(PHOTO 1: Dr. Cécile Kyenge Kashetu, Congolese-born Italian minister of Integration)
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(PHOTO 2: Brig. Gen. Joseph Nzabamwita, Rwanda military & Defense spokesman: "We have credible information that FDLR is currently embedded in FARDC")
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1) Italy: Cécile Kyenge Kashetu, the Orangutan Minister
Back in April, I celebrated on this blog the appointment by the new Italian leftist prime minister Enrico Letta of Congolese-born Dr. Cécile Kyenge Kashetu as the first ever black minister in Italy's history.
Since then, she's been threatened by her fellow citizens with hanging and rape.
But those niceties pale in comparison to the one that Roberto Calderoli, the vice-president of the Italian senate and leader of the Northern League party, came up with a few days ago when he told his supporters in Treviso:
"I love animals... but when I see pictures of Kyenge I can't but think of--even if I'm not saying she is one--the features of an orangutan."
Calderoli later on apologized for what he called his "esthetic" remark that was taken out of the joking context in which it was uttered.
Be that as it may, Calderoli is now being investigated for his racist slanderous comments.
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2) The FARDC give Rwanda the heebie-jeebies
Rumor through the grapevine of Kinshasa Radio-Trottoir has it that there are two explanations for Rwanda's jitters of these past few days.
The first explanation is that little doubt remains in the minds of Rwanda's President Paul Kagame and his military entrepreneurs and plunder operators that they are watching unravel--live!--the endgame of this installment in their serial assaults on the Congo.
The moxie and combativeness of the new FARDC units at Mutaho--where they are massively responding to M23 attacks, with two stray "bombs" harmlessly hitting the Rwandan border city of Gisenyi--and at Kisingi--where they routed the al-Qaeda-linked Ugandan rebels of the ADF/NALU--have given Kagame and his co-conspirators the heebie-jeebies and forced them to reassess their whole game plan.
That's why Kagame and his people are seeing these days bogeymen under their own beds in the shapes of FDLR terrorists embedded with FARDC and MONUSCO troops, as have loftily claimed in their talking points Rwandan U.N. Ambassador Eugene-Richard Gasana and Rwanda Defense Forces spokesman Brig. Gen. Joseph Nzabamwita.
The second explanation is that Rwanda is rehearsing its rationales for an all-out military assault in the Congo.
And this could turn out to be Kagame's biggest mistake in his long career of pillages and thefts in the Congo, as the Rwandan president is now antagonizing Tanzania.
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PHOTO CREDITS: PHOTO 1: REUTERS/Tony Gentile/NTB-Scanpix Via m.db.no; & PHOTO 2: AFP via theeastafrican.co.ke
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