After President Kagame met his DRC Counterpart (KABILA) in the Ethiopian Capital Addis Ababa, the two leaders agreed to allow in a joint, neutral international force to monitor the porous borders of the two countries. There is a saying in Kinyarwanda that when two thieves who have been working together for a long time, if one of them pays a visits to his/her colleague, neither of them will  go to sleep.  This is exactly the scenario between these two leaders, they don’t trust each other and they know for sure all their old games in the CONGO conflict.

In fact, both leaders did not allow the ink to dry on the papers signed in Addis, because as soon as they returned to their respective countries, they instructed their mouth piece Ministers to tell their people what their true colors are. In Kigali as usual the Minister of Foreign Affairs  madam Mushikiwabo was ringing her bells aloud  that Kinshasa is  coughing flue again, pointing out that DRC plays right into the double standards of the international community.

“The same officials we hold talks and sign pacts with, are the same, who after a few hours of our meetings and agreements, will go back home and start screaming on TVs and radios that Rwanda is fomenting the crisis in DRC. It puzzles me,” Minister Mushikiwabo said.

Who is fooling who?

The Congo government knows very well that Kigali is already a wounded buffalo; the whole international community has overwhelming evidence that Kigali is behind the conflict in Congo, what should then Kabila discuss with Kagame? Therefore Kigali regime is on defensive while Kinshasa is on offensive,   that’s why even after seemingly agreeing on issues, once they are back in the comfort of their abodes in Kinshasa, Congolese officials, right from President Kabila to foreign affairs Minister Raymond Tshimbanda and government spokesperson Lambert Mende, maintain the accusations on Kigali.

It is reported that after the meeting between President Kabila and Kagame in the Ethiopian capital, on the side lines of the African Union (AU), President Kabila penned a ‘strong-worded’ letter to the international community asking it to take stern action against Rwanda. Indeed that’s why Kinshasa has ‘reneged’ on every effort made between the two countries seeking to find a lasting solution to the conflict in Eastern DRC, and instead Kabila chooses to be ‘bed fellows’ with the international community.

The Kinshasa regime knows very well the history of our region , the war that ousted the former President of Rwanda Juvenal Habyarimana started in Uganda, interestingly the regime in Kampala at the time denied any involvement in the Rwandan conflict instead  with the conspiracy of some members of  the international community , Uganda and Rwanda at that time  created a force which according to  Museveni and Habyarimana would oversee the border and prevent  RPF from advancing to the Rwandan territory.

However, the RPF was a movement supported by the Kampala regime and determined to overthrow the government of Juvénal Habyarimana.. During the initial stages of the invasion, Museveni and Habyarimana were both attending a UN summit in the United States. It is believed that the date for the RPF mobilization was set to allow Museveni to distance himself from their actions until it was too late to stop them.  As I have mentioned above Museveni was blamed for complicity in the September 1990 invasion and/or not having control of his army. The RPF like M23 melted away into the Virunga Mountains straddling the Rwanda-Uganda border. Despite the negotiation of a security pact, in which both countries agreed to cooperate in maintaining security along their common border, a resurgent RPF had occupied much of the northern territory of Rwanda by 1992 until the final assault on the Kigali after murdering the former President and his Burundian Counterpart in 1994 which proceeded the genocide which still haunts the Rwandan people today.

Therefore all the above history is still fresh in the mind of President Kabila; after all he lost his father in almost the same circumstances.   Kagame is a man you cannot trust, he has managed to exterminate almost all his colleagues, and here I mean the founders of the RPF, either by killing them or politically rendering them impotent.  He has managed to control the whole country by intimidation and harassment and just recently he has introduced a law that will allow his notorious security officers to police all the information on phones and internet. Although they have been under the watch, the new law is to scare even those who still were in doubt that they are under the binoculars of the DMI and other killing squads.

Kigali regime has a tradition of denying of whatever evil they do, when the Kagame spies were involved in   acts of espionage in UK and other parts of Europe , Kagame  and his government denied the accusations despite different pieces of evidence attained by British secret services implicating Rwandan Government in dubious action against its critics in UK ,president Kagame  in his arrogant style of  spiting fire  denied the Espionage allegations and instead irrespectively accused respected British security services of not being professional . Indeed, this is the same style that he applied on the both UN reports, namely the UN Mapping report on the Massacres in Congo and the recent one of the support of M23.

It is not clear therefore whether the Kampala meeting will yield any meaningful results pertaining the Congo conflict given the background of the above conflict and how Kagame has managed to stage all these conflicts never the less manages to confuse the international community and all the donor countries where they keep funding his projects of killing his own people and giving his neighbors sleepless nights.  There is little hope that the Kampala meeting will hold the water in the glass.

 

Jacquleine Umurungi

 

Brussels.

 

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