The war in Congo (DRC), which never makes world headlines, is by far the worst crisis in numbers of people killed in the XXI century. The recent surge of extreme violence which began in the fall of 2014 in Beni, North Kivu, an oil and mineral-rich region in the eastern part of the country bordering Uganda, is part of this on-going war which has plagued the area since 1996, causing the death of millions of Congolese. But neither the UN’s peacekeeping force nor the Congolese army have been able to stem this violence or even adequately explain it. Mainstream media and official sources attribute the killings to an aged Ugandan rebellion, the ADF (Allied Democratic Forces), often stating that it has international Jihadist links.
But our research sheds light on the historical processes since 1996 which led to Congo having “an army within the army” as a major destabalizing factor in the region. With a foreword by Professor Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja and a postface by Nicoletta Fagiolo, the book analyzes the historical and geopolitical aspects that underlie the Beni crisis. Page after page evidence is exposed showing that the crisis in Beni is above all an attempt to instrumentalize Islamist terrorism so as to win the support and funding from western allies and their international war against terrorism. Yet eastern Congo has a complex institutional set up which distinguished it from other countries. Kabila’s room for manoeuvre is limited by the UN mission, MONUSCO, and countless UN Security Council resolutions. In addition to UN resolutions, Congolese President Joseph Kabila has concluded a series of secret and official agreements with Rwanda, allowing Kigali to deploy its forces within the Congolese army and thus pursue its strategic objectives on Congolese soil. In the mean time Rwanda seized the opportunity to further advance its agenda of occupation.
The situation, a taboo subject in Kinshasa, has evolved to such a point that the Congolese authorities no longer govern Rwandan agents deployed in Congo. Embarrassed, Kinshasa found a way of covering up their Rwandan allies’s actions: a false flag quickly identified imaginary Islamists.
