At the height of the Vietnam War in the fall of 1969, President Richard Nixon deployed the "madman theory," a political strategy built on projecting irrationality to force adversaries into negotiation, then breaking their resistance through sustained pressure.
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Nixon threatened Vietnam with nuclear-armed aircraft circling the Arctic, carriers deployed across the Pacific, and mines laid at the port of Haiphong. He believed he could frighten Hanoi into peace. He couldn't, and he didn't. The Vietnamese refused to yield, the war dragged on, and the United States lost.
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In DR Congo, politicians are running the same playbook. They threaten the Congolese Tutsi with war jets and drones, thousands of European and American mercenaries, local militia groups, and Burundian and FDLR genocidal troops, expecting fear to achieve what force has not. They expect the Tutsi to abandon Masisi, Goma, Nyiragongo, Rutshuru, Bukavu, and Minembwe.
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Extremists in Rwanda, before and during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, once used the same tactic. They persecuted the Tutsi across every sector of daily life and labeled them foreigners destined to be thrown into the Nyabarongo River and "returned" to Ethiopia, a place unknown to the descendants of Gihanga.
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They weaponized the colonial-era Hamitic myth to frame the Tutsi as non-indigenous, a process that culminated in the 1994 Genocide. The Tutsi in Rwanda would have been completely wiped out had the Rwanda Patriotic Army not intervened.
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Dividing Rwanda was achievable because the colonial state had reduced Rwandans to three ethnic groups. But how did authorities successfully brand Congolese Tutsi as foreign enemies inside a nation of over 200 distinct ethnic groups?
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The method was deliberate: Belgian colonial policy established autonomous chiefdoms for other distinct ethnic groups, while ensuring that the Tutsi held no such customary authority within DR Congo. This manufactured political demagogues and ethnic agitators who followed. Through a calculated ideology of division, colonial authorities polarized DR Congo, artificially fracturing its population into "natives" and "foreigners," and marking the latter for eventual expulsion.
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In 1885, when European powers met at the Berlin Conference to carve up Africa, Gahutu, Budurege, and Kayira were already Congolese Rwandophone chiefdoms in South Kivu. Jomba, Bwishya, Kamurosi, and Byahi were also Congolese Rwandophone chiefdoms in North Kivu. These communities existed before the colonial borders that would later be used to erase them.
In his book, Land, Power, and Ethnic Conflict in Masisi, Stanislas Bucyalimwe Mararo records the declaration of the Hunde customary Mwami André Kalinda: "Nturo, son of Nyilimigabo, was the true chief of the chiefdom that I govern today. I was his land manager, and when the Belgians sent him to Rwanda, I was enthroned in his place." This testimony directly confirms that the Tutsi, like other ethnic groups in eastern DR Congo, are native to the land, not foreign arrivals on someone else's soil.
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Kinshasa can address the legitimate concerns of its Tutsi community, as it does with others divided by colonial borders--the Kongo people across DR Congo, the Republic of the Congo, and Angola; the Azande between DR Congo, the Central African Republic, and South Sudan; the Chokwe across Angola, Zambia, and southern Katanga; and the Lunda partitioned across Angola, Zambia, and DR Congo--or it can continue to exhaust itself in a futile crusade.
Facing an unrelenting struggle for survival, Congolese Tutsi have no other choice but to fight. The conflict in eastern DR Congo will only end when their grievances are fully addressed.
Attempts to ethnically cleanse the Tutsi from their historical homelands through coercion and intimidation will fail, just as Nixon's "madman theory" failed to break the resolve of the Vietnamese.
The writer is a media specialist, historian, and playwright.
