DRC gov’t, M23 talks: Kabila is only buying time

Editor,Does anyone else other than I have the distinct feeling that Kinshasa is using ongoing preliminary talks with the M23 rebels as an opportunity solely to buy time? Having been so overwhelmingly routed on the battlefield by a handful of mutineers, for what purpose would Kabila’s “government” – for lack of an alternative term – be buying such time? Given the consistent track record for unreliability by this sorry bunch of incompetents, and the even worse role of many governments of Western countries in encouraging Kinshasa to completely ignore moral hazard in its destructive head-on rush to war, it is not hard to guess that Kabila thinks – once again like the proverbial person who does the same thing over and over expecting a different outcome – that he can shoot his way to a solution against the rebellious people in the Eastern DRC. And since even he must know that his rabble of an “army” is completely incapable of doing that, the time he is buying by going through the motions of negotiations to nowhere must be aimed at allowing him to persuade a number of countries with better armies to fight for him or to put together an army of mercenaries to fight the rebels. What he obviously fails to grasp is that neither of these options can guarantee success, given the critical role of motivation in such a conflict, and that either is a much more costly option than engaging his mutineering soldiers in a genuinely peaceful quest for a peaceful solution: both militarily capable governments and mercenaries will extract much higher prices to fight on his behalf than coming to an agreement with his own soldiers. But then, wisdom has never seemed like the strongest suit for Kabila junior, and with assorted non-state foreign activists such as HRW, the Heges and Stearns as well as such Western governments such as Belgium and France encouraging him in his self-destructive obduracy and a noisy but growing fringe of Congolese baying for the blood of their Rwandophone compatriots, he has clearly become a prisoner of his own fantasies as a military-cum-diplomatic giant. Mark my words: This combination is a disastrous recipe for the people of the DRC and for the survival of his own Government.Mwene Kalinda, (Reaction to the story, DRC gov’t, M23 talks adjourned, Saturday Times, December 22)

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DRC gov’t, M23 talks: Kabila is only buying time