Eastern DR Congo: EX Nkunda lieutenant forms new rebel mov't

BY JOSH KRON
Nation Media Correspondent
Great Lakes Region

CONGO - As the rape and death tolls mount in military offensives against Hutu rebels in eastern Congo, a key leader of the military campaign is forming his own paramilitary group, the United Nations has said.

Nearly a year after being installed in a senior position in the Congolese armed forces, former rebel-general Bosco Ntaganda has formed with other the Front for the Liberation and Emancipation of the Congo (FLEC). The group has not started war, but is institutionalizing control over regions of eastern Congo, particularly Masisi territory in North Kivu province.

Unlike some other rebel groups in the Congo – including Mr. Ntaganda’s Tutsi-led National Congress for the People Defense (CNDP) who wrecked havoc on the country last year – FLEC does not appear to be built along ethnic lines.

Violence both against and between Hutu and Tutsi in eastern Congo have broiled the region in an on-again-off-again struggle that, over the last fifteen years, has directly and indirectly led to millions dead.

While it remains unclear whether FLEC will be an armed insurgency or just a way to make more money, the emergence of the group is the latest sign that the CNDP is breaking up, and the Congo’s army is unraveling in its yearlong war against Rwandan Hutu rebels.

“It appears to incorporate other dissatisfied elements associated with some Mai-Mai armed groups,” said spokesperson Jean-Paul Dietrich.

“According to local sources, FLEC was established because of the reported refusal of pro-Nkunda elements and the former political leadership of the party to associate CNDP with the reported Coalition pour la protection et la promotion du Congo (CPPC).”

Mr. Ntaganda, who became military commander of the CNDP at the beginning of the year when its charismatic Laurent Nkunda was arrested by Rwanda, was supposed to lead the group into integration with the Congolese national army, along with a menagerie of other rebel groups and splinter factions.

In the United Nations-backed offensive against the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda – Hutu rebels accused of orchestrating the 1994 Rwandan genocide – Mr. Ntaganda is accused of playing a senior role. In South Kivu, where the bulk of the fighting is focused, Ntaganda’s CNDP lieutenants are the ones doing the finding and the killing.

But now, he and other CNDP officers are spending their time organizing FLEC and already control some of North Kivu’s most fertile grounds, including large swaths of Masisi territory that the United Nations says Mr. Ntaganda and FLEC look to control entirely.

“The people are forced to pay exorbitant taxes,” said the United Nations this week. “Officials justify the provision of first by the need to assist the war-wounded ex-CNDP.”

And there’s no much that can be done, saying that the police in the region were “neither equipped nor paid” by the Kinshasa government.

For years, Rwanda and Congo have battled over the presence of Rwandan genocide suspects hiding out on Congolese soil, killers that fled after the Rwandan genocide. Rwanda’s own military has repeatedly invaded the Congo in pursuit and have left behind residual militias to do the fighting for them.

Last year, things began to get out of hand, when one of these generals, Mr. Nkunda went on a strong offensive in North Kivu, taking important parts of the province and coming within a few kilometers of the capital Goma. The Congolese military didn’t stand a chance, instead fleeing with civilians from the oncoming rebel group, looting, killing and raping in the process.

It all changed, investigators have argued when Rwanda and Congo struck a deal that placed Ntaganda in the drivers seat and Mr. Nkunda supposedly behind bars. Now, the Congolese army was no longer fighting the CNDP, but the Hutu rebels, and in the process Ntaganda and his troops took command of the war.

It’s been a sweet role of reversal for Mr. Ntaganda. According to the United Nations Panel of Experts report leaked Tuesday, he is making hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in illegal tax revenues from the lands he patrols. His elite CNDP that follow him; 60,000.

But as the atrocities mount, Ntaganda has been losing friends. The people who put him in power – including Rwanda – have not gone out of their way to keep all the soldiers below him in line and, as the The New York Times has reported, much of the region has descended into ‘warlordism.’

From Mai-Mai generals to FDLR splinters, new groups have sprung and popped, since the beginning of the year, feeding off each other like water wheels. 

