Here are Uganda and Rwanda’s true ‘sins’ in DRC

Author: Charles Onyango Obbo. PHOTO/FILE

What you need to know:

The people Kinshasa sees as enemies today saved its bacon

Uganda and Rwanda are to “blame” for the current crisis in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The March 23 rebels (popularly known as M23) have made significant military gains in the last two months in the North Kivu region.

 President Felix Tshisekedi and his government in Kinshasa accuse Rwanda – and lately Uganda – of backing M23. Both Rwanda and Uganda deny the charges.

 On Monday, Rwanda said a DRC fighter jet violated its airspace, just as the two countries had agreed on Saturday to speed up efforts to de-escalate tensions and resolve their political differences.

 At the same time, a group of Congolese MPs and civil society leaders petitioned President Tshisekedi to sever diplomatic relations with Uganda, accusing it of supporting advancing M23 rebels.

 They also want Kinshasa to terminate the year-old joint military offensive by the DRC army (FARDC) and Uganda People’s Defence Forces (UPDF), launched in November last year to defeat the anti-Kampala Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) rebels, who have operated from Congo for over 25 years.

 That said, if Rwanda and Uganda are to blame for the M23 rebels, Kinshasa should thank, not vilify them. To appreciate why Rwanda and Uganda need to be thanked, we need to go back to 1996, when the two countries, among nearly eight other African nations, supported Congolese rebels led by Laurent Kabila in their war that ousted the corrupt autocrat Mobutu Sese Seko months later. With the victory, rebel leader Laurent Kabila became president.

 Kabila, who styled himself as a revolutionary (Che Guevara, who met Kabila on a visit to Dar es Salaam in the mid-1960s, thought rather lowly of him though), had in 1967 founded the People’s Revolutionary Party. Its goal was to create an autonomous Marxist territory in eastern DRC. In 1985 his rebel movement collapsed, and he fled to Tanzania.

 In September 1996, chaperoned by Rwanda, Kabila returned to Zaire (as DRC was then called) and, with other rebel groups, including elements of what was later to become M23, resumed War against the Mobuto regime. He founded the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire, AFDL. On May 17, 1997, they took power in Kinshasa.

 Without the backing of Rwanda, Uganda, and others, Kabila would never have seized power in Kinshasa. However, the post-Cold War had rendered Mobutu weak, and he was ailing. His regime was in crisis. Without his foreign patrons, unlike his futile struggle between 1967 and 1985, Kabila would have scored a victory this time. However, he would have only succeeded in his early goal of creating an autonomous, even independent, eastern state in DRC. He wouldn’t have become the president of the whole of DRC.

 It’s an extremely inconvenient, and therefore happily ignored, fact that without the role countries like Rwanda and Uganda played in DRC, problematic as it might be, they prevented the breakup of the vast country. There are strong secessionist forces in DRC, and students of history will not forget the short but ferocious Katanga secession.

 On July 11, 1960, barely two weeks after DRC gained independence from Belgium, a politician named Moise Tshombe declared its southernmost province to be an independent nation called the State of Katanga. The War that was fought over it ended in 1963.

 When external actors like Rwanda and Uganda get involved in other African conflicts, they generally preserve national unity projects. In Somalia, Ugandan, Burundian, and Kenyan peace missions signed up to the idea of a united (one) country in the face of strong centrifugal forces that have already led to the establishment of Puntland and Somaliland as semi-autonomous territories. If Uganda, and immediately after them Burundi, hadn’t taken the crazy plunge into Somalia in 2007, Puntland and Somaliland would have hardened into independent states, and other areas, including the region Kismayo, would also have broken off.

 In Mozambique, in intervening to beat back Islamist rebels in the northern region of Cabo Delgado, Rwanda prevented that oil-rich area from being hived off from the rest of the southern African country.

 In DRC in 1996/1997, the hard backing of other nations gave Kabila and his AFDL the military clout and political organisation they lacked on their own to conquer the whole of DRC. And because he had their backing, he raised his ambitions beyond being a regional overlord and could eye the whole of DRC as an attainable goal.

 Without that dynamic, DRC would have fractured, with each province breaking off by 2000. The marginalised Congolese Tutsi, who form the core M23, would easily have got control of the Kivu region and set up shop there. Today’s war wouldn’t be taking place. The people Kinshasa sees as enemies today saved its bacon. The people who have good reason to blame Kigali and Kampala for postponing their history are the fellows who are presented as their surrogates - the M23 rebels.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3