Tom Ndahiro
Africa-Press – Rwanda. There are times when words from the world’s most powerful table—the UN Security Council—do not merely fail to solve a problem; they actively entrench it. Such is the case with Resolution 2773 (2025), the latest in a long line of hollow pronouncements about the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
Cloaked in high-sounding platitudes about peace, sovereignty, and human rights, the resolution reeks of hypocrisy, ignorance, and geopolitical posturing. It is a diplomatic costume party where facts are optional, logic is negotiable, and solutions are crafted by those who have not set foot on the frontlines of the crisis.
It takes a special kind of international blindness—or perhaps willful complicity—to watch theDRC implode decade after decade and still manage to misdiagnose the disease, prescribe the wrong treatment, and then blame the patient for dying.
With all the solemnity and self-importance one expects from Turtle Bay, the Security Council aimed its pen at the eastern DRC conflict. This resolution, adopted on 21 February 2025—is —a document that reads more like a press release hastily typed during a fire drill than a serious roadmap for peace in the DRC.
It makes bold demands: M23 rebels must withdraw without conditions, Rwanda must vacate eastern Congo immediately, and the region must embrace a ceasefire while opening up humanitarian corridors.
There is a stern rebuke of child soldier recruitment, sexual violence, and attacks on civilians. But in a dazzling display of selective memory, the Security Council manages to condemn everything except the real source of DRC’s turmoil: the very state apparatus in Kinshasa that has turned ethnic scapegoating, institutional rot, and militia outsourcing into a blueprint for governance.
The DRC’s government has perfected the art of fighting warlords by becoming one.
Meanwhile, MONUSCO, the ever-present peacekeeping mission, has gradually evolved from neutral actor to silent accomplice, then to full-blown combatant by operating jointly with FARDC and genocidaires from the FDLR.
And yet, it is M23—the one organized group that has provided security and resettled displaced persons in areas it controls—that is told to pack up and vanish into thin air, as if the rebels could magically vaporize and take their grievances with them.
This view is not a polite critique. It is a penknife to the delusions of international diplomacy, a fire alarm to those genuinely interested in peace, and a direct challenge to the political class of the DRC whose grotesque theater of absurdity reached a new low when former President Joseph Kabila, now a senator for life, was rebranded by his own successors as a Rwandan infiltrator.
When the ruling elite begins to rewrite the biography of its longest-serving president in real time to match its own paranoid narratives, we are not in a normal political crisis—we are deep into a satirical nightmare of Orwellian proportions.
Let us now descend into the heart of this absurdity by unpacking this diplomatic train wreck.
First, the Council “strongly condemned ongoing offensives by the 23 March Movement (M23)” in North and South Kivu. The language here is stern, theatrical—and bleakly thin.
The resolution demands M23 “immediately cease hostilities, withdraw from areas it controls, and fully reverse the establishment of illegitimate parallel administrations.”
One might ask: withdraw to where, exactly? Lake Kivu? Perhaps Kigali? The resolution skips over the minor detail that M23 is composed of Congolese nationals, many of them returning from exile or forced displacement.
If the Council’s cartography is accurate, perhaps it assumes that Congolese rebels should surrender North Kivu to the army of fugitives from justice, namely the FDLR, or to the ragtag “Wazalendo” militia soup currently roaming the hills and villages like the world’s worst safari.
Resolution 2773 is a textbook case of what happens when a prescription is written without a diagnosis. You don’t prescribe chemotherapy to treat the flu. Yet here we are—again.
The resolution also calls for the Rwanda Defence Force to withdraw “without preconditions” from Congolese territory and stop supporting M23. It’s always Rwanda—the convenient scapegoat, isn’t it? Some diplomats love a tidy narrative, and Rwanda plays the villain well in the eyes of the willfully blind.
Meanwhile, there’s silence about the Congolese government’s well-documented partnerships with genocidaires from the FDLR, their Burundian military allies, and an alphabet soup of militias operating under the feel-good name “Wazalendo” (patriots, how poetic).
It’s like blaming the firefighter for the blaze while inviting the arsonist to the Security Council cocktail hour.
The resolution condemns “executions, sexual violence, child recruitment, attacks on civilians.” Noble, one would think—until you realize it fails to name the main perpetrators.
The Congolese army (FARDC) and its allied militias, including the FDLR, have the moral credentials of a hyena in a slaughterhouse.
The child soldiers, the rape campaigns, the ethnic cleansing—most of these atrocities can be traced back to Kinshasa’s Frankenstein alliance with regional thugs.
And yet M23, which has facilitated the return of internally displaced persons (IDPs) to areas it controls, including in and around Goma, is condemned wholesale.
One wonders if the Security Council is more comfortable with controlled chaos than uncomfortable peace.
The resolution reaffirmed support for MONUSCO and warned against obstruction. Here, the irony writes itself.