A spokesperson for the United Nation in Congo said that the latest developments reflected a “possible division within the CNDP itself,” those working with Ntaganda, and those loyal to the arrested Laurent Nkunda, who remains in Rwanda, somewhere. 

“He is our man, he always will be,” says Claude Mutebutsi, a Congolese Tutsi originally from South Kivu. He insists Nkunda wasn’t simply sponsored by Rwanda. According to him, “95%” are still faithful to Mr. Nkunda, who has acquired a Che Guevara-like mystique with his constituents.

The political arm of the CNDP – Nkunda had said he was fighting for the protection of Congolese Tutsi – has accomplished little on paper since peace agreement that culminated integration into the army. Two party members are in parliament.

Mr. Ntaganda’s new group is the latest manifestation in a breakup of the CNDP that has been ongoing for months. The first incarnation was the Coalition for the Promotion and Protection of the Congo. Initially built around Ntaganda and other CNDP soldiers, it fell apart due to deteriorating support for Mt. Ntaganda.

Now, it seems, he is making shrewd utilitarian choices with his supposed enemies as his traditional friends dwindle.

Rwanda joins the Commonwealth

BY JOSH KRON
Nation Media
Rwanda

Rwanda has been formally accepted into the British Commonwealth, becoming the 54^th nation to join the post-colonial group after a two-year bid, Rwandan government officials were told this weekend.

The Commonwealth members summit, held in the Caribbean island-state of Trinidad & Tobago, reportedly admitted the Central African country after it applied for membership in 2008.

News of the admission was first made public by a spokesperson for the Rwandan government late Saturday night, ahead of announcement from the Commonwealth itself, who had given the Rwandan government formal news of the admission.

“The government sees this accession as recognition of the tremendous progress this country has made in the last 15 years,” Rwanda’s government spokesperson Louise Mushikiwabo said in the capital Kigali.

Rwanda’s foreign minister, Rosemary Museminali, said a longer statement to the press would be made available later Sunday.

Announcement from the Commonwealth itself is due this evening, but Rwanda’s envoy to the conference had been given formal notice of the admission. 

Along with Mozambique, who joined the group in 1995, Rwanda became the second nation without any formal historical ties to Great Britain to join the group, came under scrutiny due to criticisms of its human-rights policy.

The country’s ascension to the club marks an acme for its post-genocide development and President Paul Kagame’s drive to sharply redefine Rwanda’s orientation towards the English-speaking world. In 2007 the country, along with Burundi, joined the East African Community. :Last year, all sectors of government and education adopted English as the official, operating language.

Rwanda was first colonized by Germany in the late 19^th century and then by the Belgians. The country later held close ties to France, which were severed after the 1994 Rwandan genocide by President Paul Kagame’s current government. France is accuse of playing a key role in the build up and arming of the genocidal government that killed 1 million Tutsi.

Much of the current government was raised as refugees in Uganda and since then, Uganda has been one of Rwanda’s biggest backers to join the Commonwealth group.

Introducing Ship&Anchor Pub Calgary

Pubtalk: A bizarre soccer week mares Commonwealth debut spirit

GEORGE KAGAME

There’s a story, true or false withstanding, about one of several Taifa Stars coaches in the 1990s. It is about a dramatic incident in which the coach tantalized Tanzania's press with carefully chosen English terms, a language he knew would attract few questions during the press conference. Therefore downplaying the controversy raised by the issue of dismal results after a series of friendly matches played by the team on a special and rare visit to Brazil.

Witnesses to the press briefing, which was dubbed as 'the exclusive English interview' organized to coincide with his team's arrival at Dar International Airport was even rarer in the comedy that is Tanzania's football.

The friendlies themselves had been organized as a step forward in the country's timeless-and ongoing unsuccessful attempts to- develop the standards of the game in East Africa's largest and most populous country.

AT the time the trip to Brazil, (the equivalent in Soccer as Mecca is to Islam,) was organized following another in the series that is the disastrous performance of Taifa Stars-going by the extremely high expectations of the average Tanzanians which have now stabilized at mocking the team and laughing it off as a comedy series.

