I don’t know much about Congo’s bloody civil war, M23 rebels, or Rwanda’s involvement in the mess. But I do know this: Israel has nothing to do with it.
Yet one African correspondent made an ugly analogy with the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Tell that to Jeffrey Gettleman, the Nairobi-based NY Times’ East Africa bureau chief. In The World’s Worst War, prominently placed in the paper’s Sunday Review section, Gettleman writes:
But for years Tutsi-led Rwanda has tried to carve out a zone of influence in eastern Congo, using ethnic Tutsi militias and Tutsi businessmen inside Congo to do its bidding. Rwanda has a very disciplined, patriotic army that punches above its weight — the Israel of Africa. It was Rwanda’s invasion in 1996 that sent Congo into a tailspin it has yet to recover from.
For years, the United States and Rwanda’s other Western friends turned a blind eye to this meddling. Again, like Israel, Rwanda has succeeded in leveraging the guilt that other countries feel for not intervening in its genocide — in which almost a million people were killed when Hutu militias targeted Tutsis in 1994 — to blunt criticism of itself. But recently the United States and Britain have been presented with such a mountain of allegations about how Rwanda funneled arms into Congo and even directed the recent capture of Goma that they had no choice but to change tack. So the Western powers recently slashed aid to Rwanda because of Congo, sending a simple but forceful message: Get out.
Unspoken but understood is Gettleman’s contorted correlation: Just as Rwanda “leverages” world guilt over the Rwandan genocide in order to remorselessly dominate the Congolese, Israel “leverages” world guilt over the Holocaust in order to remorselessly dominate the Palestinians.
Makes me wonder about the rest of Gettleman’s dispatch.
