Citizens cheer and give thumbs up to M23 soldiers in North Kivu. Contrary to Western Media reports, areas controlled by M23 are more peaceful and organised than areas controlled by the government. Net Photo.
With the odd rare exceptions, there are no African stories in Western media. What passes for African stories are more a reflection of Western attitudes, policy, and preconceptions about Africa, than any journalism on whichever issue they purport to be covering.
A near perfect example of this, is the latest piece in the Guardian newspaper, supposedly about the crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
We are reliably informed that an experienced, award-winning journalist, reports from the Rwandan capital of Kigali, and from Goma, the capital of the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). No doubt the trip will have given him a sense of place, as he wrote, but he could have written his story, just as well from home.
The long piece has little to do with the DRC or Rwanda, and more a reflection of Western policy on both. The facts on the ground are twisted to suit a preferred Western narrative, which is then trotted out by almost every media outlet. It is the Gobbelian principle that a lie told often enough, becomes fact.
Since Leopold II gleefully salivated about his “magnificent African cake,” the West has regarded Congo, as their possession, one they guard jealously.
The March 23rd Movement rebels, to give them their full name, or M23 as they are popularly known, are repossessing large chunks of Leopold’s magnificent cake, and like some insatiable glutton, his would be inheritors seem to be gripped by intense anxiety that their possession might fall entirely into the hands of the Congolese themselves.
It is a reprise of twelve years ago, in 2012, when it seemed that the entire Western world descended upon Rwanda, to pressure M23 to pull back before it took Goma. Rwanda used its influence to persuade the rebels to stand down, on condition of agreements signed by all parties, to resolve the grievances that were the basis of the rebellion. No sooner had the rebels stood down, than the Congolese reneged on every single agreement it had signed.
What every Western news organisation tiptoes around, when they coyly refer to “the resurgence of M23,” is that the rebels took up arms again, because they were duped, not only by the Congolese, who never had any intention of honouring any agreement they signed, but by the International community, which stood as guarantor to those agreements. To overlook all of this, a monstrous distraction is created, which Western media and commentators, incessantly feed to the world.
On the other hand, Congolese government forces, FARDC, and allied armed groups such as FDLR, face accusations of ransacking towns and villages in Eastern DRC, under the guise of fighting M23.
A rebel movement that took up arms, to protect its community, has projected upon it the very crimes against which it took up arms to fight. The M23 exists because of the persecution of the Kinyarwanda-speaking Congolese. For the crime of “looking like Tutsi,” people have been beaten into semi consciousness, before being burned alive and cannibalised.
Anyone with a strong enough stomach, is invited to view the sickening spectacle online, as the perpetrators, encouraged by hate speech from state house in Kinshasa, proudly boast about their unspeakable, scarcely believable deeds.
When they are not being tortured to death and cannibalised, Kinyarwanda-speaking Congolese, have their businesses ransacked, their cattle hacked to pieces. Anyone deemed to be Tutsi can be stopped on the street, and suffer any fate the thugs who act in the name of the state happen to wish to visit upon him or her.
None of this is even hinted at in the Guardian article. Instead, like so many articles before it, in the same publication, as in other Western news organisations, cause is deliberately muddled up with effect. The M23 movement, which came into being because of the atrocities against the Kinyarwanda-speaking community, is labelled as the cause of those atrocities.
“Children executed and women raped in front of their families as M23 militia unleashes fresh terror on DRC,” and then, “first-hand accounts from victims of unthinkable violence paint a gruesome picture of the brutality sweeping the central African country. How long is the West prepared to look away?”
The entire 3000-word article is encapsulated here. African savagery dully announced, the West is called upon to sweep in and impose some semblance of humanity, of civilisation. The words are chosen carefully. The rebel group is labelled a “militia”, which “unleashes fresh terror…” The blood curdling tales of savagery have been told before, on several occasions, and the article is careful to emphasise that these are “fresh.”
The tone deaf, paternalistic, racist undertones of these articles, beggars belief. There are regional and continental mechanisms currently trying to address the DRC crisis, but all are dismissed as of no consequence. It is instead for the West to ride in, and save the day, never mind that it is the West’s salvation that plunged Africa in general and DRC in particular, into the hellish state that is perpetuated with the connivance of selected, compliant, venal Africans.
