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Rwanda Following Leopold's Steps

The Monitor (Kampala)
OPINION
December 21, 2004
Posted to the web December 20, 2004

By Elias Biryabarema
Kampala
Between late 1880s and 1908, an atrocity that is arguably yet unsurpassed, both
in scale and depravity was committed against humanity.
The Congolese peoples bore witness to this crime: King Leopold, a benighted
ruler of Europe's tiny Belgium oversaw a 19-years campaign - of forced labor,
limb mutilation, rape and murder - said to have directly led to the death of
ten million people.
As has been abundantly documented in history books, both by black and white
authors, that crime, obscure as it has continued to be presented in the world's
major horrors, still stands as Africa's and indisputably the world's most
chilling.
That tragedy's peculiarities - a lone man, from a part of the world where
people claimed great advance in civilization, the knowledge of God and matters
of spirituality generally, causes a carnage of 10 million people in nearly two
decades of inaction by those same Christians, in a territory combining the size
of UK, France, Spain, German and Italy - will continue to stake it out in
possibly decades to come as the black peoples' second most darkest infamy, the
first being the four centuries of black enslavement holocaust.
Hitler killed 6 million Jews in about nine years. In August 1945, the Americans
dropped two atomic bombs on two Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
annihilating about 200,000 people on the spot. As monstrous as these crimes
are, they are still both paled by Leopold's Congolese pogrom.
If we are unanimous then that we, Black Africans have suffered the world's most
brutal act in recorded history, isn't it then a scandalous irony that it's the
same we Black Africans that inflicted on the Congolese people, their second
largest carnage, the massacre of 3.5 million people in five years of a military
campaign rivaling Leopold's in ruthlessness. Alternatively, lets attempt to
derive interpretations using the materialist side of the prism: if, again, we
agree that those same 19 years of Leopold's savagery against the Congolese also
saw one of the most grandest transfer of a peoples' wealth - through direct
dispossession - in history, then, still, black Africa must recoil in shame that
it is us, again, (Rwanda, Uganda, Zimbabwe and Angola) who carried out the
second most brazen looting in Congolese history.
That's perhaps one of the most puzzling paradoxes of our times; the Congolese
curse, the Black African folly, the world's most inexplicable tragedy. That a
White, racist megalomaniac came and decimated our 10 million brothers,
plundered rubber, coffee and diamonds at a most primitively scale: and we cried
and made careers denouncing White depravity. And then a century later we turn
over ourselves into worse Leopolds to orchestrate the same carnage and plunder:
freely stripping Congo of its minerals, coffee, timber and killing 3.5 million
people.
Actually if we juxtapose these two horrors and look, a bit more
introspectively, then we come closer to drawing a clearer picture to explain
the current incursions by Rwandese troops into DRC, reportedly to neutralize
the Interahamwe genocidaires. Down trodden as Black Africans are, they never
seem to recognize their situation. Instead, we self-torment and exacerbate the
anguish from our Western enemies.
And that's why even now the African Union is looking on as tiny Rwanda
arrogantly moves to restart a war that cost the Congolese such human and
material loss and for which the continent and world at large spent perhaps
millions of dollars to end.
It's a little more nuanced explanation, but you can't easily find an
alternative theory to better interpret the language and manner in which Rwanda
is being mollycoddled by AU and the world at large as it moves to relaunch the
nightmare of a region already badly blighted by strife, privation, disease and
all those ills that afflict us all in this godforsaken part of the world.
It cannot be, as has been claimed, that Rwanda still basks in the comfort of
the post 1994 genocide guilt of inaction. Unless, we Blacks again admit that we
have the shortest of memories. Less than a million people died in that
massacre. But Leopold killed ten million. 3.5 million more were killed by a war
that Rwanda and Uganda palpably bears primary blame. History has recorded worse
human suffering to let us be cowed by the lesser guilt and permit a nation to
precipitate another mass murder and pillage with such impunity as Rwanda is
doing.
Neither can it be that we believe Kagame's spurious assertions of seeking to
liquidate his Interahamwe enemies because we surely know that he himself
occupied that country for five years and failed to achieve just that and is
instead blaming a one-year-old UN disarmament program for failing him.
So for now we await a more sophisticated logic.
In the meantime though, as we await that explanation, we must collectively
appreciate the need to halt Paul Kagame's imperial adventures and intransigence
of character: insisting on attacking a sovereign nation to defeat an enemy that
is best handled by multilateral means. Before that, we must understand that an
invasion of DRC now, is not merely a matter of the Congolese who will do the
dying, and the Rwandese who will do the looting and the murdering.
No.
It's a case of regional stability, of a belief in human dignity, freedom, of
acknowledgement of the need to strive forward, development and emancipation, of
continental image, of the strength of AU, of the perception of the Black race
and ultimately of our fulfillment of with God's image.
Yes, it's when we reconcile ourselves to all the above, when we grasp all of
these nuanced undercurrents of the Great Lakes turmoil, that the regional
leadership and AU at large will realize, more urgently, why we must speak out
far more bluntly against Kagame's anarchist campaigns. Already, the local press
recently published pictures purportedly released by the UN showing barbarous
acts inflicted on the Congolese by the invading Rwandese troops.
Those are the images circulating across the world, beamed in peoples' homes in
the West. That invariably becomes the new face, not of the DRC or Congolese
people alone but of the Great Lakes region, of Sub Saharan Africa, of Black
people as a race. And then, we talk of becoming favored investment
destinations, of attracting tourists, of expanding our economies and developing
our nations, of halving poverty, of empowering our position in world affairs
and suchlike.
Got to dream on people.
Europeans, reviled as I do often, are admittedly far smarter than us. They
perhaps would never permit a war of the sort of Congo to blaze on in their
midst, but supposing it happens, certainly not a second time like Rwanda is
intent on doing.
Our softening at a time when our strength is most handy epitomizes our doom; as
a region, a race, a continent.
By the Grace of God, there must be an end to the Congolese suffering.
The author is a Monitor Staff Writer.

   

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