With world’s attention to war in DR Congo slowly waning, thousands of Congolese families longing for peace and justice are left at the mercy of warring parties.

Many had hoped to see a quick end of the crisis when the Rwandan regime, long accused for fuelling the conflict, dismissed mineral resources’ exploitation, regime change or seizure of territory as reasons of fighting, months after signing the peace accord mediated by Washington.

M23 rebels, widely seen as the protégé of the Rwandan ruler Paul Kagame, had bowed to the U.S. pressure and relinquished part of conquered territories of the mineral-rich East, leading to days of calm.

However, a recent drone attack on a key airport infrastructure in Kisangani by the rebel movement has dampened these hopes. The African Union condemned the attack as amounting to violation of international law, and act of terrorism.

Fresh wave of confrontations further prolongs the suffering of millions Congolese. Agonies are especially written in the faces of thousands, mostly women and children who are scattered across the region as refugees displaced by the current and previous cycles of violence.

But beyond the destructive effects of the war, families now contend with an even bigger problem —- the toll of ethnic tensions fomented by months of war propaganda with effects stretching far beyond the Congo.

At the height of the war, Rwandan politicians sought to portray support of the M23 rebels as justified amid alleged slow genocide targeting Kinyarwanda speaking Tutsis across the border.

Also read: YEAR AT WAR: Families of fallen Rwandan soldiers wait for answers

Another notion that was on display in the war propaganda was the incorrectly drawn borders which saw Rwanda lose to the DR Congo a chunk of its territory in pre-colonial past.

Too late

The narrative shifted later to invoke the presence of the FDLR, a Hutu rebel group linked to the genocide, when international pressure piled.

But it was too late. The ethnic sentiments had quickly spread into transnational ethnic networks and communities that had long paid little attention to identitarian cleavages to tell between Hutus and Tutsis, ethnic populations with historical ties and unresolved grievances, in instances, found in Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi and eastern DR Congo.

In Rwanda where a Genocide against the Tutsis decimated lives of over a million people in 1994, ruler Paul Kagame and his entourage see the ethnic Hutus in the country and beyond as people that need to be checked, and the Tutsis as people that need to be mobilised to be vigilant and rally behind his regime for protection.

This, on one side, helps the ruling class to maintain power, but the thinking hurts the drive to forge a collective national identity, on the other.

It is problematic for a nation that sought to correct mistakes of previous regimes having successfully eradicated ethnicity in official documents and officially treating ethnic groups as a concept invented by the colonial masters as part of their divide-and-rule system.

There has been growing tendencies by the Rwandan regime to view young generation in the prism of children of survivors and children of Hutu perpetrators, a tag young people first pick at schools and follows them unquestioned and unchallenged into the workplace and later as adults.

Controversy

Besides, authorities embarked on the drive to compel Hutus to apologise over the Genocide committed in their names as part of Ndi Umunyarwanda (I am Rwandan), a campaign that compelled ethnic Hutu people to seek forgiveness for genocide crimes committed in their names.

The regime would later decelerate the campaign when it came under scrutiny over inflicting collective guilt on the Hutu populations.

There were equally concerns of the regime using the campaign as a political tool to justify exclusion of Hutus who refuse to pledge allegiance or show remorse, while labelling adversaries as people not worth of governing on the basis of actual or alleged role of their Hutu parents or associates in the genocide.

The spillover of the ethnic mobilisation beyond the Rwandan border did not pass without causing unease in neighbouring countries, fuelling ethnic sentiments and rhetoric across the board.

The incendiary utterances of the Congolese former military spokesperson, Major-General Sylvain Ekenge, against the Tutsi community were not an isolated incidence.

Open or subtle ethnic rhetoric were commonplace in the media and online, from the likes of Muhoozi Kainerugaba, Chief of Defense Forces in Uganda, Evode Uwizeyimana, a senator in Rwanda and Jean Damascene Bizimana, a minister.