An M23 fighter stands guard overlooking areas in their control.
But the article does not, of course, call for change. Indeed, it frets that there might be change, and calls for greater, more urgent direct involvement from the West, to maintain the status quo. The supposed witnesses to the horrors the article recounts, are simply useful tools to target the perceived threats to the West’s influence in the DRC, M23 and Rwanda.
Depict M23 as nothing more than a “militia” which has no other objective than gratuitous murder, rape and pillage, claim that they commit these crimes at the best of Rwanda, and in one fell swoop, you use the rebel group to damn Rwanda, while further creating a distraction from the actual causes of the conflict in the DRC.
There is an almost voyeuristic relish in the way the article wallows in horrors which are clearly imagined. The DRC crisis has now spanned over twenty years, and the suffering of the people of the DRC has been unspeakable.
Much of this suffering has been and continues to be at the hands of the Congo state, and the many marauders who act in its name. There are real horrific tales, suffered by real people. And yet, time after time, as in this latest article, Western media manage to overlook this glaring fact, and pour out concocted horrors on paper or on screens, in a way that seems almost prurient.
“They were looking for ways to kill, ways to send fresh terror across North Kivu” a supposed eye witness recounts, going on to claim that M23 murdered children by “pummeling them” in a mortar and pestle. The author of the article is a highly experienced journalist, no one’s fool. Even with Western media’s racist readiness to accept any depravity, because it is in Africa, this journalist’s instincts will have told him to take a step back, and ask himself what kind of beings could possibly perpetrate such a thing.
Had he allowed himself to be guided by those instincts, he would have learnt that this unimaginable, unspeakable inhumanity, had been perpetrated, not in the DRC, by M23, in the twenty-first century, but by the Interahamwe militia, during the Rwanda Genocide Against the Tutsi, in the twentieth century. The story is likely to have come from the so-called Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), the armed wing of the Rwandan genocidal establishment, which found safe haven in the DRC.
The FDLR are now of course, part of a motley crew that includes Congo’s armed forces, the most murderous armed groups, now called the Wazalendo, and described by the President, Felix Tshisekedi, as “patriots,” European and American mercenaries, and shamefully, inexplicably, forces from Southern African Development Community or SADC, led by South Africa.
The Guardian newspaper is over a century old, and was truly a global newspaper, arguably, even before the advent of digitisation. It boasts on its staff, some of the world’s most accomplished journalists. It is a near impossibility that in writing a headline claiming that “children are executed, mothers raped in front of their children” in broad daylight, no journalist at such a publication, called for a pause to ask whether such a thing really did happen, and how it could be verified.
Western attitudes about Africa and Africans not withstanding, such experienced journalists would be skeptical about such claims. And yet here they were, swallowing them whole, undigested in the slightest. The inescapable conclusion, is that they consciously chose to switch off their better judgement, and focus on the intent, to demonise M23, and through it get at Rwanda.
“Not much is known about life under M23”, the article informs us. Well, The Guardian must speak for itself. There is little that is not known about life under M23 controlled areas. Lurid allegations of “beatings” “forced labour” , people being treated like “slaves”, run counter to the reality of people’s lives, people to whom the Guardian clearly chose not to speak.
It is beyond dispute that the safest areas for ordinary people in the DRC are those controlled by M23. Life quickly returns to normal in these areas, after the rebels defeat government forces. Far from executing them, children return to school, far from being raped in front of their children, women once again, feel safe to return to their normal day to day lives. Basic infrastructure is restored, and local administrations are reorganised to serve people, rather than prey on them.
FARDC has allied itself with armed groups, including the genocidal FDLR, causing mayhem in Eastern DRC.
And with the slightest openness to understanding the actual facts on the ground, the journalist would have found and most probably did notice, that people were voting with their feet. Close to a million people, and counting, have chosen to return to M23 controlled areas, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian affairs (OCHA).
They are not doing so to deliver themselves unto the hands of rapists and child murderers.
