For close to two months now, a wave of positive change, mixed with a breeze of peace, stability and security, have been blowing along the border regions between Rwanda and DR Congo. This brief period obviously coincides with the liberation of Goma from the regime of Felix Tshisekedi on January 29 by Afc-M23, which a couple of weeks later also captured Bukavu. What a great development that has turned out to be for the ordinary people of the Kivus! They have seen the chaos, murder and mayhem, looting and rape that they endured for so long vanish like a very bad dream after the M23 inflicted decisive defeats on Tshisekedi’s coalition of forces which included his own military, FARDC, bolstered by Burundian, South African, and other SADC bloc troops, European mercenaries, as well as the FDLR and Wazalendo genocidal militias. Now normalcy reigns in Goma, Bukavu, and the wider Kivu region, and to say the populations in the territories under control of Afc-M23 are happy and content is an understatement. Most didn’t think they would ever enjoy a normal day, getting up to go about their business throughout the day, return home at night, sleep peacefully, and repeat the cycle the next day. This was unthinkable as recently as January this very year. During the years they endured the terrorism of DR Congo government forces (and whoever happened to be their ally) normal life consisted of getting robbed by soldiers, getting beaten up by soldiers if one had no money to give them, and getting brutalized in the most dehumanizing ways. For any of the militias that wanted to subject someone to a gruesome death, for any reason, it was enough to shout “Rwandais!” at that person. Such a person was lucky if they got shot. Usually, they subjected them to some gruesome death, like setting them ablaze. “I can’t tell you how it feels to people that M23 has ended these things,” my barber, who is a native of Goma, and who recently was there for a couple of weeks, told me. Social media posts or activity by residents of eastern Congo are saying the same things. People can’t repeat it enough how happy they are with Afc-M23 and its handling of their day-to-day affairs. In any case, it doesn’t take much to imagine what it feels like when you’ve been living in a situation whereby, say, Wazalendo cannibals will be parading around with the severed head of one of their victims, or roasting and eating the body parts of others, and then one day all that inhuman evil is out of everyone’s life. These are just a very few of the things that the Europeans who have been sanctioning Afc-M23 officials and issuing other threats do not seem to understand. No number of sanctions or threats of sanctions will stop, in the slightest, a people that have successfully rid themselves of the daily threat of insecurity, or grievous bodily harm, in short the daily terror of bandits gone berserk. The Europeans that are so bent on advancing the interests of Kinshasa do not seem to understand one other thing: you do not tell a people faced by existential threats – like Tshisekedi’s campaign of genocide targeting eastern Congo’s Tutsi communities – to stop defending themselves. Rather, they (Tshisekedi’s European friends) would better be served to start bringing pressure to bear against him to stop his crimes, and his warmongering ways. But they won’t, because Felix Tshisekedi is, first and foremost their favorite kind of African president: a puppet and agent of Western imperialism. They just love it that he is prepared to hand the Congo’s mineral wealth over to any European or Western power in exchange for military protection – meaning entrenchment in power for himself and his cabal – and millions of dollars in kickbacks (paltry sums however for those that extract the real value from the Congo’s resources). On the other hand, the Western powers, other than their officials sitting in their offices, dispensing sanctions, would best be served to actually send fact-finding missions to the areas liberated from Tshisekedi and his forces. I know, such a course of action seems too difficult for former colonial overlords like Belgium, whose very word in the past was law. But it’s to their (the Europeans so fond of sanctions) own good to overcome the mental delusions that all of Africa still kowtows to them – a mindset that maybe one may forgive them for given the subservience of those few agents of neo-colonialism still reigning in Africa, best exemplified by Tshisekedi. Once their fact-finding missions are in Goma, Bukavu, and elsewhere in the Kivus, they will discover a people that have been freed of tyranny, and that will never willingly go back under the very system that has been oppressing them. And if they bothered to find out more, Western powers would also learn to properly appreciate what Rwanda (which now no longer has to deal with incursions by FDLR militias; shells fired across the border by Congo government forces; drunken Congolese army men firing across the border, and such) has been saying about its security concerns. Then, hopefully, they will learn even the mightiest will be well-served to learn a little humility, and that force and threats aren’t for every occasion.
