With or without M23, Congo has issues

The question on many people’s mind: Is peace finally knocking on Congo’s door or are we seeing the re-enactment of past peace initiatives that failed to take off at the cost of millions of lives?The former school of thought could tip the scales if this time around the world has its priorities right.The Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) panacea is rooted in historical and political missteps that were conveniently ignored – and even encouraged – by economic powers that had more to gain from Mobutu’s kleptomania-driven Kavuyo (chaos).Many western capitals benefitted from a disorderly DRC and they alone felt it was their prerogative to call the shots, to the detriment of the Congolese people. Now they are the first to cry wolf! when their actions or inactions start backfiring.It would be foolhardy to think that disbanding the M23 will be the magic wand that will cast away institutional failures, because that is what has been ailing Congo for decades. Congolese leaders need to go back to the drawing board and start from scratch and it wouldn’t hurt to take a backward peek at its history, there is a lot to learn from it.Scholars contend that during the dark days of the Congo Free State (1885 – 1908) when it was the personal property of Belgian King Leopold II, millions of Congolese died. Many had their limbs chopped off for failure to meet rubber quotas to service the emergence of motor cars. The Belgian king opened the floodgates to mass pillage on a national and industrial scale that today serves as DRC’s template cordially sponsored by King Leopold’s ghost.The central African sleeping giant continued to wallow in lethargic slumber, even after independence, exacerbated by the murder of its first Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, a victim of geopolitical struggle for supremacy. He was one of the first victims of the Cold War and industrial greed.There followed a wave of successive rebellions, all of them put down with the help of foreign interventions because the Congolese state could not handle them alone. It was the beginning of Congo’s reliance on UN forces to put down internal rebellions.The whole of eastern, central and southern Congo became a theatre of murderous upheavals whose pockmarks remain today.Katanga province, under Moise Tshombe, was most famous in the “gold rush”, a bid to cut off a big slice that was home to enormous mineral resource deposits, especially copper.South Kasai had led the breakaway exercise a few days before independence in 1960. Albert Kalonji declared independence. The Federal State of South Kasai was born.A short while later, as if to end the ambiguity behind their motives of carving out a separate territory, the new born ‘state’ underwent a dramatic name change; the MINING STATE OF SOUTH KASAI was proclaimed and present day Mbuji Mayi named as state capital.The vultures had begun to circle.Smaller rebellions broke out in present eastern DRC and one of them was led by current President Joseph Kabila’s father. It took Laurent Desire Kabila over 35 years to achieve his ambitions of occupying the top most seat when he rode on the back of Rwandan and Ugandan troops to oust Mobutu in 1997.Mobutu had made the fatal mistake of backing forces of the ousted Rwandan government; the ex-FAR and the Interahamwe, militia responsible for the1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda that cost the lives of over a million people.Once in power, Kabila senior’s Alliance des Forces Democratiques pour la Liberation du Congo-Zaire (AFDL) imploded. Thousands of Congolese Rwandophones were hunted down and killed, with the help of the Rwandan militia that had now morphed into Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), the core source of the current unrest in DRC.From then onwards, it was a downward spiral for the Congo.Rassemblement Congolais pour la Democratie RCD was born out of the AFDL, led by Rwandophones who had been denied their citizen rights since Mobutu’s era, and were now victims of a new threat; the FDLR and other local militia groups.Rebel groups from neighbouring countries found an ideal arena, with DRC’s blessings, to set up base and destabilise their countries. The Ugandan ADF-NALU and Burundian rebel group, FNL, were among them.When the UN stepped in with a 20,000 peace keeping force, MONUC, (now MONUSCO) the largest in the world, in 2001, one of its mandate was to tackle the rebel groups, and it failed dismally.Only last week, when the UN Security Council was debating internal reforms, Rwanda’s representative, Eugene Gasana, told the Council that 13 years down the road, the UN has never held MONUSCO accountable for failing to deal with the FDLR. Will it do it this time?Going by the level of diplomatic and multi country military efforts deployed to do away with M23, it’s a possibility that the international community has finally woken out of its stupor. But it would be foolhardy to expect that disbanding the M23 uprising alone, without addressing the core reasons for the decades-old tragedy will bring peace to the region.Congo’s woes are like the Greek mythological figure, Hydra; you cut off one head, two more appear, so the international community needs Herculean approaches to swab the heads away.

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With or without M23, Congo has issues