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The subcommittee of Defense Ministers set up at the August 7-8 Kampala
Summit of the heads of state of the International Conference on the
Great Lakes Region (ICGLR) finally convened in Goma, the provincial
capital of North Kivu.
And on Thursday, August 16, according to DRC Defense Minister
Alexandre Luba Ntambo, the subcommittee retained the following main
recommendations to be submitted by August 28 to President Yoweri
Museveni, the current ICGLR chair:
1) Troops from Burundi, DRC, Rwanda, and Uganda won't be part of the
"neutral force";
2) Troops making up this force would come from the Great Lakes region
and Africa;
3) The "neutral force" will be 4,000-strong. Another sub-subcommittee
will determine the "structrure" of this force;
4) The "neutral force" will be based at 4 "deployment zones": Beni,
Ruwenzori (an administrative sector near Beni, I'd assume), Walikale and Masisi;
5) The Defense Ministers urge M23 to cease all military activity and
to return to their "initial position" at Runyonyi in North Kivu.
To get the gist of the masquerade in progress that this plan
represents, you've got to have the map of North Kivu in front of you.
On this map, you'd notice that the deployment zone is a rough
isosceles triangle with the two base tips being Walikale (west) and
Masisi (east)--respectively at about 160 and more than 80 kms of Goma.
(The distances are my own estimates based on the scales of the maps I'm using.)
Both of these towns are therefore at about the same distance from the
border with Rwanda.
The northernmost tip of this triangle is Beni, about 60 km of Kasindi,
at the border with Uganda. Beni is at more than 200 km of Masisi.
(Again, these distances are my own estimates.)
Walikale and Masisi are areas infested by Mai-Mai militias and the
FDLR, but still under FARDC control. The same configuration prevails
in Beni.
As the DRC doesn't participate in the "neutral force," I wonder what
would be the synergy (if any) between the latter, on the one hand, and
the FARDC and local civil authorities on the other hand.
Add to this mosaic the MONUSCO, which is very present in the area, and
you obtain a volatile mix without some form of integration or
coordination in the field.
Furthermore, as this "neutral force" won't be operating in a
no-man's-land but on Congolese territory, it's only logical to expect
it to have some kind of collaboration with Congolese civil authorities
on the ground.
Otherwise, this whole thing wouldn't make any sense.
And then again it wasn't meant to make sense anyway. It's a
masquerade on a vast scale.
The attitude of the Defense Ministers vis-à-vis the M23 is bizarre.
They aren't telling the M23 to lay down their weapons or else. They
are urging M23 insurgents to return to their "initial position" as if
they were stakeholders of sorts.
Isn't the "neutral force" a foe to M23?
And, let's entertain for a moment the unlikely scenario that M23
would lose their marbles and heed this call to withdraw to their
initial position, what would then happen afterward?
Would the "neutral force" then move in to pacify the area as the M23
insurgents look on with arms folded like lambs to the slaughter?
By the way, this initial position happens to be on the Rwandan border
where this "neutral force" was supposed to be deployed in the first
place and where I don't see it moving to any time soon.
I won't even discuss the fact that Rwanda has still to come clean as
regards its support to M23; that the funding of this whole operation
is still in the air; and that the contribution in troops by African
countries is quite improbable.
The DRC shouldn't have been involved in this masquerade from the get go.
The Congolese government needs to focus on building a dissuasive army
instead of wasting time in those unending meetings.
(By the way, while Rwanda continues to arm itself unfettered, a
crippling arms embargo shackles the DRC.)
As I already said in a previous post, this is no plan for peace; it's
a plan to buy time for Rwanda.
And some leaders in this ICGLR outfit look more and more to me like a
ruthless gang of double-crossers and war profiteers.
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PHOTO CREDITS: John Bompengo/radiookapi.net
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