A glaring fact that is always missed in the allegations against M23, is that they fight in their own areas, their homeland. The people they are alleged to murder, rape, and pillage, are their relatives, their mothers, sisters, their loved ones.
But the Guardian must be forgiven for circumventing all of that. Their intention was not after all, to inform about the DRC. This was clearly an article designed to appease Tshisekedi, and maintain the status quo in the DRC, because that is how the West, somewhat misguidedly, sees their interests being served. And so, an imagined reality that will achieve these ends is created.
“As the M23, supported by thousands of Rwandan troops, pushes deeper into neighbouring DRC, UN intelligence sources confirm the West’s security services are ‘intimately aware’ of the incursion. ‘It’s shocking and frustrating that sanctions have not been forthcoming’” according to “a UN expert” we are told.
Rwanda has consistently refuted accusations that it has any troops, let alone “thousands of troops” in the DRC. Beyond shadowy infra red drone images of groups of fighters, whom the UN Group of Experts, presumably contacted by the Guardian, claim to be Rwanda troops, because “they march in organised columns”, no evidence has been produced that there are Rwandan troops in the DRC.
M23 fighters have been said to conduct themselves in a more professional and disciplined manner as opposed to government forces and members of allied armed groups.
Lack of evidence however, it would seem is no bar to making outlandish claims. Rwanda, the article claims, echoing the most irresponsible shrill noises in the DRC, “might be planning to annex a chunk of DRC larger than Rwanda itself. “This is a long-term policy to get the broader Kivu area into the sphere of Rwandan influence and, later, under complete administrative control.”
“Senior UN diplomats” we are told, “are anxious that Rwanda might mimic Russia’s seizure of Crimea 10 years ago. ‘They’ll wait until Goma is ready to fall and afterwards announce a Crimea-style referendum [to unite with Rwanda].” An official for the Danish Institute for International Studies concludes that “Meticulously changing traditional authority structures is a strategy for the long term.”
The institute does not elaborate on what these “traditional authority structures are.” Many of the areas now under the control of M23 were under FDLR control, are they the “traditional authority structures”?
Without any sense of irony, the article informs us that “Congo’s government accuses M23 of ethnic cleansing.” With persecution and genocidal murders of Kinyarwanda-speaking Congolese, higher than they have ever been (which is saying quite something), perhaps the concept of “accusations in the mirror,” accusing your intended victims of what you plan against them, might have crossed minds at the Guardian.
And irony impairment does not end there. The article worries that “the ongoing failure to rein in Rwanda risks broader repercussions, say analysts, exposing potentially fatal weaknesses in western liberal interventionism and conflict resolution…” Is this the same paper that has extensively covered “Western liberal interventionism and conflict resolution” in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and the entire Middle East?
It has been a while since we have heard the rather ridiculous term “donor darling.” To demand sanctions, they no doubt hope would cripple Rwanda, The Guardian dusts it down, and revives it.
“As the killings continue, as women are raped in extraordinary numbers, how long is the west prepared to look away?” the article demands. Except that is not really what troubles the Guardian. What captures the imagination of Western media, as they reflect Western governments, is a perceived threat to their “magnificent African cake.” Rubaya has now become a symbol of Western anxiety and obsession. Only fifty kilometres from Rwanda, we are reminded, dramatically, “lie Rubaya mines, visible from space,” no less.
“Rubaya’s mines are widely coveted, holding 15% of the world’s coltan, a strategically important mineral used in cellphones and electric vehicles; critical for the West’s green energy transition.”
“Eastern DRC holds huge, widely coveted reserves of precious minerals. ‘If groups like the M23 gain control of the minerals, it gives them – and Rwanda – significant international clout’” the article tells us, quoting “a UN intelligence official.”
That “clout” is why the Congolese President, is assured total impunity, and why an award winning journalist, travels to Kigali and Goma, only to creatively echo what the President would like to hear.
So hypnotised with Congolese mineral resources are Western media, and the West broadly, it is impossible for them to imagine that Rwanda, might wish only for amicable relations with their giant neighbour, engaging in trade, and cultural exchanges, given how much the two have in common, without ever considering minerals.
