2023-05-15 19:30:00
ESSENTIAL MAINTENANCE – Charles Onana is a doctor of political science, essayist and journalist specializing in issues relating to the Africa of the Great Lakes, which includes Burundi, Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
He publishes his latest book “Congo Holocaust” (published by L’Artilleur), in which he returns to an ongoing genocide since 1997 in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) which has caused 10 million deaths, “one of the greatest holocausts that Africa has known in the 20th and 21st centuries”, according to the essayist.
Why aren’t we talking more about this dramatic situation in the media? To understand this, Charles Onana describes the career of Paul Kagame, who according to his sources “mobilized a lot of resources, colossal, in the Western and French media in particular, so that we speak only of what happened in Rwanda in 1994, when not only is he the one who is at the origin of the Rwandan tragedy, because it is a war for the conquest of power, but he will be above all the organizer of the fall of Marshal Mobutu in 1997 in the Congo and also the one who will organize the looting and the massacres of populations to the east of this country.”
Who is Paul Kagame? Still in power in Rwanda as president, he was originally a Tutsi victim of the genocide perpetrated by the Hutus. Supported by Bill Clinton from 1993 and director of Uganda’s intelligence services, he seized power in Rwanda and subsequently tried to do the same in Congo, according to Charles Onana. So, “there are several stages in its politico-military journey which explain why the Democratic Republic of the Congo is in this situation today”, he said. In his eyes, the victims of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 have become the executioners of the Congolese population today.
Behind these movements linked to the conquest of power and the successive wars, Charles Onana evokes the question of the martyred local populations and the economic exploitation carried out around the cobalt, diamond and coltan mines. These materials are used in the production of electronic devices, including mobile phones: “Nobody wants to talk about it because sticking their nose in the macabre accounts of the dead in the Congo will lead to an international scandal.” And perhaps question a certain economic model?
“Here, we are touching the big fish. The mass media are not intended to inform you. The mass media are intended to disseminate information that interests those who finance them”, suggests Charles Onana.
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