“We are treated as a distracted people, a people who don’t know what they want.” This was not spoken by a foreign analyst nor a cynical diplomat describing DR Congo from afar. It came from Basile Diatezwa, the last surviving founding figure of the UDPS, the party of President Félix Tshisekedi, during a long-form interview this January on VOK 360. At 72, his memory spans the independence roundtables, the Mobutu decades, the National Conference and the collapse of Zaïre. Few Congolese political actors remain who can speak about the present from the vantage point of unfinished statehood. In the interview, Diatezwa advances a thesis that cuts against the country’s dominant narratives. The Congolese debate reduces the eastern war to “30 years of aggression.” For him, that framing is analytically shallow. The crisis did not begin in 1996, nor in 1994. The central fault line is the unresolved question: who is Congolese? He insists this political question has haunted every Congolese head of state, “including Mobutu, who did not invent the problem, he inherited it.” To prove his point, he deploys history. He traces the fracture to 1910, when Germany, England and Belgium fixed the colonial borders of the Great Lakes Region. Populations of the former Rwandan kingdom became Congolese without moving; the frontier moved over them. Later, Belgium imported additional populations from Rwanda and Burundi as labor for Congo’s plantations. By 1959, a third wave – Tutsi refugees from Rwanda’s first “genocide” – fled into DR Congo. Even these “foreigners,” he says, were regularized at independence: at the 1959 Brussels Roundtable, political actors agreed that all “transplanted” populations present on June 30, 1960 would be Congolese by right. ALSO READ: Never again or never without gain: Belgium's cartographic crimes against Africa The fracture reopened in 1981, when Parliament passed a nationality law stripping all Banyarwanda – Hutu and Tutsi alike – of Zaïrian nationality, rendering even those Congolese by origin stateless. “We violated international law,” he notes, “because you cannot manufacture stateless persons.” The National Conference later completed the exclusion by expelling Tutsi from the proceedings. In Diatezwa’s analysis, war did not produce statelessness; statelessness produced war. He then adds a layer rarely acknowledged in Kinshasa: multi-generational socialization into anti-Tutsi ideology. In Uvira and the high plateaus, Maï-Maï groups raised children and grandchildren “inside a pot of anti-Tutsi hatred” dating from independence. Today’s Wazalendo are simply the third generation of that worldview: proof that conflict is not only geopolitical but intergenerational. ALSO READ: The language of ethnic cleansing: from Ngoma to the Great Lakes Throughout the interview, Diatezwa calls out actors across the spectrum. He criticizes Martin Fayulu for declaring that “there are no rwandophones in Congo.” He challenges the Catholic Church’s proposed “social pact,” arguing that churches may have moral authority but not the constitutional mandate to redesign the State. He scolds Parliament for voting facial-profiling laws against “infiltrators.” Even the army is not spared: he cites senior officers making inflammatory statements based on appearance. ALSO READ: Pan-Africanism and the unmasking of neo-colonial lies His solution is simple and radical: a Citizen Pact rooted in modern republican citizenship – not tribe, not land, not ethnic bloodlines. Citizenship, he argues, must confer equal rights and duties, codified into law and binding on the State. Whether one agrees with him or not, his point is difficult to evade: a state that cannot define who belongs cannot defend those who belong – and without that clarity, Congo remains what he warned against: a distracted people, inside an unfinished nation.
