Donald Trump’s term is four years – three and a half remaining. Rwandophones are in this region since at least the 11th or 15th century.
All declarations have asserted the “Territorial integrity” of an absentee failed state of DRC, but paid scant regard to the people of the Eastern DRC’s “Right to self-determination”, an equally important principle in International law, particularly in response to a corrupt, remote, and tribalistic capital of Kinshasa.
The Congolese in Kinshasa and across the country have eaten Tutsi’s flesh, embraced Genocide perpetrators and their ideology.
This is not new; the “Force Publique”, a militia employed by Belgian colonialists to repress Rwandans, was made of Congolese mercenaries, and oversaw the rigged referendum of 1961 in Rwanda, dubbed “Kamarampaka” (Hutu Revolution), forced all royalists (mainly Tutsi and moderate Hutu) into exile, and gave power to Hutu extremists.
Between the ’60s and ’70s, Rwanda’s president Grégoire Kayibanda used to bribe his Zairian counterpart, Mobutu, to round up prominent Tutsi refugees and send them back to Rwanda to be killed.
One afternoon of the late ’60s, my maternal grandfather, Lucien Ruhumuliza, and his colleagues were arrested in Goma and placed in the infamous “Munzenze prison”, waiting to be shipped to Rwanda to meet their fate. A Belgian colonial officer – still in the Zairian army – decided Tutsi weren’t worth all that fuss, climbed in the prison tour and opened fire on the prisoners.
Many died, my grandfather survived with bullet wounds. But he never lived for me to see him. Growing up in the ’80s, my agemates and I didn’t see many grandfathers in our community in Katindo, Goma. My cousins and I carry their names in remembrance.
At the time, the Society of Nations (SDN) intervened and wanted to send the Tutsi community to Canada. Late Mwalimu Nyerere protested. He said it was not proper for African leaders to let Africans undergo another slave trade. Many Tutsi families from Zaire were relocated to Tanzanian camps where they lived relatively unharmed.
In 1990, when the Rwandan Patriotic Front started the rebellion to bring the Tutsi community back home, Zairian president Mobutu detached his army to come and aid his Rwandan counterpart, Habyarimana, to fight them. They were beaten and ran away!
That is what is at stake here. Zairians, Congolese, or whatever name they now go by, can NEVER be trusted to safeguard the rights of Tutsi minorities in Eastern DRC.
A quick fix to a historical problem is not sustainable. The Tutsi question in this region is no different from the Nagorno-Karabakh, the Kurdish, or the Eritrean questions. And we all know that there is only one solution to permanently end the conflict.
In a timeless speech at the African Union, Mwalimu Nyerere regrets: “Upon the independence of Africa and the founding of the Organisation of African Union (OUA), we consecrated the principle of territorial integrity, while we paid lip service to the right of people to self-determination. We declared that colonial borders were not to be touched; we should have insisted that the people within those borders, too, were not to be touched!
Here is the speech: