnicity.
We’ll get to the sinister connotations of this.
But first, even those most used to awful, undignified, and belligerent pronouncements from members of the regime of President Felix Tshisekedi, and Tshisekedi himself, were taken aback by Mutamba’s outburst, bizarrely set in an overcrowded prison in the border town of Goma.
Directing his invective at the president of Rwanda, the man, using the collective "we” as member of the Tshisekedi government, issued the threat that "we shall crucify Kagame, and crucify not only him but all the Rwandans!” because, he claimed, "We can’t allow Rwanda or Rwandans to dominate us.”
(Note this unhinged allegation, which they’ve never backed with any evidence but which, just like so many other accusations of the Kinshasa regime against Rwanda, was concocted out of thin air, and which is part of a strategy of scapegoating Rwanda for all Congolese problems).
Mutamba was just getting started. He next promised that he would release all prisoners that agree ‘to identify Banyarwanda’, because they must identify each and every one of them, and crucify and kill all of them.
To anyone for whom the concocted grievances of the Tshisekedi regime are news, this so-called justice minister was talking about actual citizens of the DR Congo. He was talking about people that speak the Kinyarwanda language and that share cultural practices with Rwandans, but whose native homelands happen to be squarely within DRC territory, the doing of colonial demarcations of the country.
This fact of history however has never deterred Tshisekedi from publicly and vehemently designating the herder, pastoralist communities of the Kivus ‘Rwandans’- even when he knows he is lying through his teeth. (A fellow regional head of state not very long ago disclosed that during a closed-door meeting Tshisekedi admitted those people indeed are citizens of the Democratic Republic of Congo).
Tshisekedi has been pushing his lie about a section of his own citizenry being Rwandan because it is expedient in peddling the lie that he is fighting Rwanda, or that he is protecting Congo against Rwandan domination.
And so, his justice minister Constant Mutamba – in spewing the dangerous nonsense before inmates of the Munzenze Prison – in fact was echoing the exact position of Tshisekedi and his entire government.
Mutamba also was echoing his boss in insulting Rwanda’s president, even when inflating himself up to make the utterance that he was putting a price on the head of the president of Rwanda!, and his extremist words in attacking those he repeatedly called enemy foreigners were taken straight from Tshisekedi’s vocabulary.
It was deadly language reminiscent of those of officials of the genocidal government in Rwanda in 1994, who incited the Hutu masses to turn against their Tutsi neighbors, as they prepared and later perpetrated one of the worst bloodbaths of the Twentieth history.
That in fact is exactly what the Tshisekedi regime already is doing, targeting the herder pastoralist communities in a campaign of ethnic cleansing in which one of the main players is the FDLR – a group not coincidentally born of the remnants of perpetrators of genocide in Rwanda that fled to DR Congo after their defeat. FDLR officials today enjoy close access to Tshisekedi, and its fighter are integrated in the Congolese army, FARDC.
It is no exaggeration to say Felix Tshisekedi and all his officials share genocide ideology with FDLR, in words and deeds.
To place the incendiary words of Mutamba in this context is to see that the overall aim of Kinshasa, after they annihilate all the Congolese Tutsi communities as they plot, is to also destabilize, and overrun Rwanda and its government. Tshisekedi after all openly issues threats that he will "effect regime change in Kigali”.
And so, when a senior ‘Tshisekedist’ fulminates that he will release prisoners to participate in perpetration of genocide, and to also fight side by side with FDLR, the FARDC, the terrorist Wazalendo militia, or even eastern European mercenaries imported by his boss in his nefarious plots, one cannot help but feel pity for the people of DR Congo.
The worst criminals in their midst are being incited to hate, to be empowered to commit mass murder, and who knows what other crimes against humanity, and let loose afterwards, armed to the teeth, with no control of who they will actually attack!
The evil machinations of Congolese rulers can’t succeed in anything other than sow even more chaos and, one can’t help but imagine, doom Congolese society as a whole.
From Rwanda’s perspective, this madness so close nearby can only re-enforce its (Rwanda) determination to take measures to protect her borders.