Dr. Cécile Kyenge Kashetu, first black Italian cabinet minister, is Congolese-born

(PHOTO: Dr. Cécile Kyenge Kashetu, 49, new Italian minister for Integration)



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Enrico Letta, the new Italian leftist prime minister, has just

appointed the first ever black cabinet minister in Italian history.



The new minister was until her appointment an MP of the leftist

Democratic Party (PD), Cécile Kyenge Kashetu, who has to manage the

contentious portfolio of Integration, a newfangled political-correct

ministry.



And she happens to be a Congolese-born eye surgeon who emigrated to

Italy in her late teens, and later on became a naturalized Italian

citizen.



Dr. Kyenge is married and the mother of two daughters--Maïsha and Giulia.



Dr. Kyenge was born in the now restive mining city of Kambove in

Katanga Province. Just this past February, violent clashes pitted the

Congolese police against artisanal miners who were being evacuated

from a makeshift mining site outside Kambove.



According to a contemporaneous report by Radio Okapi, those clashes on

February 19 obtained a deadly toll:



"[F]ive injured people including three wounded by live bullets, ten

arrests, and property belonging to Gecamines and the Congolese state

ransacked or burned."



Anyway, right now Kambove may be murky and blurry in the mind of

Integration Minister Kyenge, for she has a lot on her plate.



To be true, as the Guardian reported, the Ghanaian-Italian AC Milan

striker Mario Balotelli hailed Kyenge's appointment as "a further, big

step towards a more civilised and responsible Italian society."



But, still according to the Guardian, as her agenda aims at "changing

Italy's citizenship laws, which are based on descent rather than place

of birth," she quickly drew massive flak from the rightwing Northern

League.



Matteo Salvini, one of the leaders of the League, blasted Kyenge's

appointment as "the symbol of a hypocritical, do-gooding left that

would like to abolish the crime of illegal immigration and only thinks

about immigrants' rights and not their duties."



(Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/28/italy-first-black-minister-attacked)





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PHOTO CREDITS: Via dazebaonews.it

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Earl W. Gast, USAID Deputy Administrator for Africa, talks governance with representatives of DRC civil society

(PHOTO: CLOCKWISE: Lea Ndombasi, youth organizer; Yangu Kiakwama,

opposition political activist; an unidentified civil society actor;

me; USAID/DRC Acting Mission Director Catherine Andang; USAID/DRC

Mission Director Diana Putman; USAID Deputy Administrator for Africa

Earl W. Gast; Chief of staff of USAID Africa Bureau Sean Maloney; and

Angèle Makombo-Eboum, opposition leader)



***



For his first visit to Kinshasa, Earl W. Gast, USAID Deputy

Administrator for Africa, found time in the early afternoon of

Wednesday, April 10, to talk with a select group of representatives of

civil society—as well as a high-profile politician—of the Democratic

Republic of Congo about a rare commodity in this country: governance.



Gast was flanked by his own chief of staff, Sean Maloney; USAID/DRC

Mission Director Diana Putman; Acting USAID/DRC Mission Director

Catherine Andang; USAID/DRC Democracy and Governance Officer Theodore

"Ted" Glenn; and two unidentified USAID/DRC staff members, who sat in

the background.



The high-profile Congolese politician I just alluded to was Ms. Angèle

N. Makombo-Eboum, chair of the tiny political party called "Ligue des

Congolais Démocrates" (LIDEC).



In my view, at a roundtable where "governance" is the theme, a good

governance of one's own narrative has to be the leitmotif too.



By introducing herself as one of the presidential candidates in the

November 2011 election when in fact she wasn't on the official roster

of the National Independent Electoral Commission (CENI), Makombo

failed miserably the test of what I'd call the "narrative's good

governance." At the end of the meeting, she gave me her business card

that read in parts: "Candidate at the presidential election of 2011 in

the DRC."



I don't understand why a leader of such national stature need to be

peddling such unnecessary untruths. No wonder then that Congolese

politicians have lost all political credit and are being looked down

with utter contempt by Residents of the Republic.



Well, two high-profile Americans in the room didn't need to brag about

their achievements. Gast has been all over the map as a USAID

official—from Kosovo, Colombia, Iraq, to Afghanistan.



Putman, described as a "Foreign Service Whistleblower," was honored in

2010 by the Foreign Service Association with the William R. Rivkin

award for dissent for challenging "the entire structure of AFRICOM,

[….] when she called them out on the way they were dealing with sexual

and gender-based violence victims."



