Michela Wrong
In 1963, nearly three dozen newly independent African nations met in Addis Ababa to establish the Organization of African Unity. Among the core principles they embraced was the inviolability of existing, colonial-era national borders. Failure to uphold them, they agreed, would open the way for one irredentist claim after another and threaten to tear the continent apart. For much of the past six decades, although borders have repeatedly been flouted and—in a few notable cases—redrawn, that legal precept has generally held.
Since January, however, the rapid conquest and occupation of a huge area of the Democratic Republic of Congo by Rwanda and the M23 rebel group it supports has raised concerns that the principle may now be endangered. Over the past two months, the M23, together with as many as 10,000 to 12,000 Rwandan troops, has overrun an area of eastern Congo that is home to more than five million people. In late January, the rebels captured Goma, the largest city in the province of North Kivu; less than three weeks later, they also seized Bukavu, the capital of South Kivu, as well as a key airport, thereby cutting off Congolese forces from resupply. The Congolese government puts the number of dead so far at 7,000.
The M23 claims that it seeks to counter Hutu extremist groups that perpetrated the Rwandan genocide and then took refuge in eastern Congo. But the UN and Rwanda’s various donor states have long dismissed these justifications, aware that Rwanda, a densely populated, resource-poor state, has acquired a taste for Congo’s smuggled minerals and is driven by naked self-interest. Worryingly, Rwandan President Paul Kagame claimed in a 2023 speech that the precolonial borders of the Kingdom of Rwanda extended much farther than the country’s current frontiers, spilling over into modern-day Uganda to the north, Burundi to the south, and Congo to the west.
No comments:
Post a Comment