DRC should stop playing the victim – Mushikiwabo

The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Louise Mushikiwabo, has said that unless the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo stops blaming other countries for its internal problems, their woes would remain.She was speaking during an interview with France 24, a French TV network. She advised Kinshasa to own and act upon their problems, or they will never get a breakthrough.Mushikiwabo was reacting to persistent claims by President Joseph Kabila’s government that Kigali was supporting rebels, who call themselves M23, composed of fighters who mutinied in the eastern part of the country, accusing their government of not honouring its commitments under a 2009 peace deal with former CNDP rebels. “DRC has gotten into the mood of playing the victim every time they are confronted with a situation. Nothing is ever their responsibility whenever there is trouble, they always get someone to blame, if it’s not Rwanda, its Congo-Brazzaville, if not them, it’s the Ugandans or Angolans,” stated the minister.She said that the international community has a major role to play in helping DRC to own its problems, adding that that will form the basis for any sustainable solution to the country’s woes. Senior Congolese officials have launched a barrage of attacks against individual Rwandan officials, including urging the United Nations Security Council to slap them with sanctions for alleged M23 links. Kigali has denied any such links, and produced a comprehensive, point-by-point rebuttal to similar allegations by a UN panel of experts – a group whose credibility and impartiality has since come into question.Mushikiwabo said such propaganda was part of Kinshasa’s broad campaign to divert international attention from domestic problems, and accused Congolese officials of dishonesty and smearing a government they themselves requested to help resolve their internal problems.“It is preposterous! These are the people whom the Congolese came to, and it is on record, at the beginning of the crisis, to help them find a way of containing their armed forces, some of them were discontented in the east,” Mushikiwabo noted, adding that DRC has a serious problem within its armed forces.Several fighters and commanders who have since abandoned their posts and joined the M23 rebels were once members of the former CNDP and PARECO rebels, who had been integrated in the Congolese army, FARDC, under the Rwanda-backed March 23, 2009 peace, facilitated by former Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria and Benjamin Mkapa of Tanzania.The mutineers accuse the government of discriminating against them, failing to fully integrate them in the official army, killing about 50 of their colleagues after they had been transferred from the east, promoting impunity, and failing to repatriate tens of thousands of refugees, mostly their kith and kin. Some of the refugees, estimated at more than 50,000, have been in Rwanda for the last 15 years.Reacting to last Saturday’s withdrawal of 357 Rwandan special forces who were conducting joint operations against FDLR genocidal militias the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), with Congolese soldiers in the country’s eastern region. The foreign minister said the decision was taken in view of the latest insecurity threats posed by the rebellion between the government army and the M23 rebels. FDLR is largely composed of elements responsible for the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, which claimed more than a million lives.“The situation is unstable in the troops’ area of operation (Rutchuru) because this is the same area where the rebellion has taken place...but we were also motivated to pull them out because of the lack of good neighbourly attitude on behalf of our Congolese counterparts and all these made it difficult for our troops to remain there,” she explained.The minister also said that Britain had done the right thing to unfreeze the aid they had suspended based on the one-sided and highly contested UN experts interim report, saying it was not a report credible enough for countries to base on freezing aid.“That was not the right decision in the first place, but I think the British have realised that Rwanda, despite the allegations and the bad faith of our neighbours, has remained engaging and will be and continues to be part of the solutions to the DRC problems,” she said.

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DRC should stop playing the victim – Mushikiwabo