Congo: Millions Die While the “UN Keeps the Peace”
In its most recent report to
the UN Security Council, the UN Stabilization Mission in the Democratic
Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) blandly recounted “progress” in service
to their mission, but what is their mission? Up until 2013, MONUSCO had
no combat mandate; they were somehow expected to keep the peace amidst a
war for Congo’s resources without one. In 2013, however, as the
M23
militia was ravaging North and South Kivu Provinces, the UN Group of
Experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) reported that M23
answered to the command of Rwandan Defense Minister James Kabarebe, who of course answered to Rwandan President Paul Kagame
himself. There were competing factions within M23, and some of its
officers answered to high-level officials in Uganda, who of course
answered to Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni.
This made Rwanda and Uganda’s wars of aggression so
obvious that the UN Security Council finally felt obliged to do what the
UN Charter compels them to: organize a UN military intervention to stop
the Rwandan and Ugandan militias.
The UN Force Intervention Brigade, composed of
Tanzanian, South African, and Malawian troops, was the first UN
Peacekeeping mission with an explicit combat mandate, and they did
indeed chase M23 back into Rwanda and Uganda.
Then the press reported that M23 had “surrendered”
to Kagame and Museveni. That was more or less like reporting that the
Confederate Army had fled South to surrender to General Robert E. Lee,
but the world that had been horrified by M23’s atrocities applauded
their defeat and turned its attention elsewhere.
Museveni, one of the aggressors, presided over a
so-called peace conference in Uganda’s capital Kampala, which produced
an agreement giving M23 everything it had asked for at the outset of the
war. But who bothered to read or understand the agreement? Others no
doubt did, but I’m the only one I know of who bothered to report what it
said—on Pacifica Radio and in the San Francisco Bay View Newspaper, which the powerful players feel free to ignore, even if they were slightly discomfited.
The aggressors are not named
Violence has continued in the DRC’s Kivu Provinces.
According to the Congo Research Group based at New York University, at
least 99 Congolese civilians have been massacred since November 5 in
North Kivu’s Beni Territory alone. UN Peacekeepers have failed to
protect them from marauding militias, and protesters have taken to the
streets in Beni, Goma, and Butembo to say that the peacekeepers are part
of the problem and demand that they leave. In Beni they burned down
most of at least one UN military base, and one protester has been
reported killed, five wounded.
Smoke
from the United Nations compound rises in Beni, Democratic Republic of
Congo, Monday, Nov. 25, 2019. Angry residents of this eastern Congo city
burned the town hall and stormed the UN peacekeeping mission, known as
MONUSCO, after Allied Democratic Forces rebels killed eight people and
kidnapped nine overnight. (AP Photo/Al-hadji Kudra Maliro)
With 18,000 troops, the UN Peacekeeping Mission in
Congo is the largest in the world, and it has been in Congo for 20 years
without protecting the people or the peace. A young protester in Beni
told Aljazeera, “The UN is supposed to keep us safe, to keep peace in
North Kivu, but we’ve never seen the peace. So we are so angry we don’t
want them to stay here in North Kivu.”
Congolese Swiss historian Bénédicte Kumbi Njoko also spoke to Aljazeera:
“If we think about the UN and its presence, we need to go back to almost 59 years that the UN has been working in the Congo because there were problems in the country. And I think that if we take that into perspective, we can of course question the utility of this organization, because what we have seen the last 20 years now is that people are still dying and this war that is happening in the Congo has caused already more than 8 million deaths, so maybe the response that the UN is giving to that situation is not an appropriate one.”
South African mining researcher and community organizer David Van Wyk agreed.
“Sadly,” he said, “it’s one more failed intervention. The UN has failed the Congolese people from the very first day of the Congo’s independence 59 years ago.”
“Rebels,” “rebellions,” and “rebel groups”
Kumbi told me that she had asked Aljazeera why, like
the rest of the international press, they describe the militias killing
the Congolese people as “rebel groups” when they are in fact
gangs—Rwandan, Ugandan, and Congolese—fighting over Congolese territory
and resource riches.They are not Congolese nationals fighting for power
or social justice as the term “rebel groups” implies. They are fighting
at the country’s easternmost edges, on its borders with Uganda, Rwanda,
and Burundi. The war-torn Kivu Provinces couldn’t be farther from
Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, which is on its western border with the
Republic of Congo and near its Atlantic coast. So they are not trying to
overthrow the existing government as any self-respecting rebels would.
Her question, Kumbi said, did not make it into
Aljazeera’s final cut. It is essentially the same question that she
demanded an answer to at a UN conference in Geneva back in 2013,
where—until the gendarmes dragged her out—she interrupted then UN
Secretary General Ban-Ki-Moon with this scream:
“What about people of the Congo? Please! What about people of the Congo??? You don’t say anything about that! There’s been killed eight million people and you say you’re making fictitious peace and you’re telling us that this is peace when aggressors are not named! Rwanda is responsible for what is going wrong in the peace in Congo. And nobody says something about that! Burundi! Uganda! You should say that! We are sick and tired of hearing every time people just being so ‘peaceful’ with Africa. You should let Africa in peace!”
So long as the UN Security Council and the
international press blame the war on non-existent “rebels” and “rebel
groups” carrying out non-existent “rebellions,” the Congolese holocaust
will go on. NGOs and UN agencies will continue to call for millions of
dollars to help with the humanitarian crisis,
comparing it to Syria, Yemen, and Iraq, and the displaced population
already numbering four million will continue to rise. Neither the UNSC
nor anyone else is going to defeat “rebels” or end a war they refuse to
name.
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Ann Garrison is an
independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she
received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for
her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be
reached at ann@kpfa.org. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Ann Garrison, Global Research, 2019
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