ONAPITO EKOMOLOIT to the point: Congo Near Ruin Proves Museveni’s Credentials.

How has President Yoweri Museveni played his role in DR Congo?
EACH time one turns the pages of a Ugandan newspaper, they are likely to find some perplexing report about the Democratic Republic of Congo. It is a theatre of the absurd, featuring things as bizarre as cannibalism. President Yoweri Museveni being a key player in the Congo conflict, by virtue of it being our neighbour, has sometimes been unfairly accused of fomenting the mess. The President’s critics get their supposed ammunition from the fact that the area, with a presence of the Uganda Peoples Defence Forces (UPDF) troops in eastern Congo (Ituri), remains unstable.
The critics attempt to compare the Ituri situation with the false calm in the areas under the control of Joseph Kabila’s regime in Kinshasa and the allies of Rwanda, in the GOMA area.
That, however, Museveni’s critics are either overlooking or simply pretending not to know is that its only under the Ugandan presence that the Congolese have experienced what they have never known: Absolute freedom.
Unfortunately, the Congolese, after decades of brutalisation, dehumanisation and total neglect, cannot handle it. Colonial Belgian King Leopold nearly decimated the Congolese. The dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko, who misruled the country until he was kicked out in 1997, crushed what remained
of them.
The overthrow of Mobutu by a guerrilla force that President Museveni blessed marked the first of the Ugandan leader’s untiring efforts to see the Congolese take control of their own destiny through mass participation.
But President Laurent Kabila who took over from Mobutu got drunk with his own newly found power and misunderstood Uganda’s intentions.
Uganda eventually got sucked into the war to remove Kabila because he started hobnobbing with Uganda’s enemies. Time proved so fast that Kabila was in the wrong when his own guards tragically assassinated him in 2001.
Uganda’s involvement with the anti-Kinshasa rebels in the east was based on the concept of letting the Congolese choose their own leaders. But true to character, the rebels fell apart, starting with a clique winning Rwanda’s patronage to kick out their original leader, the intellectual Prof. Wamba dia Wamba.
This marked the end of dissent in the so-called Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD-Goma)-their headquarters. Anybody opposing the Rwanda-backed clique fled for dear life in time, often getting the first breath of fresh air in Uganda. The Wamba group having been hounded out of Kisangani, eventually relocated to Kampala. This was the beginning of vintage Museveni’s democracy of discussion, which the Congolese have failed
to grasp.
Time and again, all pretenders to the control of eastern Congo have flocked to Kampala. They clock days in paid for hotels as the Ugandan leadership prays for them to sort out the mess that has killed thousands of their people. Each time they agree on something, only to split as soon as they are out of the room over all kinds of trivia. The Congolese sadly seem to stay calm only under the iron-fisted methods that Leopold and Mobutu drilled them into. Both the Kabilas in Kinshasa and the Rwandese allies in Goma have perpetuated those methods.
But Museveni, always keen to listen to all sides, has refused to apply these dictatorial ways. So over time, the eastern Congo warlords have kept on emerging in all shapes-Wamba, Jean Pierre Bemba, Mbusa Nyamwisi, Tibasiima, Thomas Lubanga — to name but the prominent. Each one that emerges will always head for Kampala confident that he will not be arrested, even if he is opposing another who has Kampala’s blessing. It is just like the way African opposition groups do their thing in Europe and America with ease.
The point is, this kind of thing can only happen in a democratic and free country like Uganda. Imagine the Congolese warlords have the audacity to come to Kampala-even get a hearing at State House-and call press conferences to attack Uganda. They call Ugandan leaders names, ordering the UPDF out of their country, forgetting that the UPDF in still in parts of eastern Congo on signed understanding. The rag-tag so-called Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC) of Lubanga, which is wrecking a lot mayhem in Ituri, even had the audacity to heckle top Ugandan military officers, Lt Gen Salim Saleh and Col Noble Mayombo in Bunia.
Yet all the two officers could do was to beg the Congolese to understand. The more Congolese thing would have been to order the UPDF in the area to mow down the hecklers. But which army operating under a democracy would allow its men to massacre a bunch of armed children in the name of quelling a rebel group? Surely, not the UPDF with Museveni as its Commander-in-Chief. The Congolese should know and choose
their friends. Ends