MONUSCO— the elephant in the quagmire, has been in the DRC longer than some UN interns have been alive. And what do we have to show for it? A mushrooming militia scene—growing from under 10 groups to over 250.
MONUSCO’s achievements include mastering the art of watching, shrugging, and retreating—usually in that order. It has for long— taken an active role, operating jointly with FARDC and its allies, effectively becoming a participant in the conflict while pretending to be an impartial peacekeeper.
It’s as if the Red Cross suddenly picked up rifles and joined a street gang, then demanded respect for its neutrality.
Resolution 2773 urges M23 to dismantle its governance structures. In other words, in areas where M23 has established relative calm, repatriated displaced populations, and instituted some form of public administration, the UN now demands a return to the lawless anarchy that preceded them.
Why? Because governance by “rebels” violates some abstract principle.
Meanwhile, Kinshasa has offered no credible alternative. Goma was practically under siege. The state was absent, security nonexistent, and civilians fled en masse.
M23, for all its faults, brought a semblance of order. But order imposed by anyone other than the Kinshasa elite is, in the UN’s eyes, illegitimate.
The unspoken assumption behind the resolution is that M23 are usurpers—foreign, alien, not Congolese. This dovetails with Kinshasa’s grotesque ideology that Congolese Tutsis are “Rwandans” by default.
It’s a repugnant narrative that feeds into decades of ethnic scapegoating, anti-Tutsi propaganda, and genocidal ideology that traces its roots to pre-genocide Rwanda.
When the Council demands M23 “withdraw,” it echoes Kinshasa’s ideology of exclusion, not international law. No provision was made of the ongoing, cautious negotiations between Kinshasa and M23 under the AFC coalition.
No mention of the fact that the real anarchy—worse than any rebel-administered order—comes from a state that has collapsed into factional violence and extrajudicial vendettas.
A rebel group that has soundly defeated government forces and enjoys support from its local population is not simply going to melt into the hills because the UN issued a press release.
The Security Council’s fantasy of immediate and unconditional withdrawal without transition, negotiation, or realistic security guarantees is tantamount to throwing fuel on a forest fire.
By failing to acknowledge the realities on the ground—and more crucially, the grievances that fuel this conflict—the resolution risks perpetuating the very crisis it seeks to end. One cannot wish away facts with diplomatic euphemisms.
The resolution was supposed to be where peace could begin—but won’t. Eastern DRC doesn’t need more hollow condemnations.
It needs a bold reimagining of peacekeeping, one grounded in political inclusion, not ideological exclusion.
The Council should have called for:
Accountability for FARDC and its war-criminal allies.
Recognition of the rights of Congolese Tutsis/Banyamulenge as bona fide citizens.
Real dialogue between M23/AFC and Kinshasa.
An audit of MONUSCO’s performance (or lack thereof) over two decades.
A peacekeeping model that keeps peace instead of reinforcing disorder.
Sadly, Resolution 2773 reads like a bureaucrat’s bedtime story—soothing, detached, and fictional.
The Rwandan Spy Who Presided Over a Nation
In a shocking yet darkly comedic twist that could only be authored in Kinshasa’s political playbook, the DRC’s political class has just discovered—25 years too late—that Joseph Kabila, their longest-serving president, was allegedly not Congolese after all.
Jean Pierre Bemba, the current Deputy Prime Minister in Charge of Transport and Communication, made this bombshell announcement in a June 9, 2025 interview on Top Congo FM.
In this fever dream masquerading as political commentary, Bemba declared that Joseph Kabila was “an impostor whose role in the DRC was, in particular, to infiltrate the army in order to disintegrate it.”
Apparently, according to Bemba, CNDP and M23 were not born of failed peace processes, mass killings, or Kinshasa’s betrayal of reintegration accords—they were cunning Trojan horses to sneak Rwandans into the FARDC.
Let’s pause to reflect on the magnitude of this absurdity. Kabila, who became president in 2001, handed over power in 2019 and still serves as a senator for life.
For over two decades, he was courted by the very politicians who now brand him a foreign agent. He led the country through two elections—whether flawed or not, but internationally recognized.
He met with heads of state, spoke at the UN, and governed with the full endorsement of the same political class that now declares his origins treasonous.
If Kabila was an infiltrator, what does that make the elites who collaborated with him for two decades? Gullible? Complicit? Or just masters of opportunism?
As if that weren’t absurd enough, Bemba went further into what can only be called genealogical surrealism: he claimed Kabila’s twin sister is actually his aunt, being “the young sister” to Kabila’s alleged Rwandan biological father.
One must assume that next week, we’ll be told his dog is his cousin, and his grandmother was a time traveler from Kigali.
It’s hard to know what to call this anymore—political smear? Psychological breakdown? A metaphysical exercise in Congolese genealogy? Whatever it is, it’s not governance. It’s not even a conspiracy. It’s performance art mixed with tribal bigotry.
