At this juncture, there is just no reasoning with Congolese ruler Felix Tshisekedi and his regime. How else to explain the man’s obduracy when he keeps insisting that Rwandophones – specifically Congolese Tutsi – from the east of the country are not Congolese, something that blatantly flies in the face of facts?
But Tshisekedi and members of his cabal in Kinshasa are prepared to die on that absurd hill, shouting that DR Congo’s Tutsi communities – a people whose historic home lies well within the boundaries of the vast, colonial-created territory – are "foreigners” (read "Rwandan”).
On the basis of that bald-faced lie, they then proceed to incite genocide, spewing hate speech with impunity and abandon.
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On the basis of that lie, they commit every known crime against humanity – pogroms, massacres, looting, rape, and more.
Those are their means of achieving what amounts to the only policy goal of the Tshisekedi regime. Sending everyone of Tutsi ethnicity "back to Rwanda.” To achieve this, Kinshasa formed alliances (initially) with an assortment of cutthroat militias, most notoriously FDLR – the genocidal outfit that, absurdly, is composed of actual Rwandans, being an offshoot of the defeated Rwandan genocidal regime’s army as well as Interahamwe militias that committed the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi.
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But when the targeted communities fought back, under the banner of the M23 rebel group, to push back against disenfranchisement (and to save their communities from annihilation) what did Kinshasa do, but shout: "aha you see, the M23 are in fact Rwandans that want to destabilize our country!”
They provoked a situation whose outcome became a fait accompli (in their minds) that they turned into a cudgel against Rwanda.
Here, it can’t be stressed enough that everyone in the Kinshasa regime knows very well that the M23 and the communities it fights to protect are as Congolese as any of them. Back in 2009, Kinshasa had even agreed that the rebels (CNDP at the time) were fellow citizens and that they had to be integrated into the national army – the FARDC. It wasn’t long however before Kinshasa began to renege on its part of the terms of the deal. Soldiers of the former rebel group were singled out for severe mistreatment in the FARDC, beaten up, brutalized, locked up at the slightest pretext and, above all, discriminated against on accusations they weren’t "real Congolese”.
Even as all that was happening, attacks against Tutsi herder and pastoralist communities were picking steam again. So, around then, the M23 came into being – a consequence of Kinshasa’s own intransigence. The current regime in Kinshasa has distinguished itself with its genocidal rhetoric in that, unlike Kabila or Mobutu before him, Tshisekedi demands that all people of the Tutsi ethnic group from eastern DR Congo "go back to Rwanda!”
This has to be the strangest, most bizarre government in the world.
There isn’t any other way to describe an administration that wakes up one morning to declare a whole part of its citizenry "foreigners” that have to leave. This after presenting no facts, or showing any methodology how it arrived at that conclusion, other than loudly yelling it, and then mounting campaigns of pogroms and genocide, to enforce it.
Strangely, they know they are lying, and that in fact the whole world knows the truth.
There is no shortage of respected voices laying out the facts, including elder African statesmen like former South African president Thabo Mbeki, or the late Mwalimu Julius Nyerere of Tanzania.
One time Mbeki pointedly stated that the (Tutsi) Banyamulenge are Congolese, indigenous to the land, and that the conflict that roils their region was the result of a complete failure of governance in Kinshasa.
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Another time an exasperated Nyerere asked what solution the rulers in Kinshasa presented, with their claims that Congolese Tutsi citizens are in fact "foreigners.”
After going through historic circumstances of their being Congolese, like how parts of the traditional Kingdom of Rwanda were partitioned and added to "the Belgian Congo”, Nyerere then asked: "If you claim (the Rwandophones) are no longer citizens of your country, what are you going to do? Are you going to return them alone, or are you returning them with a piece of land?”
In my humble opinion, DR Congo’s Rwandophone communities should take Nyerere’s second proposal as the only viable option going forward, and fight like hell to achieve it; because there is no reasoning with people like Tshisekedi and his gang.
Put yourself, for a moment, in the shoes of the Rwandophone (Tutsi) communities. Belligerent regimes in distant Kinshasa have, since the first days of the country’s independence from Belgium, in 1960, targeted them, with discrimination and with violence.
The Congolese Tutsi have never known peace. Each time one of the violent convulsions they call an election takes place in that country, the Tutsi will be singled out for pogroms or ethnic cleansing. Each time a failed regime wants a scapegoat, it will target those unfortunate people.
With Tshisekedi – whose armed coalition he has grown from the initial FARDC, and FDLR (as well as local militia bands called Wazalendo), to now include the Burundian army, eastern European mercenaries, together with SADC forces, notably the South Africans – the situation in eastern DR Congo has never been as bad.
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The historic discrimination against Congolese Tutsi has been ratcheted up, to terrifying new levels. The latter have to fight, as if their very existence depends on it, which it does. They have to show that Tshisekedi cannot mount a brutal campaign of expulsion against them, and expect no consequence. If they are to be separated from the entity known as the Democratic Republic of Congo, it has to be with their own piece of land.
Tshisekedi will have to understand that he can’t have his cake and eat it too.