In this era, the tour gave the Stars an opportunity to participate in, and loose in all friendly matches between them and their Brazilian hosts. In the circumstances, the Taifa Stars lost in huge margins that upon their arrival at Dar International airport, an explanation was demanded of the coach in a press briefing. The national coach was asked why his team had lost in all the matches and whether the team had learnt anything at all in their training camp.

Asked in Swahili about the dismal performance of the team and knowing fully well that just a handful of journalists present at the press conference would ask many other questions in English, he excited the crowd when he decided to address the journalists in English. The event is also said to be his first interview exclusively in English, an uncommon language in football circles at the time.

It is further said that at the end of the interview journalists present were left in wonder and amazement. Apparently, the team had more than undertaken soccer training, they had also learnt language skills. Shooting two birds with one stone!!

You may ask where the resident of the Hammock is going with this mambo jumbo about soccer, especially Tanzanian soccer, when the newspaper has enough pages and columnists dedicated to sport/soccer.  Well, there’s the issue of the ‘hand of God 2009’ Version featuring Thiery Henry that made it hard during the week to think of anything else of national importance to discuss at the local pub. Note. In this pub, known as the Ship and Anchor, soccer has provided some hilarious moments for its patrons over the times. And as such the game is a very serious affair to which women of wisdom-no women of any calibre-are invited in equal numbers as men.

There was one such moment last year when French national football coach Raymond Domenech was asked  a simple question in a live interview about his team and the nature of tactics it had used to fail so embarrassingly at Euro 2008.

Domenech responded to the question by proposing to his girlfriend (a journalist herself) in a press conference broadcast on all major news networks and media houses. Now put this into persecutive, a press conference involving France’s national soccer team is an important national issue. Sometimes even the president of the country is watching the thing.

In the spirit of celebrating Rwanda's entry in the Commonwealth as well as announcement by all the five presidents to launch the full EAC Customs Union on 1 July 2010, (just days before the World Cup final in South Africa in 2010.)

I’ll save you the details about statistics and all, that was way after the pub closed.

"We are in the Commonwealth today, from now, we are going to adopt English as the language of drinking in this pub."

One patron announced after his third beer and staring at the barman as only a man that has drunk three Mutzig bottles plus eating two zingaro brochete can stare.

This pub is a serious one, it is important to be discussing national matters. 

In fact so important and heated was the discussion on Friday that it was agreed unanimously on many issues surrounding Rwanda's commonwealth debut. The members again agreed that in order to further the country's English competence, "We are also signing up seriously with the East African Community. We shall get rid of the Franc one day and if change does not come, we will will seriouly consider taking on Swahili as the first business language. And as if that is not enough, we will abolish the Rwandan passport and adopt an East African one. Yes, with a little foresight, Felicien Kabuga can officially and legally operate his business on Kenya.

We intend one day to become like the EU, in fact we shall have our own serious version of the UEFA Champions’ league. Have you not heard of our preparations for this year's CECAFA Senior Challenge Cup?"

Continue to the next page!

Africa needs to enter the highway of history or risked being blurred

BY GEORGE KAGAME

In a week during which memorial ceremonies commemorating the defeat of Hitler's axis and the end of the second World War were held I watched two movies of peculiar interest but with a slightly similar violent story. One, an oscar award winning performance by Kate Winslet chronicles the legacy of the gas chambers in which millions of Jews were burnt by Hitler during the Holocaust, the other is about the conflict in Sierra Leone which ended in the early 2000s after claiming more than 50,000 and was fueled by one of Africa's curses; the diamond.

The first, The Reader is about the story of an illiterate female prison officer that falls in love with a young supposedly Jewish law student that later participates in the trial of the gas chamber guard. The story shows the blind hand of fate and the innocent clash of two other-words irreconcilable worlds. The other movie, The Blood Diamonds tells Africa's miserly in dealing in its natural resources and its failure simply to connect source to market without a war. The story is told in the simplest of terms that only Hollywood knows and wants to understand about Africa and our confilcts.

