Evidently, FARDC is struggling to implicate RDF in its failure to maintain a state of security in their country. Congolese officials have delegated their duty of providing security to their citizenry to MONUSCO, and all the army leadership does all day is to parade the two kidnapped young RDF soldiers before different gatherings as they try to intimidate them into falsely implicating Rwanda to conceal their failures.
In a video clip posted online where the FARDC spokesperson Sylvain Ekenge delivers the umpteenth statement accusing Rwanda of supporting M23, you can clearly hear an FDLR militia intimidatingly interrogate one of the kidnapped soldiers.
The FDLR militia can be heard trying to intimidate the young kidnapped soldier into making a false confession that he was “captured deep inside Congo heading for an attack on Rumangabo”.
However, in another not so heavily edited clip, the RDF soldier makes it clear that he was in a group of 8 RDF soldiers on foot patrol along the border, trying to establish the origin of the rockets that had been fired from the side of DR Congo border and landed in Rwanda, injuring several people.
The FDLR militia is heard interjecting, sternly warning him against lying. The clip then switches to the FARDC spokesperson, who offers to translate in French what the soldier had said in Kinyarwanda.
However, for those who know both Kinyarwanda and French, Sylvain Ekenge may as well have been translating what someone else had said on a totally different occasion. The spokesperson deliberately and maliciously paraphrased what the soldier had said to align with the narrative that aims at implicating Rwanda.
As they say, a lie takes the elevator while the truth takes the stairs, but once the truth finally arrives at the top, the lie melts.
Leave a Reply