On African Arguments, Frederick Golooba-Mutebi wonders why Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete would ever suggest that Rwanda try negotiating with the FLDR, given the historical context:
Kikwete’s suggestion would be justified if the FDLR, which he implicitly equates with the ADF-NALU and the M23, were merely another rebel group fighting for rights they have been denied, or for a share of power or a role in public life from which they have been excluded without justifiable reason. There are many grounds on which elements of M23 can make those claims, just as was the case with the former insurgents now in power in Uganda and Rwanda. It remains uncertain what the ADF-NALU are fighting for and what exactly negotiations with the Museveni government would be about. But what of the FDLR that Kikwete wants the government of Rwanda to engage in talks?
The FDLR is the armed wing of what remains of the Hutu Power movement whose leaders are driven by the conviction that ethnicity must determine who rules Rwanda, and that the majority Hutu, the supposed natives, must by right be the rulers. Their role in fomenting hatred and persecution of their Tutsi compatriots over the last 4 decades is well documented. It is both their determination to structure Rwanda’s politics along what they see as a “permanent fracture” between Hutu and Tutsi and their desire to wipe out the Tutsi to assert what they see as the rights of the Hutu, that have set the post-genocide government against engaging them in talks.
At the core of the post-genocide government’s rejection of talks with the FDLR lie two considerations. One is that many of the people it would have to negotiate with have indictments hanging over their heads for participation in planning and executing the 1994 genocide and have remained unrepentant. The question, at least for their would-be interlocutors in Kigali, is what to discuss with convicted criminals who feel no contrition for past crimes and who would repeat the same crimes given a chance to do so?
Second, politics in post-genocide Rwanda today entails the sharing of power and responsibility between the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) and political forces and organisations that reject ethnicity as a political tool, and the exclusion of those, such as the FDLR, that do not. Negotiations with the FDLR would amount to opening the way for a political ideology to which the country owes past upheaval and associated mass murder. Clearly, the FDLR’s values and political programme are a direct affront to the foundation on which Rwanda’s post-genocide leadership wish to build the ‘new Rwanda’ of their aspirations.