As is expected, there's wielding of sharp machetes here, grosteque images of Africans butchering each other there and the occasional whiteman baffled by the exercise. The whiteman is on the beaches holidaying, holding a photo camera, sometimes writing the next big humanitarian story from Africa for a major media house in the US or Europe and other times it shows the businessman unconcerned with a 'dark' people who cannot coexist peacefully while he is doing business.

From my simple write up you can tell one thing, the way that I grasped the stark contrasts in the two movies. The complicated nature of the legacy of Nazi German and the simple 'good bad' guy in the African story.
The European story is told in such a way that tells of sophistication, it is a civilized encounter among human beings that are innocent. On other hand, the African story is told in such way that its actors are simple blood thirsty vampires bent on eliminating each other by virtue of greed for resources whose value they cannot grasp as the diamonds are shown to be traded far away in Europe.

And thats the story of Africa. Since most people out of AFrica never read about the continent in books or in newspapers, they know most things about the continent from movies, and some times (honourably) wildlife features about the animals on the continent. (It is my opinion that Europeans and North Americans know more about the animals in Africa than the people living in the continent.)
So since movies tell their stories in terms of good and bad guys, most people outside Africa know of the continent in terms of good and bad guys too-recently, an acquaintance introduced me to his North American girlfriend, "he is among the good guys", and I was baffled by what he meant.

If one comes from Rwanda and travels to another part of Africa or the world, they will once in a while be asked a question or two after the proverbial; 'Where do you come from?" Having established that one is from Rwanda the next question or conversation will be probing to establish whether one is Tutsi or Hutu, in order to place you among the good or bad guys of Africa. And people in developed countries know about conversations and getting information when they want to. They thrive on information afterall.

To many, this probing is humiliating, some foolish people are quick to point out that they are Tutsi as this is likely to win any sympathy votes, (In a related idea and also as part of this paradox, every Rwandan that goes outside Africa automatically gets the Tutsi tag and plucks it on a pedestal.) There are categories of bad and good in other parts of the world as there was during the holocaust but their differences were not recorded on obvious structures as ours.

In the same way, if you were asked to describe the bad guys of the European genocides, (they have had a couple there, have they not?) This description will pit one particular idea against another. No particular specifics, these are civilizations after all. It is not really popular how the Jews were identified for extermination by the Nazi for example, but there's a wide collection of variables that the Hutu used to butcher the Tutsi in Rwanda. If the identity card never gave one a particular designation of tribe, you could look at the neck, the mouth, demeanor, the hair, complexion and particularly the nose.

The good bad guy analogy is a simple one in the Rwandan context, this is because of the fact that as as you answer innocent queries about your Hutuness or Tutsiness ( such that one can approve whether what they watched is true) They have a set of givens and trademarks as established by anthropologists. It is an attempt to show the blur on the African story.
Closer to home, the story of Rwanda's genocide-in its most famous script as told by Paul Rusesabagina and his book; "An Ordinary man" way after he left Rwanda, and more eloquently in Hotel Rwanda is the moral of this rambling.

When a local story is told in the eyes of a foreign audience and acted out for that audience the people affected by actual events of the story become figures, graphs and theories. And in this way Africa misses out in the real story of the world, our story is told only when a powerful entertainer visits and we take advantage of the photo ops or a charity organization makes a video asking for sponsors of this or that cause. (Hotel Rwanda is off a book written by a Hutu man, and acted by an American and a Nigerian plus a couple of Ugandans.)

The people that are living the events are reduced to appear as extras. It is with this hindsight that French president Nicholas Sarkozy remarked in 2007 at a Senegalese University ‘Africa has never entered history.’ Africa needs to find a way to help real African story tellers to get into mainstream media outlets. Or even easier to develop our own media where we will not be fed on other people's impressions of us.
donuwagiwabo@gmail.com

Awareness lacking as full customs union and common market begin in 2010

BY GEORGE KAGAME

I am going to step into the muddy waters that is the relationship between Tanzania and Kenya as well as between Tanzania and the five members of the East African Community.
But before I do that I suggest that you find/if you have not yet/ read a book titled; “The Shackled Continent.”

