Rwanda’s Congo PR failure

Rwanda faces two competing demands: it has to be friendly to M23 and Kinshasa at the same time. If the two quarrel, its best role is of mediator, not partisan. The tragic mistake would be to take sides. If Kigali sides with Kinshasa, which is what many ill-informed commentators in the international press have been calling for, it would turn M23 into an enemy. In return, M23 may ally with other groups in hostility to Rwanda. And given Kinshasa’s inability to control its territory, Rwanda would have opened a Pandora’s Box.

This has been Rwanda’s security dilemma the resolution of which has been to try to mediate between the two. The problem of course is that the mediator is not the decider. He/she only facilitates others to find a compromise. Yet belligerents in Congo have mutually reinforcing fears and temptations. For example, M23 distrusts Kinshasa arguing that the last time they allowed some of their group to be deployed in other parts of Congo, they were all (49 of them) killed in cold blood – an accusation Kinshasa accepts and has promised a commission of inquiry into. This tempts M23 to be obstinate. On the other hand, President Joseph Kabila perhaps suspects that M23 is the hidden hand of Kigali. This tempts him to suspect Rwanda’s role as mediator and to appeal to the international community.

Some in the international press claim that Rwanda can easily neutralise M23 if it chose to. Utter nonsense. There are many considerations Rwanda has to make. One is the fear of turning M23 into yet another enemy. Another is that given the weakness of the Congolese state, if you neutralise M23, you create a security vacuum in that area. Kinshasa has little capability to fill the void. That would therefore require a renewed direct Rwandan occupation of that region. Even if Kabila agreed to such a deal, politics in Kinshasa would not allow it to hold for long. This is because regardless of the differences among the political elites in Kinshasa, there is one thing that unites them: the humiliation of tiny Rwanda (almost one 100th of Congo) occupying their country.

Rwanda is caught in a Catch 22 situation. It cannot afford to support M23 yet it cannot afford to have them destroyed. Secondly, and again contrary to a lot of uninformed opinion, Rwanda does not control M23 although it has leverage. It is almost in a similar situation the US found itself in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although the US had militarily conquered these countries and had its army occupying their territory, it needed to legitimise its rule by working through local political elites. However, the US learnt that it could at best influence but never control the actions of its client regimes. Often, it was outmaneuvered and sometimes even blackmailed to keep in power leaders like Nuri al-Maliki in Iraq and Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan even though it was frustrated with their violence and corruption.

Rwanda’s situation with M23 is even worse. M23 are (or were) members of the Congolese army. So they have weapons from its armories. They need Rwanda’s support (or at least they don’t want Rwanda as their enemy); so they have to keep friendly relations with Kigali. But they also seek independence – so they hate being dictated to by Kigali. There are many things Kigali can juggle but it cannot control the internal dynamics of Congolese politics. Whenever it has held mediation talks between the two sides, Kigali has been left confused at the relations among them.

In one such meeting in Gisenyi on June 29, the commanders of M23 and the delegation from Kinshasa talked into the wee hours of the morning – the meeting ending at 2am. They quarreled, yelled across the table and accused each other of all sorts of things. When the meeting ended, the two sides drove in the same cars across the border to Goma where, reports say, they spent the rest of the night binge drinking – emptying an entire bar. Former CNDP leader, Bosco Ntangada, did not show up for the meeting – telling the leaders of the delegation from Kinshasa that there was a trap by Kigali to arrest him like they did to his predecessor, Laurent Nkunda, in 2009.

The problems of Congo are complex and the role of Rwanda has many conflicting demands upon Kigali. The best way forward is to keep the dialogue between the leaders and governments of both sides. The tragedy has been to introduce into the equation the international community – a host of remote, ill informed, often prejudiced and simplistic persons to solve it. Both Kagame and Kabila take blame for allowing the situation to get out of their hands into the hands of international actors represented mostly through the UN, that institution that has consistently inflicted grievous harm on those two countries since their independence over half a century ago.

amwenda@independent.co.ug