The international community is calling for a peaceful resolution to all hostilities with the Congolese government. But one sure thing is that the Tshisekedi regime and its army will violate the cease-fire. If the M23 movement is forced to defend themselves and push back against the FARDC (and their FDLR genocidal allies) attacks, they will be blamed for “escalating hostilities” and causing a humanitarian crisis.
M23 is now being asked to lay down its arms and “withdraw from its positions, disarm, and rejoin the Inter-Congolese dialogue (Nairobi process), supposedly in preparation for disarmament, demobilization, and community reintegration offered by the Government of the DRC.” All this, yet the only thing Tshisekedi regime does is talk belligerently calling M23 movement “terrorists”.
But these are Congolese with legitimate concerns, as Congolese citizens fighting for their rights. Strangely the fact Tshisekedi is targeting them (Kinyarwanda speaking Congolese) with vicious rhetoric of genocide gets not much attention.
On the other hand M23 have heeded calls to withdraw before, even though the DRC government has never honored their side of the bargain (to honor their rights).
In response to calls by the UN and the AU calls to DRC leaders to cease the renewed hostilities and settle for a peaceful resolution, Tshisekedi’s spokesperson, Patrick Muyaya gave this response: “We are being forced to negotiate with terrorist groups,” adding with impunity: “this will not happen.”
It demonstrates the fact that the Congolese government is not interested in peace, even after seeing that their recent escalation has led to massive displacement of Congolese citizens, which has caused catastrophic humanitarian crises.
Tshisekedi’s hardline stance which seems to be oblivious to the fact that they are not exactly having the upper hand in the war they have escalated. Even though they know that they cannot unilaterally designate an armed group as a “terrorist”, the Congolese regime has continued to lie that “the M23 is a terrorist group supported by Rwanda.” They ratchet up negative rhetoric to evade their responsibilities.
The AU, the ICGLR, the EAC, and the UN Security Council have reiterated that the only path to sustainable peace in DRC is for an inter-Congolese dialogue to take place, in an atmosphere of honesty and sincerity. Tshisekedi wants none of that.
He only makes bellicose statements that the recommendation are “a ploy to ‘force’ his government to negotiate with ‘terrorists.” The Tshisekedi regime is very irresponsible and it demonstrates that daily.
What Tshisekedi’s doing is try to blackmail the international community into suppressing these voices.
He shouldn’t be allowed to do that.
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