M23's coercive rallies & Lumpenproletariat; & calls for "state of war" with Rwanda

Early in the morning of Wednesday Goma residents were forced to attend

an M23 rally.



Goma residents I spoke to afterward were mad at the international

press coverage of the rally, especially reports claiming that they'd

attended the gathering out of their own free will or that they were

supportive of the insurgents.



"Maybe those reporters are too young to remember that we also did

'freely' attend Mobutu's coercive rallies," one of my correspondents

said.



The French news channel France24 also produced one M23's so-called

"spokesman" who claimed to be from the Batetela ethnic group, no doubt

in a desperate attempt to show that their movement had a broad appeal

among the Congolese people.



Well, M23 can produce scores of those token "spokespeople" from the

mosaic of all the clans, tribes, and ethnic groups making up the

Congo, the fact remains that the majority of DRC citizens are loath to

their Rwandan-led insurgency.



As one professor of political sciences of Kinshasa University reminded

me today,Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis

Napoleon (1852), in France of the 1850s there were scores of French

citizens that had also supported the very unpopular coup d'etat of

Napoléon III.



And those who did support that coup were what Karl Marx called in his

seminal "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" (1853) the

"lumpenproletariat," comprising at the time:



"Alongside decayed rogues with dubious means of subsistence and of

dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the

bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged

jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, [...], pickpockets,

tricksters, gamblers, pimps, [and] beggars — in short, the whole

indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither [...]."



Had Marx lived in contemporary Congo, he'd no doubt have added the

lineup of shameless political opportunists of the ilk M23 produced for

France24.



In the meantime in Kinshasa, anger directed at Kabila and his regime

mounted up a notch when Radio Okapi reported that up to 80 wounded

FARDC soldiers were abandoned at Goma hospital.



Anger morphed into fury when people saw footage on EuroNews and other

media channels of rotting corpses of Congolese troops in the streets

of the provincial capital of North Kivu.



Additionally, the news of the death toll of 4 in the anti-Kabila

student riots yesteday in Kisangani didn't help any bit in improving

the quickly deteriorating situation in the early morning hours on the

campus ground of Kinshasa University where a confrontation with riot

cops was averted at the last minute due to the desperate efforts of

the professors' union, who convinced students to disperse.



At any rate, calls for a declaration of a "state of war" with Rwanda

are growing.



"Let's enter Cyagungu and see how Rwanda would feel" a student of

Kinshasa University told me this morning.



The news of Kabila palling with Museveni and Kagame in Kampala and

Entebbe further exercised lots of people in the streets of Kinshasa.



There's everywhere talk of a "balkanization conspiracy" against the

Congo masterminded by the United States and the International

Community qua MONUSCO, whose proxies are Rwanda and M23.