DR Congo’s unhinged despot, Felix Tshisekedi still clings to a failed warmongering strategy while the balance of power on the ground clearly favours the Congolese politico-military movement M23/AFC.
Remember Mobutu Sese Seko, the self-styled “Papa Maréchal,” whose iron-fisted rule over Zaire (now DRC) seemed eternal? The man is a leopard hat was ultimately chased into exile by a force of liberators mostly armed with rusty Kalashnikovs.
Tshisekedi on his part has unleashed everything in his arsenal but faced repeated defeats and failures, during a crisis of his own doing: draconian martial law, imported regional armies, foreign mercenaries, ragtag local militias, and, most damning, the genocidal tropical Nazis of the FDLR – those hate-fueled forces stoking ethnic hatred in the Great Lakes region.
Diplomacy? A global tour of humiliation: Nairobi, Luanda, Washington, Doha. Every summit has ended in déjà vu disaster. Doha and Washington were nothing but carbon copies of Nairobi and Luanda. The result? M23/AFC have controlled the major cities of Goma (North Kivu) and Bukavu (South Kivu) for nearly a year and recently announced the unilateral withdrawal from the city of Uvira (South Kivu).
The uncomfortable truth is that meaningful concessions are now unavoidable, and Tshisekedi refuses to confront them. Prisoner releases are the easy part. The real issue is power, political, economic, and security control in North and South Kivu, within a federalist-style arrangement. These are demands Tshilombo finds humiliating, but on the battlefield, leverage belongs elsewhere. Time is not on Tshilombo’s side.
Instead of reckoning with this reality, Tshilombo appears trapped in a fantasy of perpetual motion. He flies from capital to capital, chasing talks that go nowhere, while ordinary Congolese, regional partners, and potential investors absorb the cost of his foolishness.
The longer this drags on, the more urgent M23 commander Sultani Makenga and his fighters must liberate the entire national Congolese territory.
ellenkampire