Congolese Nobel Laureate Mukwege Says Tshisekedi ‘Worsening Instability’ With Rwanda Policy
17:55 GMT 21.07.2022 (Updated: 11:10 GMT 24.11.2022)
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North Kivu Province, in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, is plagued with violence by armed rebel groups, many the legacy of a continent-wide war largely unknown outside of Africa. The violence has ensured that nations involved in the war have remained deeply enmeshed in Congolese politics.
Congolese President Felix Tshisekede received criticism from a new corner this week, after one of the country’s most prominent activists tore into his diplomacy with Rwanda.
"While a multilateral partnership with the United Nations and a bilateral agreement between the DR Congo and Uganda are already difficultly and inefficiently superimposed," the imminent deployment of a Regional Force "looks like a chronicle of chaos announced, especially since some of these states are at the root of destabilization, cycles of violence and the looting of natural resources in eastern Congo," Congolese gynecologist and surgeon Denis Mukwege said on Thursday.
Mukwege, who hails from the North Kivu city of Bukavu on the Rwandan border and won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2018 for his work with female victims of wartime rape, warned that the “regional diplomacy” of Tshisekede “leads us objectively towards a prolongation and aggravation of instability.”
He especially warned there was “only one certainty” from the continuation of conflict: “women and children will be affected again, and will be the first victims of this new cycle of violence.”
"The profound reform of the FARDC [Armed Forces of the DR Congo], security services and the fight against impunity are the most appropriate measures to ensure pacification and lasting stability in eastern DRC,” he added.
In this file photo taken on May 25, 2022 A Congolese army pick up carrying trooops heads towards the front line near Kibumba in the area surrounding the North Kivu city of Goma during clashes between the Congolese army and M23 rebels. - DR Congo and Rwanda have agreed to a "de-escalation process" following weeks of rising tensions over rebel fighting in Congo's east, the Congolese presidency stated on July 6, 2022.
Late last month, the East African Community voted to activate its East African Regional Force (EARF) and sent it to North Kivu, albeit without the participation of Rwandan troops, as Tshisekede has accused Kigali of supporting the M23 rebel group there. A predominantly Tutsi group, the M23 is engaged with other rebel groups in the area as well as the FARDC, but mostly the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a Hutu Power militia that is descended from the groups responsible for the 1994 genocide of Rwandan Tutsis and Twa.
Rwanda has accused the DRC of supporting the FDLR instead of fighting them and has denied supporting the M23. However, there is evidence to support both sides’ accusations of using the respective rebel groups as proxies.
The accusations, combined with a series of border incidents that have included the kidnapping of Rwandan troops and rockets crossing the border into Rwanda, and the M23 capturing important towns near the border, have led to the two countries pledging their willingness to go to war over the issue. Regular diplomatic and economic relations have been all but severed, and Tshisekede's government has banned the Rwandan flag-carrier airline RwandAir from Congolese airspace.
In early July, Angolan President Joao Lourenco organized a summit and ostensible ceasefire between Congo and Rwanda, including reviving a long-dormant dialogue used to defuse the hostilities of the Congo Wars in the 2000s. However, the M23 rejected the Luanda deal, with a spokesperson telling AFP: “This roadmap does not commit the M23. We are Congolese, we have nothing to do with Rwanda. We are asked to leave here, but to go where? It is impossible.”
On Thursday, Congolese Tourism Minister Modero Nsimba threatened to “propose militarizing protected areas in eastern DRC," most especially Virunga National Park, an area where Nsimda said the M23 “is killing, looting and ransacking a protected area that is inscribed on the world heritage list.”
People displaced by fighting between Congolese forces and M23 rebels gather north of Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo, Friday May 27, 2022. Congolese authorities have accused Rwandan forces of supporting armed groups in mineral-rich eastern Congo, where dozens of such groups are active. Rwanda has described allegations of supporting rebels in Congo as baseless.
© AP Photo / Moses Sawasawa
The continent’s oldest national park, Virunga is home to rare Mountain Gorillas, a great ape closely related to humans, but of which there are less than 1,000 still alive. Nsimba said the global community should rally to their defense in the same way it rallied against Daesh* when the historic mosques of Timbuktu were threatened.
In addition to the EAC force, the UN peacekeeping mission in DR Congo, MONUSCO, has some 14,000 troops in the country, most of them in North Kivu in an attempt to keep the various factions there from engaging in open warfare or in crimes against humanity, such as rape and the empressment of child soldiers.
The intermittent fighting since November has displaced some 70,000 people near the city of Goma on Lake Kivu. Across the country, some 5.6 million people are internally displaced - the most of any African country.
In addition to the FDLR and M23, Congolese and Ugandan forces are engaged with the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), an Islamist group that has pledged itself to Daesh. On Monday, the bodies of eight people killed by the ADF were found in Ndimo village in Ituri Province, to the north of North Kivu, coming just days after the ADF torched the village of Otmaber, killing two more people.
Kampala and Kinshasa launched their joint anti-ADF operation in November 2021, around the same time that the M23 again took up arms after claiming the DRC had violated the terms of its earlier demobilization.
*Daesh, also Islamic State, IS, ISIS: a terrorist group banned in Russia and many other nations.
