By Darius Sunray Murinzi
We are Africans. We are not Charlie.
Picture of Ba Ki-Moon, UN Secretary General, by Don’t Be Blind This Time
In Rwandan political parlance FDLR means Hutu [at some extent, it means simply Africans, because when the Rwandan president kills instinctively Tutsi and Hutu as documented by BBC TWO Rwanda Untold Story, he does not care about the identity of his victims – editor’s emphasis]. Anyone who disagrees with the Tutsi dominated RPF government is immediately accused of being FDLR. Some media outlets, even some famous individuals who support the RPF tend to imply in their speeches, that the word Hutu means killer.
Hutu refugees have been killed in Congo from 1996 up to now.
This is done to make sure that anytime great numbers of Hutus are killed anywhere in the world, their deaths go unnoticed or in the category of a well deserved consequence to a people who are inherently evil, and whose lives should not count for anything. This explains the silence over the deaths of millions of hutus from Rwanda, DRC, and Burundi. When you add up all the other Bantu peoples who were slaughtered by the Tutsi armies of Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi in the last 24 years, because they looked like hutus, the numbers are staggering, and the silence over this horror by the UN and the world media, which shamelessly give these numbers, is shocking to say the least.
This means that, whenever we hear Russ Feingold, John Pendergast, Jason Stearns or Martin Kobler talking about eradicating the FDLR from the face of the earth, they really mean Hutus consciously, or unconsciously. This stance sends a chill down the spine of every Hutu in the Great Lakes region, young or old and the unintended consequence of this irrational position makes lasting peace impossible to achieve in the region, because cementing hatred through a well orchestrated strategy of persecution of the Hutu people in the region will always meet fierce resistance, whether the current FDLR survives or not.
In the last few weeks, a number of proposals have been put forward with the stated aim to bring peace and stability, in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo by killing off the FDLR, all from Western based institutions or countries. The one that especially caught my eyes is the one being pushed by the Enough Project and some shady character named Jason Stearns who claims to be an expert on all things African. This proposal which seems to be the same one embraced by Russ Feingold and the Obama administration is predicated on these three steps:
- Step one: Kill or arrest the FDLR leadership or make them defect to Kagame’s side, if this doesn’t work exile them to Siberia or the North Pole,
- Step two: Round up all Rwandan Hutu Refugees in the Eastern DRC, and put them into UN guarded concentration camps,
- Step three: Ship all these Hutu Refugees into the even bigger RDF guarded concentration camp, which is Rwanda,
This insidious American backed project must be supervised by a German dude by the name of Martin Kobler, who in turn expects African countries such as the DRC, Tanzania, South Africa and Malawi to enforce this insanity on his behalf and his UN bosses. The fact that this is not a new idea does not seem to bother anyone in Washington or New York. After all, this is what the UN has been trying to do since 1994, when it helped the US and Great Britain change the geopolitical landscape in the Great lakes region of Africa, bringing the RPF to power in Kigali and removing Mobutu in the same way the UN helped remove Patrice Lumumba in the early 60’s.
The FDLR survives not because they are a bunch of killers roaming around the jungles, shooting at everything that moves. The FDLR survives and will always survive because it fights for a noble cause of liberty, equality and justice; that the people understand and are willing to die for.
For the US and the UN to keep deluding themselves that every Hutu in the region is going to lay down their weapons and surrender to a Tutsi dominated government and go back to living in slavery, as it was centuries before the 1959 social revolution, in this day and age is baffling to most Africans, and I can’t help but wonder, who is piloting this runaway train.
The UN has forfeited its right to be an honest broker in all things Rwandan, since the days of Lt. General Dallaire who still talks about Hutus as the bad guys and Tutsis as the good guys, without any sense of nuance whatsoever, to the three hundred thousands Hutu refugees slaughtered under its watch in the DRC as evidenced by the -you guessed it- UN Mapping Report, which is still gathering dusts in somebody’s cabinet in New York.
