Africa-Press – Rwanda. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni on Wednesday, May 28, blamed the decades-long instability in eastern DR Congo on what he termed as “careless foreign interference” dating back to the era of former Zairean leader Mobutu Sese Seko and Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, according to reports from Ugandan media.
This was during the 12th High-Level Meeting of the Regional Oversight Mechanism of the Peace, Security and Cooperation (PSC) Framework for the DR Congo and the region. The summit was hosted by President Museveni at the State House in Entebbe, about 40 kilometers from Kampala, the country’s capital. During the opening session, Museveni said the challenges facing DR Congo could be resolved regionally with limited external involvement. He said reliance on foreign forces while ignoring regional stakeholders and the voices of Congolese citizens had exacerbated the crisis.
Speaking while assuming the chairmanship of the Regional Oversight Mechanism (ROM) of the Peace, Security and Cooperation (PSC) Framework for DR Congo and the Great Lakes Region, the Ugandan leader said the region’s conflicts are solvable if external actors step back and allow African solutions to take root.
“We know what the problem is, and it can be solved, but we must have the political will. Foreigners should limit their involvement because they are the ones who carelessly embolden the mistake. Then the mistake makers think we, the region, don’t care,” Museveni told fellow leaders gathered for the 12th high-level ROM summit.
Reports indicate that as he was handed the chairmanship by Burundi’s President Évariste Ndayishimiye, Museveni used his inaugural speech to offer a history lesson. He directly linking the continuing insecurity in eastern DR Congo to the fallout from the genocidal forces that fled Rwanda in 1994 and were later armed and sheltered in DR Congo.
“The Mobutu army was defeated in Rwanda, and together with Habyarimana, they fled to Goma,” Museveni recalled during the meeting at State House Entebbe.
“We appealed to Mobutu to disarm them. He wouldn’t listen because he thought the internal forces don’t matter. That we, the neighbors, don’t matter. What matters are the foreigners who are supporting them,” he said.
“Why was Mobutu not listening? We were here. We could have helped him.”
The PSC Framework, signed in 2013 under the auspices of the United Nations, African Union, International Conference on the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR), and the Southern African Development Community (SADC), is a major regional initiative aimed at addressing the root causes of conflict in eastern DR Congo.
Museveni said he was optimistic about resolving the crisis but cautioned against repeating the mistakes of the past.
“In my opinion, these problems are easy to solve. They are not difficult. What is difficult are the three mistakes: philosophy, ideology, and strategy.”
The summit was attended by heads of state or representatives from Uganda, Angola, Burundi, Congo-Brazzaville, DR Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, South Sudan, Sudan, Tanzania, and Zambia, along with observer delegations from the UN, AU, and ICGLR.
Genocidal militia
A DR Congo-based terrorist militia founded by remnants of the masterminds of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda has wreaked havoc in the region for the past three decades.
When the Rwanda Patriotic Army rebels took over power and stopped the genocide, in July 1994, the ousted genocidal regime’s army (ex-FAR), politicians, and Interahamwe militia that had massacred more than one million people in 100 days – runaway, en masse, with their weapons, to eastern DR Congo, then known as Zaire. They first banded together into what they called RDR, then PALIR, then ALIR I followed by ALIR II, and finally FDLR. In mid 2000, soon after the US government listed it as a terrorist organization following its murder of American tourists in Uganda’s Bwindi Forest, they formed FDLR in a bid to evade or distance themselves from their horrendous crimes. The initiators gathered in Lubumbashi, DR Congo’s second-largest city in the southeasternmost part, along the border with Zambia, and formed FDLR.
In eastern DR Congo, the genocidal militia continued its genocidal agenda, especially targeting the Kinyarwanda-speaking Congolese whose unresolved grievances resulted into the existence of the M23 rebellion. The latter was created on May 6, 2012, due to numerous failures of the Congolese government, including Kinshasa’s refusal to implement a peace agreement signed on March 23, 2009.
In January 2009, a former politico-military group formed about three years earlier, the Congrès national pour la défense du people (CNDP), had stopped rebellion after Kinshasa promised to, among others, integrate its fighters into the national army. Top government officials including the then defense minister Charles Mwando Simba – who passed away, in Belgium, in December 2016 – attended a ceremony held at Rumangabo military camp, about 45 kilometres north of Goma, the capital of North Kivu Province, to welcome the first group of rebel fighters into the national army.
A few days later, CNDP officials announced the “the de facto transformation of CNDP into a political party” recognized by the government –after their fighter’s integration into the national army. But about 11 months after denouncing rebellion and becoming a political party, everything was back to ground zero. A frustrated head of the ex- rebel group-turned political party, Désiré Kamanzi, resigned.
The ongoing war between the Congolese government army coalition that includes FDLR, over 10,000 Burundian troops, European mercenaries, South Africa-led SADC forces, as well as UN peacekeepers, against M23 rebels started in 2021.
M23 is now part of a larger – and bourgeoning – rebel coalition, Alliance fleuve Congo (AFC), created in December 2023.
The AFC/M23 rebels who control swathes of territory in eastern DR Congo including the main city of Goma confirmed the return of former President Joseph Kabila, on May 26, ending six years of his self-imposed exile. Kabila’s return to Goma, the capital of North Kivu province, was the second after he traveled to the city briefly in April before returning to Southern Africa.
“The return home of this great political figure is welcomed,” AFC/M23 political leader Corneille Nangaa said in a post on X. “He [Kabila] made the right choice, rather than remaining in forced exile.”
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