For nearly three decades now, DR Congo has offered sanctuary to the remnants of the forces that committed the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, which claimed more than a million lives, with successive Congolese governments embracing the FDLR genocidaires, even going as far as integrating them in the army. This is despite countless bilateral, regional and international pacts which required Kinshasa to end its scandalous ties to the genocidal forces and expel them instead, along with a myriad of other foreign armed groups. Now, DR Congo is home to over 130 local and foreign armed groups, who have fully taken advantage of the leadership vacuum and lawlessness in country’s east, with the FDLR and their numerous splinter militia groups particularly notorious for egregious human rights violations against civilian populations. The FDLR, a blacklisted terrorist group, has unsurprisingly exported its genocide ideology to the Congo, inciting communities against their compatriots on the basis of their ethnicity. Chilling video clips of a section of Rwandophone Congolese nationals, including children, being roughed up, handcuffed and/or driven away by Congolese forces, who are currently fighting alongside the FDLR genocidaires against the M23 rebels, are now commonplace on social media. In addition, the Congolese army, FARDC, and FDLR have recently doubled down on their provocation against Rwanda, shelling its territory on three occasions this year alone, the latest coming only last week, in a desperate effort to suck Rwanda into what is an internal Congolese problem. In trying to externalise its self-inflicted problems, Kinshasa is deflecting from its own failures, including its violation of recent resolutions of the regional Heads of State Conclave on DR Congo. For instance, the regional summit had ordered all foreign armed groups in the Congo to unconditionally lay down arms and return to their respective countries. Yet, the Congo has now chosen to embed the genocidal FDLR in its own military command structures, a slap in the face for the Chair of the East African Community, President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya, and his EAC counterparts, who constitute the Heads of State Conclave, as well as other regional partners and the UN. By doing so, Kinshasa has not only broken its own commitments, but it has also given the dreaded genocidal militia a free hand. The situation has become so messy even MONUSCO, the humongous UN peacekeeping force in the Congo, has literally found itself fighting alongside the FDLR militia, a terrorist group the UN has repeatedly denounced and urged to disarm – and one of the armed groups MONUSCO was supposedly meant to help defeat. To prevent further escalation of the situation, Kinshasa needs to stop externalising its own problems and instead respect its own commitments that it’s brazenly violated, while MONUSCO, the UN and the rest of the international community should not allow to be used or hoodwinked by an army and a government who’re in bed with genocidaires and blacklisted terrorists.
