Focus Media (Kigali)
Erwin Winkler
10 January 2009
opinion
In my hometown of Antwerp, Belgium, we still vividly remember "Black Sunday." It refers to the municipal elections of 1991 when for the first time the extreme right-wing party Vlaams Blok (Flemish Block) became the biggest in the city, with some 33% of the votes.
This fascist party had, previous to the elections, published a 70-points pamphlet on how to deal with immigrants. It was, in brief, a segregation and deportation plan. Their slogan was "Our own people first".
Vlaams Blok was forced to disband in the early 2000's after a conviction for distributing racist pamphlets. They immediately reunited under the name Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest), which conveniently has the same initials as the old party name.
Although the party had existed for some time, its stellar rise in the early 90s reminded people of what happened in Germany in the 1930s with Hitler's National Socialist German Workers Party.
Ironically, Antwerp is home to one of the largest very orthodox Jewish communities in the world, outside Israel. Yet Vlaams Blok does not have problems with them-which is not surprising, since they are at the heart of the very lucrative diamond refining business, of which Antwerp is one of the biggest centers on the globe.
No, the Blok's problem is with the more newly-arrived immigrants, mainly Turks and Moroccans who were actively attracted in the 60s, when Belgium was in an economic boom, to come and do the dirty work the "own people" didn't want to do-work in the mines, the ports, the factories.
Then came the oil crisis of the early 70s, and lots of "own people" (as well as immigrants) started losing their jobs. Suddenly, the immigrants were stealing our jobs. It was fertile ground for movements which later led to the creation of Vlaams Blok.
Yet on Black Sunday, the traditional political parties were stunned. They should have seen it coming, though-their governing, on city as well as national level, hadn't been the most impressive, and lots of protest voters were attracted by Vlaams Blok's simplistic rhetoric.
Nevertheless, even fifty years after the Second World War, it was still unthinkable to let a fascist party have a try at government once again. So all the other parties joined hands to create a monster coalition to keep Vlaams Blok out of power-they even invented a name for it, the "cordon sanitaire", or sanitary cordon.
Building a wall, however ill-constructed, to keep the vermin out.
It is the same in the rest of Europe: extreme-right parties might have become stronger over the last two decades, yet nearly nowhere they get access to government. The specter of a Nazi-like "administration" is simply too frightening.
Strangely enough, Europe does not think that the same moral principles should apply to Africa. In some much respected European publications, such as The Economist, it has been said that Rwanda should "negotiate with, and create political space for," the FDLR.
So whereas Europe, more than fifty years later, is not ready to give Nazi-inspired people access to power (and rightly so), Rwanda is after fourteen years supposed to give Hutu-extremists-a lot of whom were actually involved in the genocide-a political platform in the country.
It's like inviting the Nazi doctors, who conducted experiments on live human beings and must certainly have gained knowledge from it (how does somebody reacts when his liver is removed without anesthetics?), in the 1950s to join one of Europe's universities.
A few European publications have recently set their eyes on the FDLR, and talked to some of its members. It results in some very interesting insights in the program those people would present when given "political space" in the country.
"We are fighting every day because we are Hutu and they are Tutsis," one Major Vincent Habamungu told the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph. "We will stay enemies forever."
Talking about the genocide, in which he denies any implication, Habamungu says "everybody killed, Tutsis and Hutus. They accuse us of carrying out the genocide, but everybody killed."
Double genocide? Sounds familiar. In Europe at least.
Vincent Habamungu concludes: "We will never live in peace with them [Tutsis]. We have to fight them all the time."
Now that is a political program indeed.
Then there's Lieutenant Colonel Edmond Ngarambe, apparently spokesman for the FDLR, talking to AFP (Agence France Presse). According to AFP, "before his men could return home, he said, Rwandan President Paul Kagame had to leave office and what he called an 'equitable' justice system had to be put in place to judge suspects in the genocide."
So now we have to open the political space to a group that demands that a democratically elected President (in an election endorsed by local and international observers) be deposed as a condition for their return to the country? Now that is a political program indeed.
Talking about a political program: have any of these commentators who claim political space for the FDLR ever seen a comprehensive socio-economic project for the country from this group? Apart from their willingness to continue killing Tutsis or Tutsi-related people, they have never demonstrated any political vision for the development of all Rwandans.
Parallels can be drawn with the way Uganda is dealing with the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) of Joseph Kony. Is Uganda creating political space to let the LRA become a political party with a program based on the Ten Commandments?Of course not.
There has been a peace agreement, which the government is willing to sign. There should be justice, however-although Uganda is ready to judge Kony locally, instead of handing him over the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague, which has issued arrest warrants for him and his cronies. Yet Kony keeps playing cat-and-mouse games, and wreaking havoc in the region.
Rwanda has taken a similar attitude toward the FDLR. You can return, officials have said several times, yet justice must prevail; people who have committed crimes must be held to account. This is a universal human rights principle, yet to judge some of the international commentators it is an outrageous demand.
It should not be forgotten either that some of these rebels have already returned. Some high-ranking officers have even been integrated in the army, whereas others have gone through the demobilization program, just like other soldiers of the Rwandan army.
So let's not turn this into another LRA farce, with some rebel leader without a program promising time and again to sign a peace agreement and never showing up. Let's implement this latest agreement between Rwanda and the DRC, and dismantle the FDLR. They have been destructive for at least fourteen years, so there's no reason to believe they will become a constructive political party overnight.
And maybe Germany, in a goodwill gesture (or, who knows, out of moral considerations; but let's not count on that one), might arrest the war criminal Ignace Murwanashyaka who is happily living on its soil. Now that would be a political gesture indeed.
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