Rwanda and FDLR: The cost of negotiating with a genocidal legacy

A conditional proposal has emerged from the Kinshasa-backed FDLR genocidal militia to lay down its arms, contingent upon formal dialogue with Rwandan authorities. DR Congo and the Catholic Community of Sant’Egidio, acting as mediator, fully support this initiative, effectively reviving the genocidal terrorist group instead of neutralizing it. ALSO READ: How unpunished genocidaires fuel decades of conflict in eastern DR Congo On May 12, 2005, the International Crisis Group published a communiqué identifying FDLR as a major threat to regional stability and calling for a coordinated disarmament effort by regional governments. ALSO READ: Belgian lawyer on why genocide ideology doesn’t dissolve three decades after dispersion of genocidaires In July 2014, the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region and the Southern African Development Community gave FDLR a six-month ultimatum to disarm. The militia group ignored it. The UN Security Council later called for military action after the genocidal militia failed to disband by early 2015, but that action never materialized. ALSO READ: Investigation: How the Habyarimana network reached the heart of power in Kinshasa FDLR traces its origins to the perpetrators of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda who fled into the then Zaire – present day DR Congo – under the protection of the French-led Operation Turquoise and later regrouped under this new name. African leaders, including Nelson Mandela, Julius Nyerere, Étienne Tshisekedi, and others, called for their immediate disarmament and relocation far away from Rwanda's border. How did Zaire's president, Mobutu Sese Seko, respond? He told his prime minister, Léon Kengo wa Dondo, quite plainly that their allies wanted the genocidaires to remain there. This raises the central question: why would those unnamed allies want the genocidal militia to stay put when Zaire's own prime minister and other African leaders wanted the group disbanded? ALSO READ: Habyarimana's role in planning, implementing 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi To destabilize Rwanda, Mobutu positioned the former Rwandan armed forces and genocidaires along the border, where they re-organized. This marked the beginning of a war sustained by external allies who continue to protect the genocidal militia to this day. ALSO READ: FDLR links to Habyarimana's son raise regional security concerns – report Who are these allies, and what do they want? I know exactly who they are. Since the era of Richard Kandt, Rwanda's first colonial governor, their objective has remained unchanged: the elimination of the Tutsi. This alliance depends on dividing the Hutu and the Tutsi in order to plunder the region's wealth. The Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) rejected that framework and, instead, built a unified Rwandan identity rather than engaging in fratricidal conflict on behalf of foreign interests. This refusal is the core grievance against RPF. As a result, FDLR persists as a destabilizing force, intended ultimately to install a government in Rwanda that serves foreign agendas rather than its own people. ALSO READ: A Belgian Catholic priest and the theology of genocide Revolutionary and former Burkina Faso president Thomas Sankara said that changing a nation's destiny requires the nonconformity – even the madness – to abandon old formulas and invent the future. The RPF did exactly that: it discarded the colonial constructs of Hutuness and Tutsiness and built a national identity centered on Ndi Umunyarwanda – I am Rwandan. ALSO READ: Jean‑Luc Habyarimana and the Genocidal nostalgia This shift defeated not only the perpetrators of the genocide but also the external forces that shielded them – historically France, Belgium, the United Nations, the Catholic Church, and Mobutu's Zaire. Reorganized as FDLR, the remnants of that genocidal regime are established in eastern DR Congo to sustain permanent instability in the service of foreign interests. ALSO READ: Exclusive: Why the Agathe Kanziga genocide dossier matters Resolving the FDLR threat will not come through foreign intervention, least of all from the powers historically aligned with Mobutu. The solution rests entirely with the governments of the region, which must coordinate to enforce the group's disarmament. To gain political legitimacy, FDLR has once again chosen the Community of Sant’Egidio as its mediator, just as it did in 2005 and 2014. Has the genocidal militia disclosed to Sant’Egidio its plan to divide the country into ethnic zones? In 1994, its allies sought to partition Rwanda into designated Hutu and Tutsi territories – a proposal the RPF firmly rejected in favour of national unity. Rwanda has broken the chains of ethnic division that once sought its destruction, and it will never walk into the trap of debating its own destruction. The writer is a media specialist, historian, and playwright.

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Rwanda and FDLR: The cost of negotiating with a genocidal legacy