The Economist Reporter Robert Guest like so many before him writes about the mess that has been Africa since the end of colonialism, he attempts as much as only a journalist can to ask; “Africa is the only continent to have grown poorer over the last three decades. Why?”
The book is not likely to show you much more that you have not read elsewhere, nevertheless, it is rich with dozes of information that can come in handy while you have a pub/living room/class/garden or roadside chat under a tree shade about Africa.

First, to tell you briefly about the book. The general idea that Guest discusses is that Africans lack property rights or any awareness about it, have not experienced economic integration in small part due to our tribal tendencies and its evils, and have an obsession with land that borders on religion.

Yet we just get pleasure in the perceived respect of owning land not necessarily using it to access any meaningful financial services that can create capital and spur investments for development. The same belief that my forefathers had in owning many heads of cattle but continued to live in shackled grass thatched houses and died of malaria.
 

I was thinking of this book recently when I received an email from a Tanzanian friend. The message was a long opinion about his concerns in regard to the the East African Community.
To take you to the message I received from my Tanzanian colleague, he was reacting to a Kenyan media story concerning Tanzania’s reluctance in fast tracking the East African Community and all its frameworks. Like all the five members in the group using a similar passport, a single customs union, single currency and all the prerequisites for economic integrations.

The Kenyan story, allegedly had alluded to Tanzania being a ‘poor dirty’ country, and that Kenyans spoke ‘better broken English’ than the Tanzanians and would therefore be better prospects for business. The Tanzanian was so bitter in his reply that with pure African emotion wrote; “ If defending our great country means the death of the federation, so be it!” He went on to add that Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya and Uganda are only motivated by the desire to grab Tanzanian land rather than trade, be mutually benefiting neighbours or even share their own resources with Tanzania.

According to him, Tanzania’s land will be fleeced by the other members of the EAC, the other countries have acute land shortage and Tanzania is the answer as it is the biggest country among the five and has a relatively small population.
The relationship between Tanzania and Kenya is a complicated affair, it is especially complicated if you are a Rwandan writing about it. Seeing as it is that Rwanda has been the most vocal and active member of the EAC, we were invited to the EAC late and we were given a set of conditions to fulfill and reforms to undertake so as to access full membership to the block.

As a result, the government introduced massive reforms to be able to join not only the EAC, but do well in The World Bank Business reforms and put in place the prerequisites of joining The Commonwealth family as well. Because of this, Rwanda’s overzealous ambition for reforms was seen as despair by many in the block.

And considering that only 15 years ago there was a Genocide in Rwanda which claimed over a million people, it was/is simply and conveniently argued that we are too many to fit in the country and therefore we are joining these blocks to reduce population pressure. Therefore for a Rwandan to attempt to tell a Tanzanian to relax that we are not after your land is a tough call.

But in the larger scheme of things, Tanzania and Kenya have a very complicated relationship. In my limited experience visiting and working in these countries this relationship is basically made intriguing because of the crucial tourism industry. In this regard, Tanzania has some of the world’s best and largest collection of natural tourist attractions in terms of game parks, lakes, and history as well as having their capital on the ocean.

On the other hand, Kenya with less natural tourist attractions has expert management that markets their tourism in the country a pillar of the economy. Yet the kenyan tourism industry to a large degree benefits from being closer to Tanzania’s wealth of natural God made beauty like Kilimanjaro, exploiting the Serengeti as well as the elegant and prized Ngorongoro crater to attract high end tourists.

This nature of business has continued for a very long while where Kenya uses Tanzania’s natural blessings to attract tourists and the tourists spending all their money in Kenya rather than Tanzania.

Tanzanian politicians on the other hand saw this as an opportunity, they developed the mining industry at the expense of other sectors of the economy and turned national anger towards Kenya. The mining industry is first of all an expensive one as it is capital intensive, it employs a small fraction of locals and is further riddled with corruption bugs everywhere.
The rhetoric was first, they earn millions of dollars in tourism which would be coming to Tanzania and now have ganged up with Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi marketing the EAC? They only want your land. So the anger of Tanzanians against the EAC idea while misplaced is justified.

Even the land that is politicized is a misrepresentation of the reality, a large part of Tanzania’s land covering huge expanses in the west of the country is not ideal for any agriculture, it is lacking in water and is invested with herds of mosquitoes.

