Rwanda Redux

The current government of Rwanda now oversees a thriving economy. Its people has accommodated itself to forgiveness for the atrocities that the then- ruling Hutu brought to the country, encouraging the Hutu population to turn upon their Tsutsi neighbours with bloody ferocity, in the process murdering hundreds upon hundreds of thousands in an orgy of rage and blood lust.

Any moderate Hutus seeking to intervene, to assist or protect their relatives through intermarriage, or their long-time neighbours became themselves victims of the mass slaughter. Now the country moves delicately through a dance of politely ignoring ethnic and tribal differences. No suggestions are ever made in public of perceived differences; all are Rwandans, respected and protected under the law.

And the country's economic prospects continue to rise. Its people are confident, educated, proud of their progress. Yet here is Rwanda, interfering in dangerous ways in the Democratic Republic of Congo, accusing the government there of refusing to disarm Hutu militias formerly from Rwanda, who led the massacres of Rwandans in that 1994 genocidal upheaval.

Rwandan Hutus, well armed, and aggressively militant, have, in fact, had the ear of the government of the Congo, acting at times with their approval, in helping to put down insurrections from disaffected and repressed people of Tutsi origin in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And to complicate matters even further, the government of Rwanda is in support of their Tsutsi brethren in Congo.

The Congolese Tsutsi rebels are on the march, their militias festering with tribal hatred, and bearing out their grievances on vulnerable populations living their bare existence in tribal villages. Tens of thousands of helpless refugees have fled their villages, and even refugee camps where desperate people had fled months before, have been breached, women raped, people killed, their shelters razed.

Each of the groups, the Tutsi rebels, led by a former Congolese general who insists he fights for the rights of his ethnic minority, and the Hutu militias, backed by the Congolese government, claim pity and concern for the people whom they represent motivates them. But each in their turn are leaving in their advance bloodshed and broken lives. The genocide that took place in 1994 in Rwanda promises to repeat itself endlessly.

British and French envoys are in the process of pressuring the leaders of Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda to sit together at the bargaining table, to produce an end to the intolerable bloodshed and mass rape. The Congolese military itself, retreating in haste before the advancing rebel Tutsi militias, have committed their own atrocities on helpless civilian populations, pillaging, raping, murdering.

Refugees stream out of the affected areas, their pitiful possessions on their backs. They have no shelter, no food, no water. Sanity does not appear to prevail in Africa. It is a constant scene of failed government that raises the prospects of members of tribes they represent, while ignoring the needs of their own citizens from other tribes.

It is an ongoing process by which the various countries' resources, mineral wealth and fossil fuels endowments by nature encourage them to war against one another, to make of that great geographic expanse of natural beauty an ongoing Gehenna.