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DR Congo accuses Uganda’s Army of helping M23 rebels to capture Bunagana border town :Congo MPs vow to halt UPDF operations against ADF
https://watchmanafrica.blogspot.com/2022/06/dr-congo-accuses-ugandas-army-of.html
Fooling us about Uganda’s neutrality in the Congo Conflict!!! Militarizing the Congo to help USA and allies to rape Congo resources: DRC troops, civilians fleeing to Uganda after rebel clashes
http://watchmanafrica.blogspot.com/2012/07/fooling-us-about-ugandas-neutrality-in.html
No more Rwandans, let's go and sort out Kagame: Thousands in anti-Rwanda rally in eastern DR Congo city: UK forced to cancel deportation flight to Rwanda after European court ruling
https://watchmanafrica.blogspot.com/2022/06/no-more-rwandans-lets-go-and-sort-out.html
End of the M23 Era but no end yet to USA and her clients’ looting of Congo resources : Kabila Congratulates Congo Army for Defeating M23 Rebels: FARDC captured Ugandan and Rwandan Nationals fighting alongside M23 Rebels
http://watchmanafrica.blogspot.com/2013/10/end-of-m23-era-but-no-end-yet-to-usa.html
It is a neo-liberal ploy to loot Congo resources Stupid! US backed M23 rebels fighting in eastern Congo force hundreds into Uganda
https://watchmanafrica.blogspot.com/2021/11/it-is-neo-liberal-ploy-to-loot-congo.html
Britain’s Hero Paul Kagame Re-embarks on plan to create Confusion in DR Congo to Facilitate Western Plunder: DR Congo army accuses Rwanda of deploying soldiers 'to defend M23': Rwanda says UK asylum seekers to arrive 'in next few weeks': UK asylum seekers hide to avoid transfer to Rwanda
https://watchmanafrica.blogspot.com/2022/06/britains-hero-paul-kagame-re-embarks-on.html
Western Neo-liberal banditry: There goes the Fracas Again: Congolese soldiers flee to Uganda as M23 rebels capture Bunagana border
https://watchmanafrica.blogspot.com/2022/06/western-neo-liberal-banditry-there-goes.html
How Rwanda, Uganda rivalry is fueling DRC conflict
https://observer.ug/news/headlines/74475-how-rwanda-uganda-rivalry-is-fueling-drc-conflict
When the gunshots rang out, Dansira Karikumutima jumped to her feet.
“I
ran away with my family,” she said of the March day that M23 rebels
arrived in Cheya, her village in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo’s
North Kivu province. “We scattered, each running in a different
direction out of fear.”
Months later,
the 52-year-old, her husband and their 11 children have regrouped in an
informal camp in Rutshuru town, where they’re spending nights in a
schoolhouse and scavenging for food by day. They’re among the latest
victims of rising volatility in the eastern DRC. If unchecked, the
unrest “risks reigniting interstate conflict in the Great Lakes region,”
as the Africa Center for Strategic Studies warned in a late June report
on the worsening security situation.
M23 is among more than 100
armed groups operating in the eastern DRC, an unsettled region where
conflict has raged for decades but is escalating, especially in recent
months. Nearly 8,000 people have died violently since 2017, according to
the Kivu Security Tracker, which monitors conflict and human rights
violations. More than 5.5 million people have been displaced — 700,000
just this year, according to the United Nations.
The Norwegian Refugee Council identified
the DRC as the world’s most overlooked, under-addressed refugee crisis
in 2021, a sorry distinction it also held in 2020 and 2017. Fueling the
insecurity: a complicated brew of geopolitics, ethnic and national
rivalries and competition for control of eastern DRC’s abundant natural
resources.
The fighting has ramped up tensions between the DRC
and neighbouring Rwanda, some of which linger from the 1994 genocide in
Rwanda, where ethnic Hutus killed roughly 800,000 Tutsis and moderate
Hutus. Competition for resources and influence in DRC also has sharpened
longstanding rivalries between Rwanda and Uganda.
How does M23 fit in?
The
DRC and its president, Felix Tshisekedi, accuse Rwanda of supporting
M23, the main rebel group battling the Congolese army in eastern DRC.
M23’s leaders include some ethnic Tutsis. M23, short for the March 23
Movement, takes its name from a failed 2009 peace deal between the
Congolese government and a now-defunct rebel group that had split off
from the Congolese army and seized control of North Kivu’s provincial
capital, Goma, in 2012.
The group was pushed back the next year by
the Congolese army and special forces of the UN Stabilization Mission in
the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO). Rwanda and its
President, Paul Kagame, accuse the DRC and its army of backing the
Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a Congo-based
mainly Hutu rebel group that includes some fighters who were involved in
the genocide.
What sparked the resurgent crisis?
Last
November, M23 rebels struck at several Congolese army positions in
North Kivu, near the borders with Uganda and Rwanda. The rebels have
made advances that include the overrunning of a Congolese military base
in May and taking control of Bunagana, a trading town near the border
with Uganda, in June.
Bintou Keita, who as head of MONUSCO is the
top UN official in the DRC warned in June that M23 posed a growing
threat to civilians and soon might overpower the mission’s 16,000 troops
and police.