(See: http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2010/06/25/foreign-service-whistle-blower-gets-an-award)



In any event, Makombo's litany of the alleged electoral malfeasance of

CENI in the 2011 general elections was craftily used by USAID

panelists to segue into more substantial points—such as the following

ones:



1) The decentralization (or devolution) conundrum: Provincial

"decoupage" (carving out) vs. revenues. A bone of contention between

the central government and provincial entities--many among whom are

not even being financially and fiscally viable to begin with—is the

retrocession of 40% of revenues from the central government to

provinces. With additional provinces to be carved out (the country

will have 26 provinces), how this problem will be solved is anybody's

guess.



2) Politicians and civil society groups seem to be facing a tough

choice: Reform CENI first then go to local elections; or instead go to

local elections first then reform CENI afterwards. The law reforming

CENI, though voted in Parliament, has still to be promulgated by

President Joseph Kabila. According to civil society members present,

the law is stuck over the objections from Catholic bishops who want to

see more members of civil society in the revamped CENI.



3) Self-criticism by civil society groups: their strengths and

weaknesses. There seem to be tough challenges in building a strong

network and coalition of civil society groups. There are "pocket NGOs"

and a proliferation of NGOs (more than 9,000 and still growing)

stampeding for dwindling funds from Western donors.



One civil society heavyweight present, Baudouin Hamuli, wanted to see

more resources go into training election experts.



Hamuli also claimed that Congolese civil society is alive and vibrant

despite its contradictions. According to him, civil society groups

have in fact wrested a vital space from the powers that be after 20

years of activism. He added that journalists' rights, especially the

freedom of expression, have dramatically been advanced by civil

society groups that include churches and women's organizations. He

acknowledged however that the coalition that would cement these groups

has to be strengthened.



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PHOTO CREDITS: Courtesy USAID/DRC

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Rwanda is reinforcing M23 for final assault on Goma

(PHOTO: Jules Hakizimwami, right, Speaker of the North-Kivu Provincial

Assembly, with Governor Julien Paluku)



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Jules Hakizimwami, Speaker of the North-Kivu Provincial Assembly, held

a press briefing in Goma on Thursday, April 4, in which he was

hysterically denouncing Rwanda for sending personnel reinforcement to

M23 positions over the course of these last three days.



Strangely, as was noted by the Radio Okapi report on Hakizimwami's

press briefing, the timeline of the alleged M23 personnel infiltration

back into DRC territory overlaps with the announcement of the

relocation deeper inside Rwanda of 689 pro-Jean-Marie Runiga's M23

refugees made by Rwandan Minister of Disaster Management and Refugee

Affairs, Seraphine Mukantabana.



(See: http://alexengwete.blogspot.com/2013/04/m23-chief-bertrand-bisimwa-apocalypse.html?m=1)



Said Hakizimwami:



"The same troops that had gone into Rwanda are now being brought back

stealthily to reinforce those who are in Rutshuru. Very concordant

informations point to a concentration of men and weapons along the

Rumangabo-Kibumba corridor, precisely to assault the city of Goma."



(Source: http://radiookapi.net/actualite/2013/04/05/nord-kivu-le-president-de-lassemblee-provinciale-denonce-le-renforcement-des-troupes-du-m23/)



According to observers who've elaborated on the basis of Hakizimwami's

initial analysis, Rwanda--and Uganda, incidentally--wants M23 to

reoccupy Goma--and eventually attack Bukavu--ahead of the deployment

of MONUSCO's Intervention Brigade so as: (1) to preempt this

intervention by rendering the costs of its collateral damage

prohibitive in urban settings; and (2) to force the DRC government to

heed M23 "claims" (Hakizimwami).



Those who'd think Hakizimwami is somewhat paranoid ought to re-read my

post on "rules of accommodation (Congo) vs. Negotiating for side

effects (Rwanda)" (See:

http://alexengwete.blogspot.com/2012/06/rules-of-accommodation-congo-vs.html?m=1)



***



PHOTO CREDITS: Via provincenordkivu.org

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A specimen of the new breed of Ugly Americans: Howard G. Buffet

(PHOTO 1: Howard G. Buffet, billionaire philanthropist and

self-appointed stakeholder in the African Great Lakes Region)



(PHOTO 2: Erstwhile CIA operative and US State Department official

Hank Crumpton, CEO of the Crumpton Group and pen-for-hire of Howard G.

