With this gesture, Senegalese footballer Smaïla Sarr denounces the silence of the international community on the current genocide taking place in Congo, 2 December 2022.
Pope Francis will travel this January 31 to Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but will limit his trip to the capital Kinshasa, renouncing his original itinerary which also included a visit to the province of North Kivu in the east of the country, because it is considered too dangerous and in the throes of a new wave of extreme violence in this war which has now been going on since 1996.
In this area of the country, on 22 February 2021, the Italian ambassador to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Luca Attanasio, together with his driver Mustafa Milambo and security officer Vittorio Iacovacci, were assassinated while they were traveling in a convoy of the World Food Program, a United Nations agency. The Italian magazine Nigrizia in an article by Filippo Ivardi Ganapini, drawing on sources in the field, wonders if the instigator of these assassinations was Kigali, the capital of neighboring Rwanda. Ganapini in the article wonders if Luca Attanasio had been assassinated to prevent him from revealing what he had discovered, as was Bishop Munzihirwa.
Who was the Archbishop of Bukavu Christophe Munzihirwa Mwene Ngabo and why was he assassinated on 28 October 1996 on the eve of the invasion of Congo ( at the time Zaire) by the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire, known by the French acronym AFDL?
A financial conglomerate of predominantly Canadian and American Western companies known as American Mineral Fields Inc (AMFI) financed and armed a sham rebellion in 1996 that invaded Congo (then Zaire), presenting the AFDL as a liberation movement. The then Rwandan Vice President Paul Kagame and the Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni created the AFDL and so as to give it a Congolese façade placed a former Congolese rebel, Laurent-Désiré Kabila, at its head. Kabila hastily raised an army composed mainly of child soldiers and a few disillusioned Mobutists, but it was mainly the Ugandan and Rwandan armies that would lead the fight. In just seven months they managed to arrive in the capital Kinshasa and overthrow Mobutu Sese Seko, the dictator who had been in power for nearly three decades.
The pretext for the invasion of Mobutu’s Zaire had been to empty the refugee camps housing 1.5 million to 2 million refugees, mainly Rwandan Hutus who had fled the Rwandan Patriotic Front's advance into Rwanda in the tragic events of 1990-94.
Today Emma Bonino remains silent yet while European Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid at the time, harshly condemned the international community in a 1997 article in Nigrizia: “The total lack of transparency was perhaps the dominant feature of this "liberation" war, punctuated by lies from the first to the last day. The belligerents lied, but international observers also lied, such as those diplomats and generals who at the end of last year had the multinational humanitarian intervention force project, which had been approved by the Security Council, aborted ad giving as the explanation that " in the east of Zaire there were not a sufficient number of refugees”. Either they were lying or they were incompetent.”
Hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees and millions of Congolese civilians were massacred.
The Archbishop of Bukavu Christophe Munzihirwa Mwene Ngabo, before being assassinated in October 1996, wrote many letters to politicians, heads of state and humanitarian associations begging them to stop Rwanda's imminent invasion of Zaire. In the letters he describes the crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front against the Hutus in Rwanda, assassinations which mainly targeted intellectuals; he writes about thousands of unjustly incarcerated Hutu prisoners and underlines the presence of the United States of America which was supporting this imminent invasion.
During the war of aggression, even before becoming president of the former Zaire that became the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Laurent-Désiré Kabila granted mining companies scandalously advantageous contracts for the multinationals and disadvantageous for the Congo, known as contrats léonins.
These illegal contracts were denounced in the first report of the group of experts on the illegal exploitation of natural resources and other forms of wealth in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a group commissioned by the United Nations Security Council to investigate trade agreements signed in eastern Congo during the war. Over the years these twice annual reports were often ignored, censored, watered down and even suppressed.
When Laurent-Désiré Kabila wanted to get rid of his Rwandan and Ugandan allies they created another sham rebellion called the Congolese Rally for Democracy-Goma (RCD-Goma) and in 1998 again invaded eastern Congo. During this war Laurent-Désiré Kabila was assassinated on 16 January 2001 and replaced by his son, 29-year-old Joseph Kabila who remained in power for 17 years.
The occupation of eastern Congo is made possible also through the peace agreements which since 2003 included foreign rebels in the Congolese national army, who then deserted, creating new sham rebellions. The presence of Rwanda on Congolese soil has therefore been continuous since 1996 and only the acronyms changed: from RCD-Goma to CNDP, to the more recent M23 and ADF.
The latest report by UN experts again, as in 2012, accused Rwanda of leading the sham M23 rebellion. Europe and the United States of America have recently condemned this support but continue to finance Rwanda.
This military occupation is also facilitated by disinformation campaigns which through journalists, academics and think tanks deny or diminish the obvious link between the sham rebellions and the illegal expropriation of mineral resources; they defend a now discredited figure like Rwanda's President Paul Kagame; they do not distinguish self-defense groups and criminal gangs from the invading army and trivialize violence in that area of the world.
On the occasion of the Pope's trip, a conference, When peace for Congo?, was held in Rome on 25 January at the National Federation of the Italian Press where more than 170 civil society associations joined, with the aim of breaking the deafening silence around this war.
Two books were cited during the conference that eerily echo the analyzes by the Archbishop of Bukavu Munzihirwa assassinated in 1996 but with the addition of hard evidence, archival documents and eyewitness accounts: Charles Onana, Europe, Crimes et Censure au Congo (Europe, crimes and censorship in Congo) and Judie Rever, In Praise of Blood, The crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front. Like Munzihirwa's words their texts are ignored and their authors even threatened.
To stop this extreme violence, we must first of all acknowledge that the West wants to empty the area of its native inhabitants by terrorizing them and thus making it easier to seize the natural resources. In other times these were called raids, today these raids are disguised as civil wars or ethnic wars. Author Alain Deneault who denounced these illegal expropriations in his 2008 book Noir Canada was attacked for millions of dollars by two mining companies Barrick Gold and Banro.
Recent deals between US Secretary of State Tony Blinken and African heads of state promise eye-popping profits for US mining multinationals and fewer protections for African workers to lead the digital revolution.
Footballer Smaïla Sarr celebrated his goal for Senegal during the World Cup on 2 December 2022 by covering his eyes and pointing a finger to his head, imitating a gun. Sarr explained on Twitter that this gesture symbolizes the world's contempt for the atrocities taking place in Africa, especially in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His gesture was preceded by two other Congolese footballers Cédric Bakambu and Romelu Lukaku. A Congolese professional basketball player of the National Basketball Association (NBA) Phoenix Suns Bismack Biyombo Sumba said in an interview on December 20, 2022 “I am praying for all of you at home” referring to the atrocities and massacres that people in his country bear.
Their desperate gestures call for urgent action and also reveal the absence of an international diplomatic community that takes to heart the atrocious suffering of the Congolese people in this genocide that already in 2015 Noam Chomsky and Andre Vltchek called a super genocide. Today there are more than 10 million Congolese civilian dead and six million displaced since 1996.
Originally written in Italian for La Riscossa 30 January 2023