When you think you are finally giving up on the strenuous effort of trying to unravel the well-intentioned workings of this international community in forging a peaceful world, another undiscovered facet to the ‘community’ pops up that dares you to ignore it. This honourable international community, how does it go about its wonderful work?
In the admirable name of giving peace to the innocents of eastern DRC, it prosecuted Rwanda, pronounced her guilty and sentenced her, without cross-examination, to serve undetermined penalties. And so, duly punished, we sat down to wait for that peace, in the hope that we would share in the blissful existence of a neighbour at peace with herself and with us, Rwandans.
But before we could let out that sigh of relief, and before the fruition of that peace, now the amazing international community has discovered another snake in the green grass neighbouring eastern DRC: Uganda. That country that, in our view, was mobilising for a regional initiative that promised to bolster the efforts of this ‘community’ was all along stabbing everybody in the back. Who would have guessed? But for the sharp intuition of this ‘community’, we would not have known that Uganda and Rwanda were conspiring to actually put the Congolese in bondage.
But……wait a second! When you come to seriously consider it, when you peel off that veneer of sweet-talk, who knows bondage best? Who introduced slavery to the world? Who, transcontinental and continental wars; conquests; genocides; colonised communities; lootings; world wars and other innumerable known, and maybe hitherto unknown, vices?
This ‘community’, this many-headed hydra that now you see, now you don’t, where hasn’t it sown mayhem? Before the arrival of the ‘community’, were the Americas, Australias, uninhabited jungles? If some parts of the East, parts of South America, are only now beginning to rise from the dead, the Arab world is being sunk into the abyss. Africa, immersed in the rotten skeletons in the grave where it’s trying to extricate itself, feels the nail-studded boot that’s firm and hard on its head.
“Nail-studded”. Now that, ask Rwanda. Many are the victims that perished in Genocide – one of many made-in-you-know-where – with shattered skulls thanks to nail-studded knobkerries. Today, in the Ntarama Genocide Memorial Site lies inerasable evidence of such ‘gifts’: a pick-axe marked “Don de l’Armée Française” (Gift of the French army). Such gifts, the ‘community’ – not only one of its members – has in uncountable forms and unlimited amounts. And its generosity is inexhaustible.
Examples of where that generosity is expended are as perplexing as they are varied. After Genocide in 1994, BBC and VOA radio stations used their international reach and influence to introduce programmes in Kinyarwanda/Kirundi ostensibly to help the governments of the two countries to repatriate their nationals. Today, the two radios have become the voices of anyone who has the most unacceptable insult to fling on the two governments. Where nowhere else in the world genocide negation is allowed, the radios are havens for genocide deniers. And the ‘community’ favours them with shelter and succour, to be near for that “opposition opinion”.
Look at this. The collective voice of the ‘community’, the UN, leaks a report to the most influential Francophone news publisher, Le Monde, or the most influential Anglophone news disseminator, Reuters. While the educated world is ruminating over the leak, the UN Security Council lends it – the leak, remember, no report – its powerful voice in case there is any in the educated world still in two minds – and summarily imposes sanctions. And then the multilingual BBC/VOA voices permeate the news everywhere, especially to the uneducated masses of the Great Lakes Region, where the following of Kirundi/Kinyanda programmes is strong.
But why all these tedious and dollar-guzzling ‘ambush’ machinations? Why is the powerful UN Security Council – the real community – fretting over one tiny mutiny-group out of myriad other rebels? Interestingly, this tiny group, even if it may not have a clear guiding line, is the only one with genuine grievances. And credible reports have pointed out that the area under their control is marked by calm and order, contradicting those by UN proxy media and rights organisations. Why does the Security Council risk its reputation by insisting on backing repeated, erroneous leaks by discredited, conspiratorial voices like that of Steve Hege and of others of his ilk?
What calls for the targeting of Rwanda and Uganda so urgently? Rwandans brought sanity to their country, a country that all but died under the ‘community’s watch. Ugandans have contributed in turning round Somalia, a country in which the ‘community’ received a bloody nose trying to bend it to its will. Now Rwanda and Uganda are teaming up with seven other neighbours to DRC to deliver the country from the hell to which it was consigned by Belgium, with the nod of the ‘community’, that long ago.
The ‘community’, on the other hand, insists on sponsoring a humongous body that’s only effective in looting the minerals and raping the women of eastern DRC, without forgetting to bomb the area’s populations and their property. Yet these are tasks that the collection of disparate rebel bands like FDLR, Maï Maï Mutomboki, etc, etc, are united around for effective performance and for which, therefore, they need no assistance.
The ‘region’ (Great Lakes Region) or the ‘community’, who is following the dictates of primitive instincts? Multinationals of the West (consumers of minerals, oil), Congolese uranium (that must be kept from ‘destructive’ East) and the global human family, who matters in this world? This bankruptcy in morality, this gutter – cesspool – rut, why does the ‘community’ revel in them? What kind are they, that they see harmonious co-existence of all humans as a threat?
In our neck of the woods, how we crave civilisation for the world!
