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Joseph Kabila hits out at Tshisekedi over DR Congo conflict, turmoil

Africa

By AFP | Feb 24, 2025

Members of the M23 movement stand guard as people board a truck during an enrollment of civilians, police officers, and former members of the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (FARDC) who allegedly decided to join the M23 movement voluntarily in Goma on February 23, 2025. [AFP]

Former Democratic Republic of Congo leader Joseph Kabila said Sunday the bad governance of his successor, President Felix Tshisekedi, had a leading role in intensifying the conflict in the east of the country.

The unrest could not solely be blamed on the advances of the Rwanda-backed M23 armed movement or tensions between Kinshasa and Kigali, Kabila wrote in an opinion piece in South Africa's Sunday Times newspaper.

M23 fighters have made rapid gains in the past weeks to now control large swathes of the resource-rich eastern DRC, with fears that the conflict could spill across the borders.

Since Tshisekedi took over in 2019 after winning the previous year's election, the situation in the DRC had deteriorated to the point at which it was "close to imploding," Kabila wrote.

The December 2023 elections that handed Tshisekedi a second term by a landslide were a "sham", he said, accusing the government of muzzling political opposition with the head of state becoming the "absolute master of the country."

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"Intimidation, arbitrary arrest, summary and extrajudicial executions, as well as the forced exile of politicians, journalists and opinion leaders, including church leaders, are among the main characteristics of Tshisekedi’s governance," he said.

"The innumerable violations of the constitution and human rights, as well as repeated massacres of the Congolese population by Tshisekedi’s police and military forces will not end after the successful conclusion of negotiations between the DRC and Rwanda, or the military defeat of M23," Kabila said.

Failure to address this aspect of the turmoil by focusing only on the M23 would lead to continued political turmoil and armed conflict and even civil war, he said.

"Any attempt to find a solution to this crisis that ignores its root causes — at the top of which lies the governance of the DRC by its current leadership — will not bring lasting peace. "

The M23, which says it is fighting to protect the rights of the DRC's minority Tutsi people, resumed fighting in 2021, two years after Tshisekedi came to power.

South Africa has more than 1,000 soldiers in the DRC as part of a mission by the 16-country southern African grouping SADC to support the government and stabilise the region. Fourteen South African soldiers were killed in the conflict last month.