Buffet)



***



Writing yesterday in the Kigali-based daily New Times, reporter

Eugene Kwibuka celebrated--no doubt as a vindication of the Rwandan

government unconvincing denial of its involvement in setting up and

micromanaging the M23 bandits--the polished hogwash, written by

lobbyists on behalf of billionaire Howard G. Buffet and his

foundation, that purports to give a more informed view on the crisis

in eastern DRC than the one given last year by the UN Group of

Experts.



(Source: http://www.newtimes.co.rw/news/index.php?i=15316&a=65567)



The ridiculously laudatory piece by Kwibuka fails to point out that

this publication by the Howard G. Buffet Foundation (HGBF)--aptly

released on April's Fool Day--is a self-cannibalizing set of

plagiarisms lifted from a piece co-authored by Buffet and Tony Blair

titled "Stand with Rwanda: Now is no time to cut aid to Kigali"

published on Foreign Policy on February 21, 2013.



(I ranted on that nonsense here in a post of early March:

http://alexengwete.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-callous-buckraker-called-tony-blair.html?m=1)



Well, what else can one expect from a paper that has abandoned all

semblance of decent journalism to become the mouthpiece of the

repressive Kagame regime.



A more balanced assessment of the new dossier penned by Buffet's

mercenaries can be found on the blog ethuin.wordpress.com (With Eyes

Wide Open) in a post titled "Putting things in perspective: Buffet

Foundation versus UN Group of Experts"

(http://ethuin.wordpress.com/2013/04/02/putting-things-in-perspective-buffet-foundation-versus-un-group-of-experts/)



I won't be parsing the paid pro-Kagame informercial produced by Buffet

here, but I am rather marking it down as a benchmark: the dawn of a

new breed of Ugly Americans in the guise of roving global

self-appointed stakeholders.



These self-appointed stakeholders are even worse than the breed of the

new Africa scholars whose ambition, as I surmised in a post of June

2012, "is to make the traditional genre of Africa reporting extinct

and to replace it with something that is a cross between academic

hogwash and advocacy."



(See: http://alexengwete.blogspot.ca/2012/06/laura-seays-view-from-goma-in-warscapes.html?m=1)



What makes Buffet and his ilk dangerous is, firstly, the tons of

monies they're waddling in. Secondly, some of them, such as Tony

Blair, have been top political leaders who currently enjoy instant

access to the world top influential people and decision-makers. And,

lastly, as this most recent endeavor of Buffet has shown, they are

well connected to former spooks turned contractors running their own

intel outfits.



What's more, unlike "unselfish" advocacy groups such as the

International Crisis Group (ICG) or Human Rights Watch (HRW) that

often offer paths to lasting solutions in conflict situations or

advocate on behalf of individual citizens or civil society groups

often oppressed by the powers that be, these new "Ugly Americans"

brazenly advocate on behalf of repressive regimes and oppressive

leaders such as Kagame.



These new Western moneyed self-appointed global stakeholders have now

come to shore on the African continent to stake out their claims and

carve out cartographies of interventions--no matter how idiotic or

terrible they might be.



They're now busy attempting to change, orient, and trim the future of

the African continent to fit and suit their narrow interests while at

the same time driving out, evacuating, dispossessing, disempowering,

and disenfranchising legitimate local, indigenous stakeholders.



In sum, these self-appointed stakeholders--mostly American

unfortunately--are bad news for Africa. Therefore Buffet, being one of

them, is very bad news for Africa in general, and for the African

Great Lakes Region in particular. And I don't care how much money

Buffet is funneling to the good causes at the Bill & Melinda Gates

Foundation or the WWF.



No one knows what made Buffet appoint himself a stakeholder in and a

savior of the African Great Lakes Region.



But this past December, Buffet baffled Congolese and others in the

region when he "boosted" the Kampala M23-DRC government with a

whopping $500,000 donation!



Why would Buffet invest so much money in "boosting" a group so

universally hated by the Congolese?



You only get an answer to such questions circumstantially--by turning

for instance to one of the two hired guns Buffet enlisted to patch up

an incoherent attack against the UN Group of Experts laced with an

embarrassing panegyric of Kagame and a blasting attack against the

government of the DRC for its malgovernance.



I'm alluding here to the Crumpton Group, headed by erstwhile CIA

spymaster and US State Department official Henry "Hank" Crumpton.



In an interview last May with CNN Suzanne Kelly at the launch of his

memoir "The Art of Intelligence," Crumpton said:



"If you look at the role of non-state actors overall both as

adversaries as enemies, as allies as potential allies, as citizens,

and institutions that we need to protect, I think that they are

increasingly a part of the landscape."



