One could say DR Congo has carried a curse for the 65 years since it gained independence. It is the curse of Patrice Lumumba, the charismatic, dynamic first prime minister of the vast country, whom Mobutu Sese Seko – that arch agent of neo-imperialism in Africa – murdered with the complicity, and active direction of Belgium, and the CIA. ALSO READ: Denial as devotion: A king’s legacy and the ghosts of colonial Africa They killed Lumumba because he was unwilling to be their puppet; to sign away the wealth of his country to them, to dig up and cart away as they wished. They labelled Lumumba a communist, and killed him because he wanted to govern the Congo as a truly independent state, and not anyone’s de-facto colony. ALSO READ: Can Tshisekedi ever be trusted as a partner in peace? After killing him, which they did by torturing him in some savage ways and shooting him, on January 17, 1961 – the willing executioners being Mobutu the army chief and willing puppet of the erstwhile colonial master, plus supporters of the quisling Katangese politician Moïse Tshombe – they got what they wanted. They had themselves a puppet regime that did all their bidding. And thus, the Congo, which Mobutu renamed Zaire, only for those that came after him to once again rename, this time baptizing it “Democratic Republic of the Congo”, was set on its ignominious, post-independence path as a problematic, chaotic, conflict-prone country. Today they shout at the top of their voices that “Rwanda is their aggressor”; or that “Rwanda has invaded them to bring conflict”, and so on. But these claims won’t stand a moment of scrutiny. DR Congo’s problems long precede the administration of President Paul Kagame in Rwanda. The president of Rwanda was only a little child when the servants of Western imperialism were busy sowing death and destruction there. They killed the one man that actually stood a chance of unifying, and forging a coherent nation out of this monstrosity that Belgian monarch Leopold II had carved out for himself in central Africa. The killers of Lumumba were never going to be concerned with such ideals as creating a Congo that worked for all Congolese; nor using its resources to build a social infrastructure - roads, schools, hospitals, bridges, electricity and phone lines – to bring prosperity to all Congolese: Africans that had for long been abused in the most brutal ways, enslaved by Leopold’s agents that robbed them of all human dignity. When one looks at this infamous moment in the history not only of DR Congo, it was as if the murder of Patrice Lumumba became a curse not only for that country, but Africa as a whole. Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, alias Mobutu Sese Seko, went on to rule for several years, but then sowed the seeds of his own demise when, during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda he threw his lot in with Juvenal Habyarimana. An individual that clearly was bent on exterminating an entire section of his country’s population. Surely that was the curse of Lumumba at work! Mobutu not only politically backed Habyarimana in whatever he did, he even sent Zairian troops to Rwanda to fight side by side with the Rwandan army, the FAR, against the Rwandan Patriotic Front - a force that fought for the rights of all Rwandans to a home. Perhaps no one sent Mobutu the memo: it's futile to stand in the way of such a force. The RPA routed the bulk of the Zairian force in short order, and the rest hightailed it back across the border. But Mobutu hadn’t learnt his lesson. Later when the liberators of Rwanda defeated Habyarimana’s army, sending them and their Interahamwe militia auxiliaries fleeing into Zaire, Mobutu received them with open arms. Even after the horrific bloodbath they had perpetrated. Zaire allowed the killers to regroup, with the goal to relaunch attacks into Rwanda to finish the genocide they had started. No doubt the curse of Lumumba was strong in Mobutu. The new administration in Kigali warned the government of Zaire, repeatedly, to disarm and disband the ex-FAR on its soil, as well as the Interahamwe militias, because they clearly were bent on destabilizing Rwanda. The Zairian supremo wasn’t listening. And so, after one provocation too many, the Rwandan Patriotic Army launched a lightening attack to disband the killers; an operation that didn’t stop until the fall of the regime of Mobutu, with the man fleeing, to later die of prostate cancer in a Moroccan hospital. The instability that the genocidaires created in DR Congo, and the conflicts that have roiled the country since then were purely a matter of Congolese doing. Why didn’t they act like Tanzania, to disarm every ex-FAR and Interahamwe refugee that fled to Tanzanian territory, and hand all of them over to the UNHCR as regular refugees? Today, we see another stubborn Congolese that has stuck by a remnant group of the genocidaires, and that’s hellbent on destabilizing Rwanda. He speaks a lot of hot words, and scapegoats Rwanda for all his failures. He better be careful. The curse of Lumumba could be on him.
