Five Second ... Leaked Report on DRC

The UN report on the violence in the DRC was recently leaked and Texas in Africa gives these valuable summary points as well as the usual cogent discussion:

As Jason Stearns notes, the leaking of the report almost certainly happened in order to ensure that the word "genocide" got out lest someone scrub it from the final version.... I have seen the draft report. It is long and it is damning. ...

Faced with the incredible horrors around him, he assumed that since the genocidaires were the bad guys, Kagame and his team were the good guys. What Gourevitch failed to understand then - and seems to still be missing now, despite all evidence to the contrary - is that there were never any good guys in this fight. Blood is on almost everyone's hands, and there's plenty of blame to go around. ...

This report highlights the importance of seeing violence in Rwanda, the Kivus, and the rest of the eastern DRC as interrelated. You can't understand one without the others. The Rwandan genocide did not happen out of thin air; it was a product of the country's civil war, and decades of historical events before that. The fight for control of Rwanda extended onto Zairian territory and, in one form or another, continued at least until early 2009 and arguably until today. It may well break out in Congo again;...

The importance of this leaked report cannot be overstated. If released as such, it will disastrous for what's left of Kagame's reputation, and he knows it. Even if it's not released, it's unlikely the donors can now simply ignore what they have long known to be true. What happens as a result of this is anyone's guess. Kagame is already sitting atop a powder keg of resentment and division in his own party. But there are many potential consequences, and no donors want to see instability in Rwanda.