Editor,

I WISH to react to Stella Musoni’s article, "How independent is the Expanded Joint Verification Mechanism?” (The New Times, June 27).

This supposedly expert military team (Expanded Joint Verification Mechanism or EJVM) intended to provide professional and objective findings regarding incidents on the common borders of member states, especially those involving DR Congo borders—particularly on that country’s eastern frontiers – seem to have gone the way of the UN’s highly politicised Group of Experts’ process, down to the leaking of working drafts to short-circuit normal vetting procedures and consensual approval of findings.

Am I the only one who sees the expanded role of Monusco-FIB in the EJVM process as largely responsible for this degradation? We should by now have no illusions about Monusco-FIB’s anti-Rwanda agenda.

Does anyone still have any doubt about their bellicose intentions against Rwanda and the UN’s complicity (as in 1994 when it approved France’s Opération Turquoise to protect the génocidaires) in that agenda following the UN’s violation of its own sanctions to transport interdicted génocidaires from Eastern DR Congo to Rome to meet with Catholic Church-affiliated FDLR supporters, the UN’s own Special Representative for the Great Lakes Region and her Belgian counterpart?

What an incredible "coincidence” that the man most closely credited with facilitating the ex-filtration to Eastern Zaire in 1994 of the forces that had just committed the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, the then Deputy Permanent Representative of France to the UN, Mr. Hervé Ladsous, and therefore the man most closely linked with exporting the genocidal ideology from Rwanda to Congo, is the very same man who has just assisted these mass murderers to violate UN Security Council decisions and fly them to Rome to meet their sponsors with UN benediction, instead of arresting them as per the UN Security Council resolutions mandate?

How did the UN get to this low point? Is Ban Ki-Moon still in charge or has Ladsous turned him into a toothless lame duck who no longer controls his own Secretariat? Does he realise how his deputy has humiliated him and made him lose face by seeming to be a power unto himself?

Mwene Kalinda, Rwanda