DRC — The hundreds of children, elders, women and young men killed in Kiwanja in November by the Laurent Nkunda Batware’s National Congress for the Defence of the People (CDNP), a rebel group claiming to defend the Tutsi population in the Democratic Republic of Congo, are still fresh in our memory.
Now the imperialist news media has just announced the hacking with machetes of again mostly children, women and elderly between December 25 and 27 in Faradje, Doruma and Gurba in northeast Congo near the border with the Central African Republic and Sudan. We are told that they were killed by members of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) — an Uganda-based military force led by Joseph Kony that opposes the Ugandan regime of Yoweri Museveni.
Who are guilty — LRA’s rebels or the Ugandan army and its allies?
According to a December 29 article in the Guardian, “On December 14, regional patience finally ran out. Uganda, South Sudan and Congo announced a joint offensive to flush the rebels out of their bases in the Garamba national park, in northeastern Congo. Operation Lightning Thunder, which was led by Uganda, saw air strikes by MiG fighters and attack helicopters against several LRA hideouts, including Camp Swahili, Kony’s reported base.”
These attacks speak volumes. How can the Ugandan and SPLA armies — and the Congolese army who authorized these attacks — distinguish and spare the Congolese population from the LRA’s members when many of them do not even have army uniforms? How would they distinguish civilian from military targets when they are using air strikes? I tend to believe that it is a cover up.
What is a legitimate war or military operation in Africa today?
What is the basis of legitimacy of all these wars? What is the difference between armed rebel groups and governmental armed forces? None of them is involved in a war of liberation.
How many people have Museveni and Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame killed? The imperialist press is quiet on that!
Why are Kagame and Museveni allowed the military solution of hunting down their opponents in Congo? Why is there no international process to get Museveni to negotiate with Joseph Kony and Kagame to negotiate with the Hutu leadership? After all, none of them is against imperialism, and therefore none of them have a basis to shed the blood of Congolese or any African population.
Since there is no army consciously fighting imperialism and the African petty bourgeois compradors and bureaucrats in the Congo and the region, it means the leaders of the LRA and Museveni, as well as the Hutu and Tutsi leaders in Rwanda, are fighting for the right to be the favored servant of white imperialism. That is why this war is an illegitimate war.
However, the people’s resistance by any means is legitimate.
Imperialist press is silent on the crimes of Museveni and Kagame
We know about this massacre because it is allegedly committed by the LRA. The white press of Britain, Canada and the U.S. continue to impose silence on Museveni and Kagame‘s war crimes.
In eastern Congo, the Hutu soldiers of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) and the Tutsi soldiers of the Rwandan army are all experienced mass murderers as a result of their participation in the Rwandan genocide in 1994. There was no good side in that war.
The Congolese army has no loyalty to the people but instead to themselves and their merchant generals who steal even the pay of their own rank and file soldiers. The Ugandan army is responsible for mass murders against the Acholi population in northern Uganda from which the LRA comes. The Rwandan government has committed mass murder in Rwanda and continues to support the ongoing war in Congo. They continue to get away with these war crimes because the imperialist press always blames their victims and because there are no revolutionary struggles in this region of Africa to organize the defense of the peoples.
Revolutionary struggles across the illegitimate borders is the solution
The Congolese army is rotten. It rapes and kills its own population. None of these armed forces — governmental or rebel — are on the side of the people, of Congo or of Africa. They are all on the side of white power imperialism. This is the fundamental problem that needs to be resolved if we want to see peace, dignity and freedom in this part of Africa.
We urgently need an ASI organization on the ground in central and East Africa, which will pull together the whole African population in these regions into one single organization to organize the people’s resistance against neocolonialism, a precondition for the worldwide final offensive of African people against imperialism and its black collaborators.
