Endless Suffering Of Civilian Population In Eastern DR Congo: An Egregious Example Of The Cruelty Of Africa’s Power-Hungry Elites?

Writers are often sensitive individuals who can put themselves in other people’s shoes – and imagine the pain they suffer in their everyday lives.

The fact that there are hundreds of thousands of my fellow Africans, who, in the 21st century, are literally going through hell, in the DR Congo provinces of North and South Kivu, is something that one finds particularly painful and troubling.

The question is: Why are the AU and the rest of the international community, unable to halt such senseless cruelty in Africa?

How can it be, that in this day and age, the African Union and the leaders of the nations in the continent, remain so strangely silent about the abominable acts of cruelty going on in that beautiful part of what is potentially one of the wealthiest nations, on the planet Earth?

Leaving aside its huge mineral wealth, the DR Congo, even has the hydroelectric potential to power the whole of Africa, if the power of the River Congo was ever harnessed for that purpose.

Over the past few months, over one million of the inhabitants in both provinces have become internally displaced persons – and the women there suffer from what are undoubtedly the world’s worst cases of the incidence of rape.

It appears that no African leader is willing to lay the blame for this avoidable tragedy and humanitarian disaster, squarely, at the doorstep of those responsible for this unacceptable example of the brutalizing of innocent civilians – and a complete disregard for their safety by those responsible for the savagery going on in northern and southern Kivu.

The time has come to name and shame those who are using their supposed concern for the safety of the Congolese Tutsi population in North Kivu, the Banyamulenge, as a cover to hide their real objective: seizing control of the DR Congo - and making it a vassal of Rwanda and finally opening up its vast wealth to their predatory ambitions.

Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame, and his stooge in the DR Congo, the so-called “General” Laurent Nkunda, ought to be indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Their cruelty and the suffering they have caused in DR Congo, is really in the same league as that caused by the Sudanese leader, President Omar Bashir, in Darfur.

Paul Kagame, has succeeded in portraying himself as the man who has achieved a miracle in Rwanda – reviving a broken nation in which nearly a million people were massacred in a wave of genocidal killings, orchestrated by the Huttu-dominated regime, which his Rwandan Patriotic Front army overthrew, to end the Rwandan genocide in 1994.

Yet, today, he presides over an unjust society and runs a repressive and brutal regime, which has been wrapped up in the deceptive garb of a "paper-democracy" that in reality is a one-party state in which there is widespread fear amongst the populace - and no one dares criticize Paul Kagame.

It is instructive and indicative of his war-like nature that at the height of the post-election killings in Kenya, his proffered advice about ending the violence there, was for the Kenyan military to take over the running of their country.

The AU and the continent’s leaders must not allow him to engineer the overthrow by proxy, of the elected government of the DR Congo – to enable him install his puppet Laurent Nkunda, as the new leader of that much-abused nation and its long-suffering people. Period.

My humble appeal to West Africa's leaders is that they must quickly go to the aid of President Joseph Kabila, by putting the sub-regional military force, ECOMOG, at the disposal of the UN to reinforce its peacekeeping force in the two Kivu provinces (north and south) of the DR Congo.