President Félix Tshisekedi has committed many acts that could be described as treasonous, but none is more egregious than his decision to arm, fund, and integrate the genocidal group, FDLR into the Congolese security institutions.
Indeed, by allowing a foreign terror group to operate freely on and profit from Congolese soil, Tshisekedi has committed a profound act of treason.
What happened to the sovereignty Kinshasa claims to defend? A sovereign state does not allow a foreign entity to control its territory, let alone arm it and integrate it into its national army. Yet this is precisely what the Tshisekedi regime has done.
The UN Group of Experts has documented that the Congolese army (FARDC) has continued to cooperate with the FDLR. Reports indicate that FDLR fighters have been absorbed into the FARDC, sometimes even holding sensitive command positions. They are paid through the Congolese army and receive weapons, ammunition, and logistical support from the state. This is a full-fledged military alliance that makes a mockery of Congolese sovereignty.
This alliance is not without its rewards. The FDLR’s presence is intimately linked to the exploitation of the country’s mineral wealth. The UN has long documented that the FDLR has exploited gold and cassiterite in the Kivus with the help of trading networks established by FARDC high ranking officers. By 2014, the FDLR had built a sophisticated criminal enterprise, raking in an estimated $71 million each year through illicit trade, everything from timber and charcoal to poaching and gold smuggling.
By choosing the FDLR as a partner, Tshisekedi is complicit in this looting, prioritizing a foreign armed genocidal group’s financial interests over the welfare of the Congolese people.
The decision to empower the FDLR has a direct and devastating human cost for Congolese civilians. The FDLR, and its allied Wazalendo militias, have conducted systematic killings, torture, and ethnic cleansing. In Nturo, North Kivu, in 2023, more than 300 homes belonging to Congolese Tutsi were burned to the ground by Kinshasa-backed militias. These groups do not just attack; they terrorize, displace, and kill civilians with impunity. The Tshisekedi regime, by arming and supporting these genocidal forces, is directly responsible for the suffering of its own citizens.
In this, Tshisekedi is following in the footsteps of the man he most admires, Mobutu Sese Seko. In the mid-1990s, rather than repatriate the genocidal forces that had fled to Zaire, Mobutu chose to arm and support them, using them as a tool to maintain his grip on power. This decision was a catastrophic miscalculation that led to the destabilization of the entire region and the eventual collapse of his own regime.
Tshisekedi is repeating this same historic error. By rearming the remnants of those who committed genocide in Rwanda, he is not only betraying his own country but also threatening to engulf the entire Great Lakes region in another devastating conflict. The Alliance Fleuve Congo (AFC) and the M23 are, at their core, a response to this existential threat.
Like Mobutu before him, Tshisekedi must be stopped before his reckless gamble plunges the entire region into another war of catastrophic proportions.
ellenkampire