El Memeyi Murangwa
05/29/07
The call for a round table on the Kivu region by the interior minister seems to be a move to slide over the real and hot security issue in that region that has become the smokestack of the DRC from an uncontainable fire that is spreading beyond control all over the country.
The heavy smoke in Kivu is a result of the fire deliberately set by the amateurishness at the highest level of the State together with a blind support of the FDLR Interahamwe, an organization that keeps changing names to hide their genocidal ideology that led to the extermination of nearly one million innocent civilians in the neighbouring Rwanda.The officials who hold real power in the hierarchy are indeed bogged down into a situation that was however showing some signs of a peaceful solution. The voluntary repatriation of the FDLR Interahamwe was on course despite its slow pace, with returnees getting incentives to facilitate their reintegration in Rwanda. A biased media is trying to sway the public opinion that Rwanda is deliberately trying to keep the so called negative forces out of its borders. This thinking makes little sense, especially to the ordinary Kivu residents who themselves witnessed the keenness of the Rwandan authorities to repatriate over two million refugees shortly after the towns of Goma and Bukavu fell in October 1996. With no help from the United Nations, Rwandan troops, using sticks rather than bullets, successfully repatriated spectacular masses of people,. It was a total surprise for those who were still struggling to put together a study group that would have cost millions of dollars to the international community to repatriate everyone from those vast refugee camps.