(Source: http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2012/05/15/former-spys-memoir-gives-voice-to-the-frustration-that-comes-with-the-territory/)



Crumpton-qua-Buffet may therefore see M23 as part of eastern DRC

"landscape" for years to come and as actors to partner with in the

future balkanized Congo!



As I said before, in the ideal world of social and cartographic

engineering designs of these new self-appointed roving stakeholders,

local peoples and their imaginings don't exist. This ideal world has

no bearing whatsoever on the reality of Africa, having been hatched in

air-conditioned offices in Seattle, Washington, or in Arlington,

Virginia.



Postcolonial Africa has yet to start planning on ways of countering

the imperial forays of these colonists of the 21st century.



***



PHOTO CREDITS: PHOTO 1: Via farmfutures.com; PHOTO 2: Via cnn.com

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M23 chief Bertrand Bisimwa: Apocalypse Now

(PHOTO: Bertrand Bisimwa at a press briefing at Bunagana yesterday)



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With the full deployment by the end of this month of the MONUSCO

Intervention Brigade, M23 political head Bertrand Bisimwa may most

definitely have started feeling the ground opening up under him and

his posse of international bandits.



In his reaction to the UN Security Council resolution 2098 (2013)

setting up an "Intervention Brigade" to go after M23 and other armed

groups, Bisimwa, who's recently taken on the habit of donning a stupid

oversized cow-boy felt hat à la Yoweri Museveni, said yesterday at a

press briefing at Bunagana that "from now on, peacekeeping forces will

wage war on groups of citizens who are demanding good governance in

our country."



Really, Bisimwa!



Could you show the world the petition signed by groups of Congolese

residents of the Republic asking you and your gangsters to kill,

plunder, and rape on their behalf for good governance?



Is Bisimwa waging war for "Groups of Citizens" or is he an element of

the hordes of "doppelgänger anticitizens" terrorizing peaceful

Congolese civilians?



(I systematically use on this blog the expression "doppelgänger

anticitizens"--coined by Comaroff and Comaroff in another context--to

tag individuals or groups evincing various kinds of uncivic

behaviors.)



Significantly, Bismwa added: "It [the UN military offensive campaign]

will be the Apocalypse!"



Apocalypse now, indeed, for Bisimwa, his bandits and his

sponsors--Rwanda and Uganda--as their loots in the Congo would dry up

overnight!



Congolese therefore can't wait to see the advent of this

Apocalypse--in the real or figurative sense--of Bisimwa and his M23

looters, rapists and mass murderers. In fact, most Congolese denizens

often even fantasize about real Apocalypse being visited upon Rwanda

and Uganda!



Well, it's never too late: Bisimwa and his fellow could still avoid

the Apocalypse by laying down their weapons and disbanding--with

individual members reporting to the nearest police precinct to detail

the mischiefs and atrocities they might committed upon Congolese

civilians. For this time around, civil society groups of the Kivus

have vowed to see to it that not one single abuser of human rights

would go unpunished!



Maybe Bisimwa and his international bandits didn't realize there was a

rising tsunami of outrage worldwide over military entrepreneurship of

cross-border resource pillages masquerading as homegrown legitimate

demands over governance--the very kind Rwanda and Uganda have been

repeatedly engaged in on the territory of the DRC, claiming staggering

human tolls and devastating humanitarian disasters.



Talking of humanitarian disasters, it now turns out that Rwanda is

having a tidbit of taste of the bitter medicine it had been

administering to the Congo over the years.



Rwanda Minister of Disaster Management and Refugee Affairs Seraphine

Mukantabana, who was describing yesterday to the Kigali daily "New

Times" the relocation of 689 M23 bandits (of the Jean-Marie Runiga's

faction) from the border district of Rubavu to Ngoma, also complained

about the lack of international assistance in this mini-refugee

crisis.



Said Mukantabana:



"The international community has ignored and adamantly decided not to

support us in managing this crisis. These are not our citizens,

neither are they our prisoners, they belong to the UN."



Adding:



"It is now upon the UN to provide other requirements for the refugees."



(Source: http://www.newtimes.co.rw/news/index.php?i=15315&a=65551)



This would sound like a cruel joke to the more than 800,000 Congolese

IDPs who've left their homes and livelihoods thanks to Rwandan-backed

M23 cross-border terror group.



And, if anything, this episode should serve as a cautionary tale to

Rwanda who's wont to cause mayhem, deaths, and mass displacement of

populations in the Congo.



***

PHOTO CREDITS: Via kigalitoday.com

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