The view that other members of the EAC are short of land for their people is a popular one in Tanzania, many in this country believe that the EAC is a project aimed at hoodwinking Tanzanians into loosing their land.
It believed in many EAC circles that this idea has frustrated negotiations in the progress of the EAC unfortunately, and at some point Tanzania, in an apparent show of protest joined the South African Development Cooperation to target investments from the wealthy South Africa, booming Botswana and emerging Malawi. Even if this did not stop Kenya being the biggest investor in Tanzania after Britain.

According to highly credible regional business publication The Ratio magazine, “Kenya remains one of Tanzania’s largest investors – in fact, the country has more investments in Tanzania than South Africa, according to the 2007 investment records from the Tanzania Investment Centre (TIC). Britain had 595 projects worth USD1,115m, with at least 232,030 jobs. In the same year, Kenya had 249 projects valued at USD958.21m, employing 37,511 people.”

The British investments are in the mining sector which mainly benefits politicians and technocrats who are not really Tanzanians and most earnings from this sector is repatriated while the Kenyans invest in consumer services like banks, hotels and shopping malls that benefit regular Tanzanian folks.
Tanzania is itself benefitting from the EAC already, Ugandans have opened their schools for students from Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda and Burundi to access this quality services, while Rwanda-which is in dire need of expert labour has opened her doors to expatriate Tanzanians to work there in technical capacities.

Regional EAC trade has been increasing since the customs union was launched in 2005, and should continue to rise as internal tariffs come down to 0% in January at the onset of a fully fledged Customs Union, also many companies have moved into Tanzania to take advantage of its port access and borders with growing markets such as Malawi and Zambia .

As the customs union becomes a reality next year, the EAC secretariat needs to get out of hotel rooms and the politics of travel allowances to the field. There’s urgent need to sensitize East Africans what the mutual benefits of the union is about and go beyond the politics of blind and sentimental nationalism.

And talking about land, Tanzania is now in negotiations to sell 1,000 square kilometers (386 sq miles) to South Koreans and leasing 500,000 hectares of farmland in Tanzania to Saudis to grow rice and wheat, which means the country has already decided to deal land, therefore the system there needs to depoliticize EAC and land.

Africans and our lovely climate/weather

WHEN IT RAINS AFRICA CRIES, WHEN IT SHINES AFRICA CRIES (Except in Malawi)

Yesterday at 23:44

A few months ago, every day there was a "mercy train" or "mercy convoy" leaving Nairobi carrying food and other relief to some of the nearly 10m Kenyans threatened with starvation -- because it hadn't rained. The dams ran dry and, as happens in most of Africa, electricity outages followed. Now the rains are back. And it is misery again; floods, broken bridges, and although the dams are full, the storms are dropping huge trees on power lines and we continue to endure darkness. Last night, most of Kenya was without power for several hours.
This failure to harness nature is frustrating.

In the early 90s, most of Africa suffered severe food shortages. I remember then listening to a BBC broadcast, in which a ranking UN official was saying the worst was over, and food production in most of Africa will increase toward the end of the year. I thought he was going to announce the discovery of some new crop variety or irrigation method, or miracle fertiliser. No, he said they had been looking at the skies, and the signs were that is was going to rain soon!

Our difficulties with using science to take control of our lives, ends up in situations where we have unbearable dust in sunny seasons. Then when it rains, we are paralysed. You can't wait for a bus or taxi without getting soaked, because most stands are not covered. In fact, taxi stop points are arbitrary. Even if you have a car, it is useless. Traffic snarls become six hours long. And if your car can't swim through the floods, you are going nowhere. My office assistant called me at 7.45am to say she was stuck in traffic. It is two hours later, and the poor woman has not yet made it to office.

And, yes, because of the heavy rains, we can expect that there will be food shortages. So is it all hopeless? No. Take a country like Malawi. It has one of the smallest economies in Africa, and was once among its poorest nations. But in less than 10 years, it has moved from a food deficit case to a food surplus status and one of the leading African food exporters. This year Kenya, the country with the most mechanised agriculture in East Africa, is importing maize from Malawi.