Editor,Please allow me to comment on Pan Butamire’s article, “Cry, the beloved D.R. Congo” (The New Times, November 1).Stability in the DRC, and specifically its eastern regions, can only be beneficial to the country’s eastern neighbours who have borne the fallout from its perpetual instability. But the root causes of that instability, the presence in the Kivus of the genocidal militia FDLR and the terrorist ADF-NALU, have not been addressed.The M23 (and CNDP before it) and the various Mai-Mai and other rebel insurrections were always symptoms of the insecurity and the genocidal practices imported into the area by Rwandan genocidaires and Ugandan terrorist bands. The M23 was not the cause but the consequence.And to therefore think that their defeat (if that is what has, in fact, happened) will somehow eradicate the insecurity is to seriously misread the situation.In fact, the genocidal FDLR has emerged even more empowered from this campaign, having fought alongside President Kabila’s forces in their war with the M23 rebels. The supreme irony is that the original purpose of the deployment of UN forces in the DRC was to eradicate these genocidal and terrorist forces in order to eliminate the reasons for Rwandan and Ugandan incursions into their neighbour to deal with these mass murderers and thus safeguard their national security.Instead of dealing with this menace, the UN forces have embraced these negative forces and have been all but openly in alliance with them through their close support of Congolese army units in which those genocidal forces are fully integrated.And so, one can see the situation has in fact moved into newer and more dangerous terrain with the UN now fully part of a campaign involving genocidaires. The fact that their presence in Eastern Congo-Zaire was made possible by the efforts of the man now anointed the head of UN peacekeeping (this is no longer an applicable term since the forces under the UN flag in the Eastern DRC are no longer peacekeepers but full-time belligerents just like any other), who at the time was France’s deputy permanent representative at the UN shows that this is in fact a continuation of the same French campaign to bolster their ex-FAR-Interahamwe allies.The UN has clearly been subverted and is no longer even pretending at even-handedness in the affairs of its member states.The blank check to Kabila from the UN, whose forces have done most of the fighting in Eastern DRC contrary to the claims of the likes of Martin Kobler, means that the UN has created a sort of a moral hazard: Kinshasa has little incentive to be amenable to a peaceful solution of the M23 rebellion; the UN MONUSCO-FIB guarantee underwrites Kabila’s reckless disregard for the demands of the ICGLR states that he engages his erstwhile officers and men of the FARDC in talks to resolve the conflict peacefully.Mwene Kalinda, Kigali
