My visit to Bentiu was nothing short of inspirational and Educational. This town found ways to Triumph through two civil wars with the help of sports and culture
I encourage u to Visit other towns other than your own and you will realize we have much more in common
#VisitBentiu
The Unusual Effect of Anti-Tutsi Politics in DRC, Racist Arabism in Sudan, And Tigrayโs Revanche โMistakeโ
Recently in Kigali, I was invited to a private event attended by a handful of some of Rwandaโs leading public intellectuals. I didnโt know I was in for a mind-bender.
With the 30th anniversary of the #GenocideAgainstTheTutsi days away, the extremely dry-eyed conversation focused on the meaning of the last three decades, and the next 30 years of #Rwanda. Invariably, almost everyone agreed that what happens in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo, where the allegedly โRwanda-backedโ #M23 rebels have made several military gains in recent months, would impact the shape of that future Rwanda.
And talking about DRC and M23, today required discussing the way anti-Congo-Tutsi politics and hate speech, that has swept DRC, and the accompanying lynching of #Tutsi.
At one point one of the good fellows threw a curved ball that stopped everyone in their tracks for some seconds. He argued that it was important to recognise that anti-Tutsi sentiment in DRC is not just cynical ethnic politics driven by President Felix #Tshisekedi and the regime in Kinshasa. He said it was bigger than Tshisekedi and was the โfirst truly national ideology out of Congo in over 30 years - since the early years of Mobutu Sese Sekoโ. And not only that, it's evolving to be the basis for the "reconstruction" of the Congo state. Anti-Tutsi politics in DRC, then, is almost akin to post-World War I Nazism-fuelled revival and the rise of Hitlerโs Third Reich in Germany.
On the flipside, it was recognised that the anti-Tutsi hate speech and killing, equally made the breakup of DRC more likely because it presented the Banyamulenge with two stark choices โ death or death. The creation of an independent #KivuRepublic โ and possibly another state further north โ comes closer with every killing of every dozen Congolese Tutsi. You donโt want to fight against an opponent whose only options are death. The M23 story today is an early illustration of that. That evening also revealed a Rwanda you never see in public, in the media, regional, or global discourse โ and pointed to the depth of non-sentimental intellectual resources Kigali can quietly draw from in its geopolitical gamesmanship if it needs to.
DRC is coming to the party late. Some of these trends have played out in Africa many times over the years. In Sudan, John Garang's South Sudan People's Liberation Army #SPLA for decades fought a rights war against an Arab-dominated regime in Khartoum. The SPLA didnโt initially seek an independent state. With time, Khartoumโs Arab nationalism turned into racism against a non-Arab south #Sudan. Then radical political Islam was infused into state ideology, and it ran against a trenchant religious wave in predominantly traditional and Christian South.
One result is that the global #Christian right, especially from the U.S., rallied to south Sudanโs support, bringing tremendous new diplomatic and material resources to the SPLA's fight. It made an independent state, which SPLA never initially sought, the inevitable outcome.
Will M23 enjoy the fortunes of SPLA? Or pay the price that Tigrinya revanchism brought upon the #Tigray People's Liberation Front #TPLF?
Shortly after the Tigray War started in November 2020, the momentum quickly swung in favour of the dissident Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), the dominant party in the former ruling Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front #EPRDF, against the federal government in Addis Ababa led by Prime Minister #AbiyAhmed. Abiy had come to power in April 2018 at the head of the EPRDF, but there had been a fallout.
As the TPLF scored a string of victories, obituaries were written for Abiyโs government. Some people argued that the best course would have been for TPLF to be content with kicking Addis Ababa out of Tigray and the surrounding regions, and then held the line. That way it would have slowly bled the government, its authority drained by defeat in Tigray, and state resources shrinking as it ran against a TPLF wall it couldnโt break through, which would have led to its collapse.
But with its #Eritrean allies, Addis had left a trail of destruction in Tigray, and Addis Ababa seemed at that point to have lost the diplomatic fight, with especially the west condemning it with atrocities in the war. The urge to punish it and exact the ultimate revenge was too strong for the Tigray rebels to resist. Then the revanchists needed to restore their recently lost glory as supremos in Addis Ababa. With its tail in the air, the TPLF started to march on Addis Ababa. That in turn raised nightmares for other Ethiopians, many of whom werenโt initially sympathetic to Abiy, of the return of the EPRDF (TPLF) dictatorship.
Many closed ranks around a motivated Addis Ababa; the TPLF was pummelled, and an already-ravaged Tigray was turned into a starving wasteland. The TPLF all but surrendered at the Ethiopian peace agreement in November 2022.
Be afraid of #EthnoNationalism, #Religion and a people whose backs to a wall in Africa. They break and make states.