And behind this curtain of lunacy lies a dangerous agenda: anyone opposed to President Tshisekedi is now fair game to be labeled a Rwandan.
Criticize Kinshasa? You must be an infiltrator. Suggest talks with M23? You’re doing Kagame’s bidding. Attend a meeting in Goma? You’ve defected to Rwanda.
The real message from Kinshasa is painfully simple: disagree with us, and you cease to be Congolese. Speak to the rebels, and you become one. Talk peace, and you’re branded a Rwandan.
This brand of exclusionary nationalism is not purely pathetic—it is lethal. It foments hate, inflames ethnic tensions, and erodes what remains of national cohesion.
Let’s also note the timing: since early May 2025, Joseph Kabila has made multiple visits to Goma to meet with AFC/M23 leaders.
In response, his political party has faced persecution in Kinshasa and other areas.
But instead of engaging with the political message such visits carry—namely, the legitimacy of grievances in eastern DRC—the government has opted to do what it does best: shift blame, fabricate enemies, and stoke fear.
This is the circus that the UN Security Council should be watching with alarm.
Yet the Council, ever the aloof grandparent, is more concerned with scolding M23 than questioning why Kinshasa’s ministers are now rewriting paternity records in a bid to purge political opponents.
The new identification of Kabila is not a side story—it is the very symptom of a terminally ill political class that weaponizes identity and distorts truth.
A new vocabulary is indeed required to describe this madness. “Satirical dystopia”? “Post-political surrealism”? “Genealogical warfare”? Take your pick.
What’s certain is that peace will remain elusive so long as politics in DRC remains a grotesque playhouse of contradictions, where absurdity is normalized and lies become state doctrine.
Always, wrong prescription
If peace in the Democratic Republic of the Congo were a patient, Resolution 2773 (2025) would be the equivalent of prescribing aspirin for a malignant tumor.
In a stunning feat of diplomatic hypocrisy and intellectual indolence, the world’s highest body for peace and security chose to condemn the M23 rebel movement for its advances, while completely ignoring the festering rot that is Kinshasa’s own governance.
The resolution demands that M23 stop breathing, vacate its positions, and melt into the mist, without addressing the gangrene at the heart of Congo’s crisis—state failure, ethno-nationalist hatred, and a regime whose main export is chaos.
This is not just a flawed resolution—it is a political hallucination drafted in moral darkness.
Imagine to ask the group that has restored a modicum of order in some parts of eastern DRC to step aside for those who engineered the anarchy in the first place: the FARDC, its genocidal FDLR allies, and a cocktail of murderous militias masquerading as patriots.
The Security Council Resolution is not just off the mark—it has become a co-author of the DRC’s tragedy, mouthing platitudes while lending legitimacy to impunity. One would laugh—if Congolese civilians weren’t the ones paying the price in blood. This is not leadership. It is diplomatic malpractice—served cold, on UN letterhead.
It is a document so detached from the political and military pathology of eastern DRC that it borders on malpractice.
The UN Security Council did not just fail to offer a remedy—it delivered a misdiagnosis, omitted key symptoms, and prescribed a placebo wrapped in jargon.
This was not peacekeeping; this was virtue-signaling with diplomatic letterhead.
The resolution’s call for M23’s unconditional withdrawal without alternative governance is tantamount to inviting anarchy.
Worse still, it tacitly blesses the return of FARDC-FDLR-Burundian coalitions that have shown a consistent pattern of human rights abuses.
That MONUSCO, which oversaw a proliferation of militias from less than a dozen to over 250, is being affirmed as a stabilizing force is a cruel joke to every displaced family who has watched blue helmets stand idle or collaborate with criminal forces.
And then there’s the shameful silence on the re-identification of a former president as a foreign agent.
When a government begins to erase its own history in pursuit of political supremacy, the result is not nation-building—it is institutional decay.
That Joseph Kabila is now being retrospectively labeled a Rwandan plant, while his governance was internationally recognized and his critics once jailed for questioning his nationality, is not just revisionism. It is madness dressed in the robes of nationalism.
The Security Council would do well to remember that peace in Congo cannot be achieved by recycling stereotypes and exorcising imaginary Rwandan ghosts.
Peace requires confronting Kinshasa’s failures, acknowledging M23’s political legitimacy, and calling out genocidal actors regardless of which flag they claim. Anything less is complicity dressed as diplomacy.
If the UN wants to avoid becoming a footnote in Congo’s endless tragedy, it must stop pretending that the country’s problems come from Rwanda, Goma or Bukavu, and start recognizing that the cancer lies much closer to the Presidential Palace in Kinshasa.
Until then, its resolutions will remain just that—words without weight, justice without judgment, and peace without purpose.
Source: The New Times
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