President Paul Kagame’s threat that he will release General Laurent Nkunda should have regional leaders worried about the risk of an explosion of unrest in Democratic Republic of Congo that could spill over into the entire region.

Rwanda is battling fresh accusations from the UN Stabilisation Mission in the DR Congo and the Congolese government, that it is backing Bosco Ntaganda, Nkunda’s former chief-of-staff and successor.

Ntaganda is wanted by The Hague-based International Criminal Court to answer war crimes charges. He broke away from the Congolese government army, into which he had integrated his troops in 2009, in April this year.

According to a furious President Kagame, in a two-hour press conference in Kigali on Wednesday last week, DRC President Joseph Kabila had reneged on his promise to honour the integration process.

Rwanda had already denied the accusations and resorted to shuttle diplomacy between Kinshasa, Kampala and Kigali to try to resolve then matter with its eastern neighbour.

Two weeks ago, Congolese government spokesperson Lambert Mende accused Kigali of playing a “passive role” in the process while on the other hand facilitating training of hundreds of rebels fighting the regime.

Last week, Rwanda’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Louise Mushikiwabo, was in Kinshasa for talks. A week before, President Kagame visited his Ugandan counterpart for just over three hours.

Bickering

There have been other meetings involving the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region to try to find a solution to the latest round of bickering.

Rwanda arrested Nkunda, a Congolese ethnic Tutsi and former rebel leader of the National Congress for People’s Defence, on January 22,
2009, inside Rwanda where he had fled after clashes with a joint DR Congo-Rwanda force.

Until his arrest, General Nkunda, had inflicted a series of defeats on the Congolese army and was rapidly increasing the territory under his control. His uprising sparked a conflict in eastern Congo that sucked in six neighbouring countries — among them Rwanda, Uganda, Angola and Zimbabwe.

The conflict soon degenerated into a fight for resources and subsequently inspired the deployment of the $1.2 billion per year UN Stabilisation Mission.

President Kagame said that “if this nonsense continues,” Rwanda would have no option but to withdraw from all efforts aimed at returning peace to eastern Congo, and if necessary release Gen Laurent Nkunda.

“We are coming to a point where if this nonsense continues — on one hand you want Rwanda to be helpful, on the other hand you are putting all the blame on our shoulders — we shall offload all these problems that have been put on our shoulders and throw them back at them,” a visibly angry Kagame said.

“One way of doing it is, we will reach a point of saying, ‘Take this man [Nkunda] we are holding here,’ or we tell him ‘go wherever you want to go,’” President Kagame said.

Kagame was responding, for the first time, to the Monusco accusations. According to him, if the UN mission had not failed in its primary mission to deal with the Interahamwe genocidaires operating there, eastern Congo would look a whole very different today.

“A situation has been created where Congo’s problems are Rwanda’s problems and not only that, actually that they have been caused by Rwanda and when everything else has failed, Rwanda must be held accountable for Congo,” President Kagame said.

“But ultimately we will be forced into a situation where we just draw a line and say ‘Well, if you don’t want us to be useful, if you don’t want us to participate in finding a solution and you are just creating false grounds to blackmail us, we don’t respond to blackmail,’” President Kagame warned.

Since Nkunda’s arrest, which nearly everyone welcomed as a solution to one of the major impediments to restoring normalcy in eastern Congo, he has been confined in a location the Rwandan government has remained reluctant to reveal and no charges have been brought against him.

Ethnicity

When the Congolese government issued an international warrant for his arrest over allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity and insurrection, Rwanda refused to hand him over. Kigali fears that he is unlikely to be fairly tried or at worst might simply be killed for his ethnicity, a scenario President Kagame made clear Rwanda won’t be party to.

Yet some have suggested the real reason could be the fear of what would be revealed in a full trial, given that Nkunda may well have been Rwanda’s proxy in the DR Congo in his heyday. His rebel outfit, formed in 2003 to protect Congolese ethnic Tutsi like himself, took it as its mission to fight against the same Hutu militias that the Rwandan government is pursuing.