Of the countless egregious crimes that the Kinshasa regime is perpetrating against the DR Congo’s Tutsi citizens, one stands out for the sheer tribal prejudices that inform it (and that provide Kinshasa the fuel for its ongoing campaign of genocide against the beleaguered people). This is the relentless efforts to deprive the Congolese Tutsi – composed primarily of Kinyarwanda-speaking pastoralist or herder communities in the east of the country – of their citizenship, their nationality. Senior-most members of the Congolese government basically have declared their Tutsi compatriots “Rwandans”. Ba-Rwandais! To give just one of thousands of possible examples across Africa, it is as if the government of Kenya today were to wake up, and declare all its Somali citizens to be foreigners! Everyone knows Kenyan Somalis are nationals of the country just as the Kalenjins, the Gikuyu, the Abaluhya, the Maasai, and dozens of other ethnicities. Their commonality is that one morning in 1885 they all woke to find themselves under an entity called Kenya, after Europeans sitting in Berlin drew lines on a map of Africa. It is only in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that they pretend to ignore the realities of their colonially created entity, purposefully to disenfranchise a whole section of the country’s people. Congolese authorities – under the guise of fighting the M23 movement – use that lie to incite masses of ordinary Congolese of other ethnicities against their Tutsi compatriots. Take a few minutes to listen to the audio clip, and the blood-curdling calls to genocide. It is hate speech that, in this region, last was deployed against Rwanda’s Tutsi population in the period 1990-94. In fact, there is no difference between it and RTLM broadcasts circa 1994. This is no coincidence. FDLR, the offshoot of the forces that were the main perpetrators of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda (the ex-FAR and Interahamwe militias) are in the thick of today’s genocidal activity in eastern DR Congo, ahead of other militias like the so-called Wazalendo (patriots). Kinshasa looks very determined to exterminate, or expel a whole section of its citizenry – Banyarwanda ba rudi kwawo! – using genocide as the means. In that, they couldn’t have found better partners than FDLR. The claims by the inciters of hate that they are doing this “because the M23 is fighting the government” is just one of the countless untenable fallacies that you will hear emanating from the DR Congo’s authorities. Let alone questions like how a rebel group’s activities supposedly are justification for wholesale slaughter of civilian populations, one may ask: who exactly is “fighting” who? The M23, as any knowledgeable observer may know, only took up arms once the central government in Kinshasa – under the previous regime of Joseph Kabila – threatened the rights of their communities. That also was after Kabila reneged on an agreement to integrate troops from the Kinyarwanda-speaking communities into the national army. For some context, one has to remember how the defeated genocidal regime in Rwanda exported their ideology to the then Zaire, now DR Congo, and found a willing host in the government of President Mobutu Sese Seko. They had suffered defeat at the hands of the Rwandese Patriotic Front and fled, in hyperchaotic scenes, across the border. Once across, their immediate goal was to re-launch attacks into Rwanda. And so they embarked on building a force in the vast Mugunga refugee camp, with the active help of Mobutu, and the government of former French president Francois Mitterrand. There is a clear causal link between the failures of the Mobutu government, and the perpetual insecurity that has bedeviled the east of the vast country. Mobutu, rather than dealing decisively with the ex-FAR and Interahamwe problem, meaning to disarm them, arrest their ringleaders, and state in no uncertain terms that Zaire wasn’t going to be a safe haven for illegal armed activity, instead chose to work with them. Kabila “First” and “Second” too chose to work with the genocidal forces, who continued to wreak havoc, and to target the pastoralist, herder communities in particular, because of who they are. With the Tshisekedi regime’s recourse to genocide, one can see another highly cynical calculus at play; one informed by the thinking that targeting people and falsely labeling them “Rwandan foreigners” is the surest way to gain votes. Tshisekedi has, since he took power in January 2019, presided over an ever-deteriorating economy, higher crime rates than any predecessor, and levels of corruption that would startle Mobutu himself. With this record of abject failure, and faced with a presidential election in about two months’ time, inciting hate against the Tutsi population, but also constantly blaming Rwanda as a means to deflect from this woeful record, is all Tshisekedi has. Will the DR Congo’s Tutsi communities survive Tshisekedi? And in case they do, what then? Who will guarantee their security, long term? At this point who would blame them if they were to think of a separate homeland? Shyaka Kanuma is a journalist based in Kigali
