Why peace and security is critical to the development of the Great Lakes Region

SECURITY has been defined as the relative freedom from harmful threats. It can also be looked at as freedom from risk or danger, doubt, anxiety or fear. Today no one doubts that Rwanda is probably the safest country in the region despite the presence in the neighborhood of a looming threat of insecurity arising from the menace caused by the Ex-Far and the Interahamwe, who have been enjoying a safe haven in the thick forests of the DRC. They were routed from Rwanda at the height of the 1994, by the Rwandese Patriotic Army (RPA), and they continue to hatch designs and strategies of completing their nefarious ‘assignment’ of destabilizing and killing Rwandans.Recent events in the neighbouring Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) also demonstrate that all is not well for peace and security to prevail in our sub-region. As everyone knows, the 1994 genocide took place at a time when the world and indeed the international community could have done something. But Africa and Rwanda specifically, was not in the geo-political interest of the great powers and so we lost over a million people in just a hundred days.Evenhanded condemnation of the FDRL-Interahamwe by some sections of the international community seems as patronizing as it is pointless. eace and security in Rwanda, while important for the country’s development, cannot be sufficient if and when peace is not restored in the neighbouring DRC. The form in which the Eastern part of the DRC came into existence following the Berlin Conference of 1884 and subsequent re-division of the former Kingdom of Rwanda created acrimony and discontent for the Kinyarwanda speaking Congolese who have been consistently denied their citizenship and identity. If outsiders had a solution to the current imbroglio in North Kivu of the DRC, it would surely have been found by now. The world’s mightiest powers and the most brilliant statesmen and diplomats have devoted themselves to resolving the problem.Western diplomatic and United Nations adventurism through the most expensive peacekeeping contingent in the name of MONUSCO in the resolution of the DRC problems have nearly always turned out to be catastrophic failure. Neo-imperialism, reborn in the uniform of world policeman, is now a raging virus. Various declarations made on peace in the DRC have always pledged “all it takes to ensure the maintenance of peace and security in the Eastern DRC” and the United Nations has always assured various stakeholders in the peace efforts of “maintaining the momentum created and ensure that protocols and declarations signed would be transformed into tangible action”. This is what a friend of mine calls high-sounding nothing! I am not sure whether declarations and money poured into peace-keeping efforts on their own without the political will on the part of the Congolese authorities and their supporters is sufficient to bring peace dividends to the Eastern DRC.Neither should the security of Rwanda and that of the Great Lakes Region be viewed from the military or defense perspective per se. As is now generally recognised, as Robert McNamara, formerly a United States Secretary for Defence and World Bank President once said, “Security is development and without development there can be no security. Development means economic, social and political progress. It means a reasonable standard of living and reasonable in this context requires continual redefinition”. In brief therefore, contemporary security should encompass the whole range of economic, social, ecological and demographic issues that now face us, in addition to those more traditional threats that might require a military response.For the Great Lakes Region and indeed Rwanda’s security concerns to be allayed, there should be sustained political will on the part of the players in the Great Lakes Region, coupled with increased financial resources from members of the international community.But we should view security from a more realistic perspective. Where can we find today such thing as absolute security, either for states or citizens of states? All states, including the superpowers have to settle for relative security, and Rwanda or indeed the Great Lakes states, a poverty stricken area, with close to 50% of its citizens living on less than a dollar a day, we have to settle for less than might be acceptable elsewhere. The bitter truth of the matter is that the levels of security, both personal and state, which are taken for granted by the citizens of the post-cold war Europe, despite its current financial difficulties, are probably unattainable anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa in the immediate future. I am not expressing a statement of despair but the plain truth and a warning that security for our region needs to be grounded in political, military and economic realities.

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Why peace and security is critical to the development of the Great Lakes Region