On Saturday last, 50 members of the Congolese community in Ireland, along with five or six Irish people, took part in a demonstration in Dublin. They marched from the Garden of Remembrance in Parnell Square, through O'Connell Street, to Government Buildings, then to the Wolfe Tone monument in St Stephen's Green, where a modest public meeting was held, writes Vincent Browne.
The demonstrators were protesting the recent invasion of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) by the army of Rwanda. Banners carried by demonstrators called attention to the deaths of five million people in the course of the conflict in DRC since 1997, the mass rape of women throughout the DRC and the engagement of children as combatants.
Monstrous crimes against humanity have been committed and are being committed in the DRC. The loss of life has been on a scale unknown elsewhere in the world since the second World War. At one time in the past few years, eight countries were at war in DRC. Massacres of thousands of people took place regularly. Millions of people were forced to flee their homes. Sexual violence took place with impunity, to use the characterisation employed by Kofi Annan.
Although a peace agreement was signed in 2002 and a transitional government came to power in June of last year, the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo is appalling. There is continuing violence in North and South Kivu and in Katanga. Hundreds of thousands of people have fled their homes in the past few months. The Rwandese Interahamwe, which was largely responsible for the Rwandan genocide a decade ago and whose members then fled across the border to DRC, have been raiding Rwanda again, killing large numbers of people. As a consequence, 4,000 troops of the Rwandan army have entered DRC (again) and there are fears of a major escalation of violence.
There are more than 20,000 children still in custody in DRC, children who had participated in the conflict since 1997. Hundreds of thousands of women have been raped and sexual violence continues as a matter of course.
What has happened in Democratic Republic of Congo is very much linked to what our partners in Europe did to that part of Africa in the colonial period and to what they have done since the colonial period formally ended. The Belgians colonised this part of Africa and they were the most brutal, murderous and exploitative of the colonial powers. They gave the Congolese independence in 1961 but immediately engineered, with the aid of the Americans, the British and the French, the assassination of the democratically elected prime minister and the subversion of Congolese democracy. These powers installed the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko in power in 1965 and he remained in power, with their active and decisive support, until 1997. By then, the country was ravaged by violence, despoliation, malnutrition and widescale human rights abuses. Since then, there has been the most catastrophic war the world has known in half a century.
Ireland has benefited enormously from association with the countries that raped and plundered that part of Africa. We are now among the privileged of the earth. And with these privileges we now seek to change our Constitution in a way disadvantageous to the future children of the most vulnerable of the earth, children to be born among us in Ireland. We are being asked to do so not because we are required to bear an unbearable burden but because of what amounts to a minor and inconsequential "anomaly" in our citizenship arrangements and because that "anomaly" might be uncomfortable for our EU partners. So why should our EU partners care?
What if a few hundred or even a few thousand parents contrive to gain Irish citizenship rights for their children by having them born in Ireland? These parents would have no right to remain in Ireland with their Irish citizen child. Indeed, the child itself might have no right of residence until many years later. The child and its parents would have no right to reside in any EU state because of the Irish citizenship of the child unless they had a load of cash and could prove they would be no burden on the host state.
By conferring citizenship on such children, we are doing little more than conferring an honorary title. Perhaps at some future stage of their lives, their entitlement to Irish citizenship might be a protection of some sort, however feeble, against the vicissitudes Congolese people have to face, in part because of what our EU partners did to their country.
Do we really want to deny them even that modest comfort, when nothing of consequence is at stake for us? As that march on Saturday proceeded through the streets of Dublin, Irish people waved, applauded and shouted encouragement to the Congolese. Can these same Irish people deny the future Irish-born children of these immigrants even the vague consolation of Irish citizenship when nothing of consequence is at stake for us, or even for our European partners?