By trying to implicate SADC nations into the US/UN latest attempt to slaughter Hutu refugees en masse, because they refused to bow to the Kigali regime, until it accepts an honest political dialog with its opposition, the US/UN cartel is trying to drag SADC’s credibility with the Rwandan Hutu refugees and all other people of goodwill who admire and respect what SADC did by helping the DRC get rid of the Kagame/Museveni backed murderous thugs known as M23.
Trying to equate the FDLR to M23 in order to justify a UN led military offensive on an unarmed defenceless population is an insane proposition, which can only bring disastrous results, and I hope and pray that SADC nations can see through the lies and ruses of those who are trying to cover up crimes they committed against our people, by bullying our brothers and sisters into starting an unnecessary fratricidal criminal insanity though military confrontation.
It is worth noting that since the defeat of the M23 the region has remained relatively calm, and whatever troubles that occurred in some parts of Eastern DRC had nothing whatsoever to do with the FDLR, and yet the utmost World body for peace and security is calling for war, and the Representative of the so-called world’s greatest democracy, Mr. Feingold, is telling the world, how impatient he is about the voluntary peace process that was initiated by the FDLR, trusting SADC to help bring everyone to the peace table, including the Kigali government.
Mr. Feingold is not ashamed at all, to say how much he wants to see more bloodshed in our region, as if we haven’t seen enough blood already. [There are nations including US which cannot prosper without imposing wars on other nations; this certainly is the case as far as Eastern Congo is concerned – editor’s emphasis]
Who in their right mind says that since a peace process is not moving as fast as they would like to see, even if it is moving and it hasn’t stalled at all, they’d rather see blood? Who is supposed to do the killing and the dying and for what? Besides, why does the US/UN feel that they should get the last word in a situation that is entirely a DRC/ Rwanda affair?
More than a year ago, when President Kikwete of Tanzania suggested to Paul Kagame that he should talk to the FDLR, Kagame publicly threatened to kill the soft spoken Tanzanian gentleman. Kagame also went on to state publicly that he will shoot anyone who opposes his government in broad daylight. It didn’t take long until we started seeing dead bodies float around Rwandese lakes and rivers, and in an extremely arrogant fashion, the Government of Rwanda admitted that more than sixty thousand of its citizens have disappeared, including 18 thousand school children. This is the man our people are supposed to trust and he is the one, in whose hands, Russ Feingold wants us to put ours and our children’s lives. [It is as if these westerners take Africans as stupid and without any memory at all – editor’s emphasis]
Before anyone keeps insisting on pushing Hutu refugees to go back to Rwanda without any guarantees of freedom and democracy, through a reliable political dispensation, they should do a head count of the people who returned since 1995 especially through the UNHCR and shows us where they are, and how they are doing? We know how well Gen.Rwarakabije [former FDLR leader today working with the Rwandan regime] is doing. Forget him! Show us all the people who returned with him, and if you can’t produce them, at least tell us what happened to them, and why it happened.
The truth deficiency in Rwandan politics and the Great lakes region has reached the point of saturation. It is up to SADC to bring everyone to the table and hold them accountable where it is necessary. We can start by doing a proper census of all the lives that were lost in the Great Lakes region since 1990, in order to fix the underlying ethnic tensions, away from nefarious media propaganda, and institutionalized persecution of our people by those who seek to dominate the continent, by exacerbating local rivalries, so that they can benefit from the ensuing chaos.
Every single life that is lost on our [African] continent should matter.
Claiming that we don’t know how many people died in Rwanda or the DRC and who they were, and who their families are, tells the rest of the world that we don’t care about our own, and therefore it is OK to do as they please with us. Moreover, the fact that those who are responsible for the 10 million Bantus of Eastern Congo haven’t been brought to account for their crimes, and instead they are calling for more of our people’s blood creates a lasting stain on our continent’s psyche.
We are Africans. We are not Charlie. [editor’s emphasis]
Most of the problems of Rwanda are Rwandan made and they will not be resolved by anybody else, as powerful as they may be; same as the issue of Eastern DRC. It is crucial that the African countries who understand the underlying issues of the region don’t fold, in face of the extreme pressure being exercised by Western vultures, who currently see Africa, especially the Great lakes region, as nothing else but a source of cheap or free resources and ruthless mercenaries, such as Kagame and Museveni.
