26th July 2013
There is a campaign for “constructed confusion”. No other reason can explain why Human Rights Watch (HRW) could not hire a researcher (rather, proof-reader?) so as to avoid betraying the trust of its followers due to a little, silly mistake. HRW is known to make blunders but it hadn’t come to this. Was it difficult to do a simple Google search and know that Rwanda does not maintain peace keepers in Somalia?
Yes, we know how HRW goes “shopping” – someone called it “ambulance chasing” – for evidence implicating Rwanda in anything that tarnishes her name. In that campaign, we know that it’s not ashamed to resort to hired guns as witnesses.
But in quoting witnesses whom it called Rwandans and yet it did not take time to correct the constructed evidence, HRW seems to have been in too much of a hurry in order to fulfil a deadline and thus, the oversight. It seems somebody wanted its “report spin-doctoring wizardry” pronto.
Only this can explain why US State Department ignored this gaffe and instantly jumped into this muddle with both its feet. Knowing that the whole report is predicated on the evidence of these questionable witnesses, from where does the department spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, get the reason and confidence to confirm that the report contains a “credible body of evidence”?
However, the shame of it all seems to finally have struck, though rather belatedly. When her boss, Secretary of State John Kerry, chaired the UN Security Council meeting this Thursday, all he could mumble was a vague “all parties to end their support for armed rebel groups in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.” What does that diplomatic mumbo jumbo mean? Is all parties” supposed to mean “Rwanda”?
At least UN Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon, remembered to call on the DRC government and M23 to return to Kampala peace talks. Wasn’t everybody beginning to forget?
Remember when President Museveni and President Kagame got fed up by the whole DRC mess supervised by MONUSCO and sat President Kabila down in Kampala so they could cobble together the seed of a solution? By the end of a few hours’ deliberation, they had enforced a ceasefire between DRC and M23.
Next, they organised all the Great Lakes Region leaders so that together they could work out a way of putting DRC around a negotiation table with rebel groups that had genuine concerns and neutralising the rebel militias that didn’t.
The rebels of Uganda and the terrorists of Rwanda would be tossed off the DRC soil – and, hopefully, moribund MONUSCO (my “addendum”!)
For the first time since the terrorists of Rwanda were off-loaded onto the Zaïrois (DRC today) soil by France in 1994, Congolese citizens could see the light of peace at the end of the dark tunnel.
Then all hell broke loose and anarchy came visiting again!
Ban Ki Moon was dispatched and he “invaded” the African Union meeting in Addis Ababa to sell an additional baggage on MONUSCO and the “Intervention Brigade” was birthed. SADC was promised God-knows-what and it readily joined the sabotage campaign and was duly rewarded with the august visit of the most powerful man on earth, US President Barrack Obama.
To their credit, the happy duo of President Kikwete and President Zuma promptly honoured their promises and their forces are in Goma, rearing to go. Heavy artillery weapons from Western countries, accompanied by drones, are on the way and it will only be by the grace of God that the Great Lakes Region is not reduced to rubble.
But already the presence of the intervention brigade alone has emboldened the DRC army, FARDC, and the hitherto lifeless MONUSCO and the otherwise shrinking terrorists of Rwanda, FDLR. For the last few days, FARDC helicopter gunships have been pounding areas under M23 control and MONUSCO and FDLR have each dropped two bombs on the Rwandan territory, so far.
And meanwhile, the intervention brigade is not sitting idly, waiting for those drones. In a tweet, M23 has shown a Tanzanian soldier commanding FDLR that it captured. Rwandans, though, are not griping over their security; they know they can hold their own against the most powerful, leave alone an “old woman’s trickle”. Otherwise, to anyone else, such an occurrence would be a source of worry.
At the moment, what’s preoccupying Rwandan minds is something else: the anguish of watching what’s happening to poor citizens in the areas around Rumangabo, under M23. M23 fighters have their bunkers in which to duck at the sound of an approaching helicopter gunship. But the citizens are caught as sitting ducks to bear the brunt of bombings.
So now what we are seeing is total mayhem of death and destruction. The graphic photos on the internet are not for the faint-hearted: disembowelled torsos; meaty pieces of tattered limbs of small children, elder siblings, parents, grand-parents………..sorry, fingers and eyes fail.
This is what the syndicate of Western countries, led by the Security Council and their big wig, Barrack Obama, have sponsored in the Arab World. Is it now the turn of the Great Lakes Region?
Remember Julian Assange, Edward Snowden? Me, I’m going into hiding……….But, with these drones and some of our leaders and the way they lust for trinkets of favours, where in Africa can you hide?
