His duplicity is profound: instead of standing in solidarity with his communityâ€"victims of a systematic ethnic cleansingâ€"he aligns himself with the apparatus that either tolerates or perpetuates these atrocities. By siding with the executioners rather than his own people, he flips the most basic moral order. This choice, driven by both survival instinct and willful blindness, transforms his public stance into an act of symbolic betrayal.
Behind the polished speeches designed to flatter the powers that be, lies a deliberate avoidance of naming the real culprits behind the tragedy. He replaces the real causes with vague rhetoric about peace and reconciliation, ensuring the system remains intact and his ministerial privileges are preserved.
The irony is sharp: from Kinshasa, he speaks of the plight of the Banyamulenge as though it were an abstraction, while his own mother and one of his sisters live in exile as refugees in Kigali, Rwanda. This personal reality undermines his sanitized rhetoric. If the Minembwe he describes as secure were truly safe, why does his own family not live there? This simple question exposes the gap between his words and the truth.
This uncomfortable truth, which should inform his words, does not seem to disturb his composure. He presents himself as the voice of his community, yet uses it as a tool to cement his own position, serving as an alibi for the state's actions.
This is not a matter of ignorance, but of calculated self-interest. By avoiding naming the perpetrators of violence in the Highlands, he spares those who elevated him to power. This silence comes at a high cost: the erasure of the dead and the reduction of the living to mere pawns in political bargaining.
More troubling still is his refusal to explicitly address the Banyamulenge of Gatumba, victims of a massacre whose memory should be central to any honest discourse. Reducing them to a vague identity of "Congolese from here and there" is not only a deliberate distortion but a moral failure: denying victims their identity and the specificity of their suffering, in order to make the crime more palatable to those in power and less visible to the world.
In the end, history will remember less his well-crafted speeches than his role in supporting a regime that spins genocide into a generic humanitarian crisis. By lending his voice to this deception, he follows in the footsteps of elitist figures more concerned with their position at the table than with the fate of those in the hills of South Kivu, whose disappearance is a looming reality.
It is likely that when the archives are opened and the human cost is tallied, Alexis Gisaro's name will not be remembered as that of a defender of his people, but as that of a willing accomplice, complicit in silence and omission.
Tite Gatabazi
