An article that appeared last Friday on the Bloomberg news website claims “Rwandan meddling is deepening Congo’s deadly conflict”. But this assertion flies in the face of facts about the conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. It is another example of Western journalists (or other groups in the category of “shapers of global opinion”) making up their own set of facts, to support their preferred narratives. ALSO READ: Secret financial audit exposes high-level corruption fueling eastern DR Congo conflict Objective observers of DRC affairs would be correct to point out that the real cause of deepening conflict there is the intransigence of the country’s president Felix Tshisekedi in pursuing a (very public) campaign of ethnic cleansing; of pogroms, massacres, rape, and other atrocities against his country’s Tutsi communities, rather than adhere to existing peace roadmaps. Countries in the region have devised the said roadmaps, such as the Luanda and Nairobi processes, but Tshisekedi has trashed them. The man shows very little will to find a peaceful resolution to his country’s conflicts. But Bloomberg isn’t interested in these facts. They don’t fit the narrative. ALSO READ: South Africa's Ramaphosa says political solution needed in DR Congo crisis The article instead devotes several paragraphs demonising the Rwandan president, with the usual array of clichéd phrases and tropes, as the responsible party behind the “deepening conflict.” It then detours into the subject of the M23 rebel group, talking at length about how its waging war against Kinshasa with supposed Rwandan backing. It isn’t surprising that an article like this makes very little mention of the fact M23 is a native movement of Congolese citizens (of Tutsi ethnicity) that rose to defend its people against governments in Kinshasa that have pursued policies only of hate and discrimination against them. There is no mention that ever since Tshisekedi came to power, he has stepped up the hate and discrimination against the Congolese Tutsi. Or that the Kinshasa regime sponsors a multitude illegally armed militias that seek to exterminate helpless, unarmed Tutsi civilians, mounting constant attacks in their villages to massacre them, rape their women, and loot their property. The article instead seeks to flip facts on their head, repeatedly accusing M23 of heinous acts: of massacres of civilians; of looting minerals and other resources; of rape, and a repertoire of other crimes. This is accusing victims of the crimes of the perpetrators. Any half-serious researcher will be aware that the Congolese military, FARDC and groups allied to it, most notoriously the genocidal FDLR, are the true terrorist entities wreaking havoc in eastern Congo. They, and other cutthroat outfits like the Wazalendo militias that participate in the hunting and killing of Tutsis at the behest of Kinshasa, are the most feared killers, rapists and looters. FARDC in fact has integrated into its ranks the FDLR, a group that’s been blacklisted by the UN, and the US State Department for terrorist activities, but which now fights side by side with the Congolese national military. Even the Bloomberg article acknowledges FDLR as being an offshoot of Hutu extremists that perpetrated genocide in Rwanda in 1994 before fleeing, in defeat, to the former Zaire. Beyond that the article gives the Congolese army, as well as FDLR, Wazalendo and others a pass. There isn’t even a superficial description of the constant, relentless terror this unholy alliance wrecks in the Kivus, that’s led to whole villages deserted, that’s created one of the worst refugee crises in recent history. Anyone that follows the news around here knows that as the Kinshasa regime perpetrates its anti-Tutsi pogroms, its propaganda mouthpieces justify this criminality with claims that they (the victims) are Rwandans, and therefore should go back to Rwanda. Kinshasa is strenuously trying to expel a whole population from their historical homelands in the east, exploiting the fact they share an ethnicity with people across the border in Rwanda. Yet Bloomberg makes next to no mention of this. It, like so many foreign media, is doing a great job amplifying Tshisekedi’s propaganda. The article’s authors do not raise questions about the premise on which Congolese authorities base their genocidal campaign: that being Tutsi in itself is cause for a death sentence. They only write, superfluously, that “M23 says it’s fighting to protect ethnic Congolese Tutsis.” That’s all. No context. No mentioning what it is the group is protecting the ethnic Congolese Tutsi against. Nothing. But the article’s biases are betrayed by one phrase in that sentence: “M23 says”. It is meant to cast doubt on the group’s stated reasons for existence. This is part of a wider theme: to deprive M23 of agency, hence the constant harping that “M23 is Rwandan proxy”, the better to place the blame for war on Rwanda. They drag Rwanda, at will, into problems that are the result solely of Congolese governments’ myriad failures: failures of governance; failure to establish rule of law; failure to sort their issues of insecurity (which date back to their first day of self-rule in 1960), and so on. The whole article, seen with an informed eye, actually isn’t anything much more than a sponsored hatchet job; something written at the behest of, say, big Western mining companies with an interest in fixing the spotlight firmly on the victims of a state-sponsored campaign of terror. You don’t have to go far into it to get a clue into its main motivation. In paragraph 8 it states: “in February they (M23) surrounded the key hub of Goma, choking off supplies from some of the world’s richest deposits of tin ore and coltan, minerals used in semiconductors and mobile phones.” Aha! They momentarily let the mask slip there! Bloomberg, let’s not forget, is a prominent mouthpiece of corporate America, and the big guys there; the ones supplying the producers of semiconductors and mobile phones, must be very pissed at M23. The latter (in defending its people’s rights to existence and to a homeland) somewhere might have interrupted the flow of minerals, and therefore they must be hit in the media and their image further sullied, and Rwanda doubly so! Nothing must ever even hint at interrupting the Congolese ruling class, the actual supplier of pillaged minerals (Kinshasa’s drumbeat of accusations against Rwanda, of looting minerals, is just so much projection). The rulers in Kinshasa must be defended, and protected at all costs. The Bloomberg piece goes as far as quoting an anonymous French mercenary, of the so-called “private military contractor”, Agemira, on war equipment allegedly in the possession of M23 (which makes one with some knowledge of journalism wonder how this kind of sourcing for a story can be ethical). In DRC, Agemira basically is in the employ of Kinshasa, so what can they say about M23, or Rwanda for that matter, that is reliable? Very little. Just like the entire Bloomberg piece.
