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Apart from those very directly involved at the heart of the recent bout of fighting in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), nobody will ever know the full story. Wars being what they are, the victors as well as the vanquished usually both offer heavily revised and edited versions of events after the fact.
Nevertheless, rumours abound. For years, there have been tales of a long-term attempt to create a new state in which ethnic Tutsis would apparently feel secure. At one extreme, the rumour tells us, this would have included the mineral-rich North and South Kivu provinces, Rwanda itself, parts of Burundi, the southern tip of Uganda, and even the Kagera region of northern Tanzania, in a sort of “eretz” (“greater”) Rwanda, to mirror the allegations of the plan for an “eretz Israel” taking in south Lebanon and possibly Jordan. At the other extreme, there is the tale of the attempt to just create a mini-client state out of the Kivus.
Africa has never sunk as low as she sits now: a vast playground for all manner of imperial wealth-grabbing ambitions facilitated by a wholly amoral and avaricious class of nouveau riche upstarts who suppress the continent’s own intellectual and physical abilities to rebuild herself. Nothing symbolises this more than the devastation of the Kivus, the land where advanced mathematics may have first been developed as evidenced by the pre-Egyptian mathematical tool discovered at Ishango in 1960.
The DRC’s woes are far from over. However, the sudden demonstration of seriousness by the UN-supported army of the DRC, which led to the absolute rout of M23 militia in early November, will force recalculations on many sides.
The bottom line here seems to have been a collapse of the grand workplan that the Western-blessed regimes of Kigali and – more importantly – Uganda have been hawking to Western geostrategists for two decades now.
As well-known Ugandan analyst Timothy Kalyegira outlines here, the arrival to power of the National Resistance Army (NRA) in 1986 gave birth to the concept of an ethno-military fighting machine that could be used to create regime change in any political space in the region. What followed has been two decades of hubris where, having convinced themselves they could never fail, these militarists went on to convince the Western powers of the same thing.
It would appear that, in the land of the Ishango bone, this thinking has turned out to be a serious miscalculation.
First, the myth of ethnic representation has been shattered as it finally becomes clear that not every community in the Kivus is ethnic Rwandese; not every ethnic Rwandese there is a Tutsi; not every Tutsi there is a Munyamulenge; and not every Munyamulenge there who may have supported the Kigali/Kampala-backed rebellion that ousted the Mobutu lootocracy was in favour of the attempts to topple the subsequent DRC governments.
Second, the proxy mask has slipped badly, exposing a sordid and fundamentally anti-African mentality among those regimes that have been supporting the cycle of war in eastern DRC. It is reported that, true to form, the Western powers shifted allegiances (or agents) and basically ordered the Kigali and Kampala regimes to sit this one out. This is what has enabled the so-called M23 “uprising” to be seen for what it was: a shell formation of a few thousand infantrymen whose ability to fight was wholly dependent on massive troop and logistical support (together with intelligence support and diplomatic cover) from backers further east.
Third, the idea of superior “military science” has been shown to be somewhat bogus. In particular, the practice of “talking while fighting” first used by the NRA to such great effect during the 1985 Nairobi Peace Talks, not only failed but actually backfired, as the DRC government instead used it against the rebels and their backers.
Much as he leaves out an important factor, namely, political outlook, Kalyegira does provide a useful timeline as to how regional Tutsi angst was systematically harnessed to the advancement of Western imperial ambitions to create new client regimes that can successfully meld the language of Pan-Africanism with the goals of Western economic exploitation across the region.
What is left to be seen is how each player now utilises the cards he has left. President Museveni in Kampala has the huge inconvenience of the defeated remnants of M23 – from the commander downwards – streaming over the border and basically placing themselves in his custody. If he does not hand them back to the DRC, his role as a backer will be taken as fact, and all his pretences as honest broker at the various regional peace talks will be seen for what they are. In addition, like Museveni, Kagame’s Kigali also has the added difficulty of maintaining credibility with their defeated proxies, and anyone else in the future whom they may seek to involve in such projects. And without such credibility, their usefulness to the West – which helped them along on this long misadventure in the first place – will be significantly diminished.
What new calculations will be made at that point?