M23’s renewed attacks aim “to pressure the
Congolese government to answer their demands,” said Jason Stearns, head
of the Congo Research Group at New York University, in a June briefing
with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
The
rebels want implementation of a 2013 pact known as the Nairobi
agreement, signed with the DRC government, that would grant them amnesty
and reintegrate them into the Congolese army or civilian life.
How is Uganda involved?
“The
longstanding rivalry between Uganda and Rwanda in the DRC and the Great
Lakes region is a key driver of the current crisis,” the Africa Center
observed in its report. It cited a “profound level of mistrust at all
levels — between the DRC and its neighbours, particularly Rwanda, Uganda
and Burundi, as well as between all of these neighbors.”
Late
last November, Uganda and the DRC began a joint military operation in
North Kivu to hunt down the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), an armed
group of Ugandan rebels affiliated with the Islamic State and designated
by the US government as a terrorist organization. Uganda’s President
Yoweri Museveni has blamed ADF for suicide attacks in Kampala last
October and November.
Ugandan officials have accused Rwanda of
using M23 to thwart its efforts against ADF, the Africa Center report
noted, adding that the UN also “has implicated Uganda with aiding M23.”
UN investigators a decade earlier had claimed credible evidence of
Rwandan involvement.
Stearns, of the Congo Research Group, said
the joint Ugandan-DRC military operation created “geopolitical ripple
effects in the region,” with Rwanda essentially complaining that
Uganda’s intervention “encroaches” on its sphere of interest in eastern
Congo.
What economic factors are at play?
Some
of the fighting is over control of eastern DRC’s vast natural
resources, including diamonds, gold, copper and timber. The country has
other minerals — cobalt and coltan — needed for batteries to power
cellphones, other electronics and aircraft.
“The DRC produces
more than 70 per cent of the world’s cobalt” and “holds 60 per cent of
the planet’s coltan reserves,” the industry website Mining Technology
reported in February, speculating that the DRC “could become the Saudi
Arabia of the electric vehicle age.”
The Africa Center report
noted there is “ample evidence to suggest that Ugandan- and
Rwandan-backed rebel factions — including M23 — control strategic but
informal supply chains running from mines in the Kivus into the two
countries.” It said the groups use the proceeds from trafficked goods
“to buy weapons, recruit and control artisanal miners, and pay corrupt
Congolese customs and border officials as well as soldiers and police.”
Access
also has value. In late 2019, a three-way deal was signed to extend
Tanzania’s standard gauge railway through Burundi to DRC, giving the
latter two countries access to Tanzania’s Indian Ocean seaport at Dar es
Salaam.
And in June 2021, DRC’s Tshisekedi and Uganda’s Museveni
presided over groundbreaking of the first of three roads linking the
countries. The project is expected to increase the two countries’ trade
volume and cross-border transparency, and to strengthen relations
through “infrastructure diplomacy,” The East African reported. The project includes a road connecting Goma’s port on Lake Kivu with the border town of Bunagana.
“Rwanda,
in between Uganda and Burundi, sees all this happening and feels that
it’s being sidelined, feels that it’s being marginalized,” Stearns said
in the CSIS briefing.
Rwanda has had its own deals with the DRC —
including flying RwandAir routes and processing gold mined in Congo
—but the Congolese government suspended all trade agreements in
mid-June.
What can be done to address the crisis?
The
DRC, accepted this spring into the East African Community regional
bloc, agreed to the community’s call in June for a Kenya-led regional
security force to protect civilians and forcibly disarm combatants who
do not willingly put down their weapons.
No date has been set for
the force’s deployment. The 59-year-old Tshisekedi, who is up for
re-election in 2023, has said Rwanda cannot be part of the security
force. Kagame, 64, told the Rwanda Broadcasting Agency he has “no
problem” with that.
The two leaders, at a July 6 meeting in
Angola’s capital, agreed to a “de-escalation process” over fighting in
the DRC. The diplomatic roadmap called for ceasing hostilities and for
M23’s immediate withdrawal. But fighting broke out the next day between
M23 and the Congolese army in North Kivu’s Rutshuru territory.
Speaking for the M23 rebels, Major Willy Ngoma told VOA’s Swahili Service that his group did not recognize the pact.
“We
signed an agreement with President Tshisekedi and Congo government,”
Ngoma said, referring to the 2013 pact, “and we are ready to talk with
the government. Whatever they are saying — that we stop fighting and we
leave eastern DRC — where do you want us to go? We are Congolese. We
cannot go into exile again. … We are fighting for our rights as
Congolese.”
Congo’s government says it wants M23 out of the DRC
before peace talks resume. Paul Nantulya, an Africa Center research
associate who contributed to its analysis, predicted it would “take time
to resolve the long-running tensions between Rwanda and the DRC.”
In
written observations shared with VOA by email, he called for “a
verifiable and enforceable conflict reduction initiative between Congo
and its neighbors — starting with Rwanda” and “an inclusive
democratization process in Congo.”
Rwanda’s ambassador to the
DRC, Vincent Karega, warned in a June interview that hate speech is
fanning the conflict. Citing past genocides, he urged “that the whole
world points a finger toward it and makes sure that it is stopped before
the worst comes to the worst.”
