Echoes of Genocide: Unpacking Tshisekedi's shocking support and justification of Wazalendo crimes

If you’ve been active on Twitter as long as I have, you start becoming quite familiar with other avid local Twitter users. You’ll find yourself ‘liking’ their tweets, commenting under them, and sharing them with your own followers. Juliette Karitanyi (username @JujuLaBelle), a doyen of #Rwot (Rwandans On Twitter), is one of the many people whose voice and content I’ve enjoyed over the years. So, although I doubt that we’ve said more than ten words, a tweet she posted yesterday broke my heart. “That's my brother-in-law. He did not deserve to be killed like that. He did no crime. Poor man was in a traffic jam and blocked a car behind him that had the wazalendo in. They got out and killed him. He was going back to celebrate my sister's birthday”. The brother-in-law she was tweeting about was Adolphe Mweze, a driver for the International Committee of the Red Cross. He was killed in Goma, the capital of North Kivu, by the bloodthirsty Wazalendo on the evening of March 31. The killers shot him simply because they could. They were confident that there would be no consequences for their actions. Why? Probably because they’d murdered someone else before and not even received a slap on the wrist. In my column last week, I wrote about how the ‘primitive politics’ (as President Paul Kagame called them) of our region manifest, i.e., through the lazy ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend’ thinking and the Hamitic vs Bantu narrative. The deadly incident in Goma on Sunday is the natural consequence of primitive politics. How? The only reason the Wazalendo militia is able to shoot at people without consequences is because they are not only armed, equipped, and paid by the DR Congo government, led by Felix Tshisekedi, but they are also shielded by his government from any kind of repercussion. Tshisekedi’s most recent interview is proof of this. Speaking to the French-language newspaper ‘Le Monde’,the Congolese president defended the Wazalendo when asked about the role of foreign mercenaries in ‘training’ Congolese forces (I put the word ‘training’ in quotes because it is a well-known fact that these mercenaries, the majority from Eastern Europe, are actively engaged in fighting). “Today, we must valorize and channel them. They are brave warriors, but they have not received any training. There might be ATROCITIES and EXCESSES as a consequences”, he is quoted saying. When the French journalist pushed a little further, stating that the Wazalendo were recruiting young children into their ranks, an obviously irritated Tshisekedi retorted, “stop looking at this situation as a normal one, we are here in an unreal world...Stop your Western gaze which is beginning to annoy Africans.” To summarize, Felix Tshisekedi is justifying not only the recruitment of child soldiers within a force that is being armed and financed by the DR Congo government (which is contrary to various UN Security Council resolutions, the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict, which obliges Felix Tshisekedi to take measures to prevent the recruitment and use of soldiers under the age of 18), he is justifying, minimizing, and thereby, supporting whatever crimes these Wazalendo involve themselves in. The justifications that Felix Tshisekedi gives to Le Monde for Wazalendo crimes exactly mirror those that the genocidal government in Rwanda gave in 1994. In 1994, the architects of the Genocide against the Tutsi, Bagosora, Kambanda, Sindikubwabo, and co., justified the murderous Interahamwe, saying that those murderers were simply engaging in ‘self-defense’ as a result of RPF’s actions. Tshisekedi literally made statements in the interview that Bagosora himself would have been proud of. Stating “some of them (the Wazalendo) have seen their parents raped, others massacred or beheaded. They are not people who reason like you and me. Put yourself in their shoes for a moment. They defend themselves with everything they have. The aggressors must be judged, those who drive them into this state.” According to him, anything is justified because of the M23. As Rwandans, we know the natural, and final, consequence of primitive politics: genocide. So, will the world sit back and watch as another one takes place in the Great Lakes region as it did 30 years ago? It seems like it will. Felix Tshisekedi, a primitive politician par excellence, is heading furiously towards that conclusion, so the question is, will anyone stop him? The author is a socio-political commentator

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Echoes of Genocide: Unpacking Tshisekedi's shocking support and justification of Wazalendo crimes