The United Nations knows what is responsible for the rise of the FDLR or other armed groups in the great lakes region including the RPF which is in power in Kigali.

Western and, by default, Belgium involvement in Rwanda after the First World War  created the disharmony within the Rwandan communities which was only in the interests of the Belgium and its Western allies.

It’s absurd for the latest attack of the FDLR by the Congolese army supported by the UN in this most messed-up country and of region. Not only is it not a solution – it will always, almost without fail, prolong and deepen the problems, for one key reason: it deprives the people involved of the capacity to sort out their own conflicts, no matter how difficult that may be. That is the real vacuum that intervention always leaves behind: the space where a self-determining people ought to be.

 

For example, the rise of MDR PARMEHUTU and other political parties towards the Rwanda independence was not a Rwandan creation but   a creation of Belgium and its allies within the line of the so called Western interests. The sudden death of the Rwandan King Mutara III Rudahigwa and the chaos that followed the so called independence and subsequent Republics was not by accident, but well planned and design to keep Rwandans divided and under the control of the West and its former colonial masters.

Many Western politicians and pundits backing the Kagame regime have been at pains to blame the former deposed governments for allowing divisions of the Rwandan communities into Hutus and Tutsis which ended up in genocide.

Kagame like his predecessors supported again by some people in the West like US and UK, and to certain extent Belgium, Rwanda’s former colonial master is exploiting and commercialising the Rwandan tragedy of genocide for his own political and economic benefit. Kagame’s continued waging war on the Rwandan refugees, it’s not a new phenomenon, since 1996, he has been killing Rwandans within Rwanda and Congo unabated. Indeed killing and waging war against a section of Rwandans is not bringing Rwanda society together; he is rather and further dividing it along sectarian lines. And in doing so, he is sowing the seeds of hatred and the rise of other armed groups in the future and possibly the same killings we witnessed in 1994.

Yes, Habyarimana’s regime, Kagame’s predecessor was often brutal, and undemocratic but up until the RPF invasion in 1990, Rwanda was virtually peaceful and cases of disappearances, extra judicial killings were rarely heard.

The Congo invasion by Kagame in 1996 was in pretext of attacking the genocide forces that had sought refuge in Zaire now Congo. By the time Kinshasa fell in the hands of Kagame there was no popular, social force just waiting to assume power, no inchoate source of authority, no aspirant form of popular sovereignty. There was just a vacuum into which various foreign and local powers were drawn.

Like Kagame who was brought by Museveni after the mysterious death of the RPF leader Gen. Fred Rwigyema, Laurent Desire Kabila a long-term exile ferried into Congo after Mobutu’s fall, was a bit of a desperate despot, trying to rule through his admittedly limited force rather than popular consent.

Because of his dictatorial attitude and independent mind, he soon fell out with his masters who had given him the throne, hence those who enthroned him, dethroned him and gave power to his Son. As the saying goes like father like son, so is the Son Joseph Kabila Kabange despite his election victories he has suffered demonstrations that have not only undermined his legitimacy but has also compromised his authority. But all including Kagame have been a product of the West’s interference; in fact all these weaknesses  we see in all these leaders are synonymous with those of  leaders effectively imposed on to a territory stripped of its ruler by an external force.

Some political theorists argue that the support of the Kagame regime by the West right from the beginning as a rebel force that captured power after genocide in Rwanda in 1994 was part and parcel of the current conflict in the great lakes region including the creation of FDLR today.

For example, the Syria conflict since 2011, through the West’s official backing of the rebels, its explicit denunciation and delegitimisation of one-time Western ally, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, and its support of rebel-held, proto-governmental areas in northern and eastern Syria, Western leaders, from one-time US secretary of state Hillary Clinton to British prime minister David Cameron, not only helped to undermine and roll back the Syrian state – they paved the way for IS to move through and take control of vast swathes of non-Assad-controlled Syria.

Like the removal of Saddam in Iraq, or Colonel Gadaffi in Libya, the support of Kagame’s interferences in the region and Congo in particular removed the legitimate President, political and civic forces that allowed stability and other arms of government to function. The UN should be ashamed for not only sanctioning the armed attack on the Rwandan refugees but withholding the Mapping report that implicated Kagame in the Congo massacres that could constitute genocide.

The UN backed intervention against the FDLR will be and is the ultimate author of the nightmare in Congo and the region. Do something? You already did something; you did this, you made this horror, History will not always be on your side.