The story of Icarus, his wings made of wax, and his fatal overreach is one of the best-known stories in Greek mythology. In the fable, Icarus and his elderly father Daedalus escape from the Labyrinth using wings made of feathers and wax. Flying away together, Daedalus warns Icarus not to fly too close to the sun, but the thrill of flying soon gets to him. Ignoring his father's advice, Icarus goes higher and higher until he unfortunately gets too close to the sun, causing the wax to melt and the wings to disintegrate. As his father watches, impotently, Icarus plunges into the sea, dying a horrible and wholly unnecessary death. While the story of Icarus is quite well-known, the tale of Phaeton, the mortal son of the sun god Helios, isn’t. But like the saga of Icarus and the waxen wings, his story is also a cautionary tale of the consequences of recklessness and the importance of recognizing one's limitations. Wanting to prove that he, a mortal man, was the son of a god, Phaeton asked his father to let him drive the sun chariot (our ‘sun’) across the sky for a day. Despite Helios' warnings about the difficulty and danger of the task, Phaeton stubbornly insisted. Unable to control the powerful horses that pulled the chariot, Phaeton veered off course, devastating both the earth and the heavens and to prevent further destruction, Zeus, the king of all gods, struck Phaeton down with a lightning bolt, killing him instantly. When I heard the news that SADC (Southern African Development Community) military forces had entered into the eastern DR Congo morass, I immediately thought of Icarus, Phaeton and their grisly ends. In a press release released on January 4, SADC announced that they had deployed an armed mission on December 15 to support the DR Congo Government to restore peace and security in the east of the country. SADC’s rationale for sending South African, Malawian and Tanzanian troops was the SADC Mutual Defence Pact of 2003. Similar to Article Five of the North Atlantic Treaty (NATO’s founding document) that enshrined the principle of collective defence, the Mutual Defence Pact emphasised that, any armed attack perpetrated against one of the States Parties shall be considered a threat to regional peace and security and shall be met with immediate collective action. The thing is, collective defence is all well and good when you are dealing with a ‘normal’ state. Unfortunately, DR Congo is everything but a normal state. Firstly, there are over 200 armed militia groups in eastern DR Congo, ranging from the Allied Democratic Forces that are causing havoc in Ituri, to Mai-Mai groups (that have been christened Wazalendo) killing hundreds in South Kivu. So, when SADC says that their forces will fight groups that ‘perpetrated’ armed attacks against the state of DR Congo, will they fight each and every one of these groups? Or, as I probably rightly suspect, will their remit be just the M23? Furthermore, as the latest UN Group of Experts report, published on December 15, 2023, reveals, unlike what Felix Tshisekedi’s government would have the world believe, civil conflict isn’t just in the east. It is literally everywhere in the country. For example, the report notes that violence in Mai-Ndombe Province has ‘extended into the neighbouring provinces including Kinshasa Province, leaving hundreds of civilians dead and hundreds of villages, schools and medical facilities destroyed’. For those who don’t know the DR Congo well, Mai Ndombe is found in the west of the DR Congo, thousands of kilometers from North Kivu and South Kivu provinces. In North Kivu, the very same UN report notes that the Congolese government created and sponsored a new armed coalition called ‘Volontaires pour la défense de la Patrie (VDP), which comprises the genocidal FDLR and Mai-Mai militia. This group is not only murdering Rwandaphones in the most horrific of ways and raping women and girls in the camps around Goma, they are funding their reign of terror by engaging in illegal coltan, tin and tungsten mining in mineral-rich Rubaya, an area they control. With the UN’s evidence of the DR Congo’s governance failure, as well as its continued support to FDLR and other genocidal groups, its president’s threat to invade Rwanda, its backing of hate speech, its refusal to participate in the Luanda and Nairobi peace initiatives, and its horrible treatment of EAC forces, it is my view that SADC’s belief that they, somehow, can tame the DR Congo ‘tiger’ is as mistaken as Icarus thinking he can fly as high as he wants without consequence. It is akin to Phaeton arrogantly believing that he can master the sun, just because he is the son of a god. I will not be surprised if, a few months from now, groups like Lucha start burning effigies and flags of the SADC member countries in the streets of Goma and Bukavu because SADC hasn’t miraculously fixed the impossible mess that is DR Congo. After all they’ve done it to everyone else. The writer is a socio-political commentator
