The Socialist Workers League stands in unwavering solidarity with the Congolese people in this time of escalating crisis. The recapture of the city of Goma by the M23 rebel group has led to more bloodshed as M23 continue their campaign of terror against civilians, backed by the Kagame regime. While we welcome the temporary unilateral ceasefire, that is not enough. We stand for a decisive end to the fratricidal crisis in the Congo that will benefit the poor working people of the Congo.
A United Nations report found that Rwanda created, funds and commands the M23 rebel group. Yet western countries have continued to back and fund his regime, because Kagame is a poster child of neoliberalism, to the pleasure of imperialist forces. Rwanda and M23 claim that the rebel group is fighting to protect Tutsis, who were the primary target of the Rwandan genocide and are a minority in the DRC. The Kagame regime has also made territorial claims to parts of the DRC.
Rwanda, along with Uganda has launched two wars against the DRC. One in 1996-97 to depose Mobutu Sese Seko, and another in 1998 to 2003 against Laurent Kabila, with the second Congo war drawing in more than 9 other African countries stretching from Sudan all the way to South Africa.
For years, M23 has continued to attack non-Tutsi communities in Kivu, committing mass rape, massacres, and razing down communities to seize mineral rich areas as those who survive the carnage flee west.
It is no secret that Congo holds vast natural resources important to the technology sector. Western corporations have continued to fuel the crisis by buying these conflict minerals, providing crucial resources for the M23 militia and its Rwandan backers. The governments of the United States and the United Kingdom have continued to provide economic and military support to the Kagame regime and blocked the creation of an international criminal tribunal for the DRC. While they continue to use the conflict as justification to expand NATO and AFRICOM military presence in the region. Efforts to balkanise the Congo to facilitate further colonial extraction must be fiercely opposed.
The violence in the Congo cannot be understood outside the context of the colonial past and present which continue to keep the Congo in a permanent state of war. It is the conflicting maps drawn up by European colonial powers, and the splitting of Africa into extractive neocolonial states which power Western overconsumption, that has laid the groundwork for today’s crisis. However, those who fuel this conflict do so not out of fidelity to the arguments they espouse, but to ensure the continued looting of the resources of the DRC, while the Congolese people live in abject poverty and insecurity.
The SWL calls for the immediate establishment of a criminal tribunal in the DR Congo, and for the Rwandan Defense Forces to respect Congo’s territorial sovereignty and withdraw all its forces from the country. It is impossible to argue that mass rapes, massacres against non-Tutsi communities and ethnic displacement being committed by M23 is being done in self defence. If anything, Rwanda’s emboldenment by western support has led to more deaths and now threatens to pull the continent into another Great War.
The SWL reaffirms its commitment to building pan-Africanist solidarity for a bottom-up revolution that can liberate working-class people on this continent from imperialist intervention and create lasting peace.
We call on all exploited and oppressed Africans, popular organisations and movements to rally around the Congolese people and push for accountability of the actors involved, including boycotting cultural events and military partnerships that launder the image of the Kagame regime and bolsters its military efforts in the Congo.
We join our voices with other freedom-minded Africans to call for removal of AFRICOM and NATO military bases including those stationed in the DRC, Uganda, Kenya, and the Central African Republic.
Jamiu TOWOLAWI
National Chairperson
Amara NWOSU
National Secretary
