Congo’s M23 ‘warriors’ return home

Sgt Jean Kabende ran through trenches surrounding his outpost in Tsanzi and did not know whether he would survive the barrage of artillery fire from advancing Congolese government forces.

Fortunately, he and other 1,377 M23 fighters survived and fled to Uganda and have been camped in Bihanga Barracks in Ibanda District since last year in November until Tuesday when he went back home.

Burly but unkempt, Sgt Kabende led 120 ex-combatants in singing morale songs at Entebbe Airbase tarmac as they waited for Congolese and Ugandan government officials to officially sign documents authorising them to fly back home.

“We don’t know where we are going. Life may not be easy in the coming days. But we are happy to go back to our homeland,” he said.

Escaped
Surprisingly, as these 120 fighters were singing and preparing to go back home, UPDF was hunting for the majority who escaped from Bihanga Barracks fearing repatriation. The escapees are now in Rwamwanja UN refugee camp and they claim they are not safe going back home, a scenario that brings interesting insights into the M23 conflict.

Most of those who fled, according to sources within M23, are Congolese of Rwandan origin while majority of returnees are from other tribes, confirming the existing fear for safety of Congolese of Rwandan origin.

“The Tutsis feel insecure because they were killed 1998 in Kamina. At least 200 officers were killed by the suspected government forces,” said one of the Munyamulenge M23 fighters. “We are hated in Congo and sadly, we cannot go to back Rwanda because we are not Rwandans. Where should we go?”

Indeed, these fighters were supposed to be taken to the same camp in Katanga Province, where many refugees recently died of hunger. The conditions in this camp are said to be inhumane.

There are fears that if these ex-combatants are kept in harsh conditions in this camp, they might again resort to violence.

M23 Movement could now be a defeated force, but the conditions that created the rebel group have not been solved, says Amani Kabasha, the M23 Movement spokesperson.

Mr Kabasha says the Kinshasa regime has not implemented all the 11 issues captured in the Nairobi Declaration. The declaration provides for amnesty and returning of Congolese refugees in Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi.

“The regional leaders are just pretending. They are burying their heads in the sand like ostriches. M23 can be defeated but the cause still remains alive,” says Mr Kabasha.

Had it not been geopolitics, pressure from the international community, regional bodies such as the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR) and Southern African Development Community (SADC), and leaders like Yoweri Museveni, M23 could still be controlling a big territory in eastern Congo.

President Museveni, as the chairman of ICGLR, influenced the M23 to withdraw from Goma town last year and forced them to go to the negotiating table.
But Rwanda saw the withdrawal from Goma as a strategic mistake by the M23 because they would have no bargaining power and indeed Kigali was right.

Museveni’s insistence on peace talks was because he was the chairman of ICGLR, the regional body that mediated the talks despite allegations that Uganda and Rwanda were supporting the rebels.

President Museveni was embarrassed but kept calm when the Congolese delegation refused to turn up for a ceremony to sign the agreement with the rebels at State House Entebbe. Members of the international community, regional leaders and diplomats had come to witness the ceremony.

This was after the UN Intervention Brigade had attacked and pushed M23 rebels out of Congo despite Museveni’s repeated appeals to the UN force to stop attacking the rebel positions.

President Museveni had invested a lot of time and energy to push for peace talks, but as DR Congo president Joseph Kabila increasingly became more comfortable with SADC than ICGLR, which Museveni was chairing, Uganda felt betrayed.

As a key player in the regional conflicts and particularly in the M23 conflict, Mr Museveni carefully toed a middle line to keep his credibility as mediator but also because of UPDF’s scandalous invasion of DR Congo in 1998.

That invasion and the alleged plunder of minerals by Ugandan army officers has remained a scandal that President Museveni does not want to associate with, and he tries hard to remain a centrist in any conflict involving DR Congo.

Throughout the M23 negotiations, President Museveni took a careful line and maintained good relations with Kinshasa and Kigali which were outright adversaries in the conflict.

Uganda and Rwanda have similar strategic security interests in DR Congo but the two countries are using different approaches to engage Kinshasa.
Rwanda has come out openly to accuse DR Congo of supporting Rwandan rebels of FDRL while Uganda has painfully used diplomacy to engage Kinshasa over ADF rebels.

Uganda’s strategy seems to be winning because the Congolese government forces have attacked ADF camps in the eastern part of the country, but FDRL, which has threatened to attack Rwanda, has remained intact and a recent report by the American advocacy organisation, Enough Project, has warned that the former genocide suspects are busy training.

Learning from past mistakes, President Museveni has realised that confronting Kinshasa would be a dangerous trend in the eyes of the international community, which has big interests in the mineral rich country.

But if DR Congo does not come out to tackle the issue of FDRL, a serious confrontation might soon break out after Rwanda gave Kinshasa a deadline of January.

With abrasive approach used by Kigali, President Kabila feels threatened and has decided to ally with countries seen to be unfriendly to Rwanda and these are Tanzania and South Africa, members of SADC whose troops hammered M23 out of DR Congo.

Early this year, South Africa cut off and later restored diplomatic ties with Rwanda after Rwandan dissident Col Patrick Karegyeya was assassinated by suspected Rwandan assassins, which South Africans saw as a humiliation to their security. Rwanda has accused Tanzania of working with its enemies.

With this complex geopolitics, M23 movement has become a target of Tanzania, South Africa and some powerful countries in the West which see the group as an offshoot of Rwanda pushing Kigali interests.

Divided

But also internally, the M23 has differences. Those who come from Rutshuru have integral differences with those in Masese. One group is loyal to Laurent Nkunda incarcerated in Rwanda and the other pays its loyalty to Bosco Ntaganda, who is facing war crimes at the ICC.

With all these problems, the ex-combatants fear for their safety to go back to Congo. But Uganda is insisting they must go back home. And why is Uganda insisting?

State minister for Foreign Affairs Okello Oryem said it is a fulfilment of the Nairobi Declaration.
But sources in Foreign Affairs say Uganda is under pressure from Kabila to hand them over because president Kabila is trying to divert attention from political pressure from his opponents for his attempts to amend the constitution and get a third term.

“The whole world is now looking at the repatriation of M23. But back home, Kabila is moving to amend the constitution. This is just diversionary,” a source says.

It was also expensive for Uganda to feed these fighters. “We were feeding them and giving them medical care,” the army spokesperson, Lt Col Paddy Ankunda said.

Security experts say keeping these M23 ex-combatants together in one camp outside Congo is a big security threat to the Kinshasa government. “The current president of Rwanda was one time living in a refugee camp in Uganda.

Therefore, these M23 fighters can mobilise and attack Congo. It’s in the interest of Congo to take these ex-combatants back home,” says Capt Mandu Kageye, a retired Ugandan army officer.

And if the attack happened today, Uganda government would be blamed like Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) did in 1990. “That’s why Uganda would want these fighters to leave Uganda,” Capt Kageye says.

About the M23 rebel Movement
The rebels are named after a peace agreement they signed with the Congolese government on March 23, 2009, when they were fighting as part of a group calling itself the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP). Many CNDP fighters were integrated into the Congolese army, officially known by its French initials FARDC.

The rebels belong to the minority Tutsi ethnic group and have close ties to the Tutsi in neighbouring Rwanda. Their rebellion began in April 2012 when they mutinied. At that time, the CNDP was led by Bosco Ntaganda who is now at The Hague in the Netherlands where he is awaiting trial by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the north east of the country from 2002 to 2003.
Source: aljazeera.com