 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. In the beginning of December, the forces of Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo launched a joint operation in the DRC against the rebel group Allied Democratic Forces or ADF. The claim has been that this group is associated with the Islamic State. Close to 1,700 Ugandan troops have entered the DRC as part of this operation. The presence of Ugandan troops in the DRC has been a contentious matter due to its earlier invasion in the late 90s when it was accused of a lot of atrocities and crimes. Similarly, there have also been questions about the nature of ADF and if it's actually associated with the IS. Earlier in March, the United States had also declared the ADF as a terrorist organization. What is the ADF and what is its history? How is the Ugandan military operation in the DRC being perceived? What is the role of the US in the conflict? Kambale Musawuli of the Center for Research on the Congo addresses these questions. In the end, I mean, the same question that Congolese people are asking themselves on the ground, why after two decades of war, any wedding country, Uganda, is now in the DRC? I mean, we have to really put it in the proper context, but let's look at the ADF first. The Allied Democratic Forces is a social group that's been operating in the DRC. Mid-1990s. It's a group that claims that it has Islamic beliefs and then people try to extrapolate this belief to meaning, Jihad, terrorism, and so on. But they have a political claim. They believe that the President of Uganda who's been in power since 1996 should not be in power and they're fighting from the political angle. That's an aspect something that's forgotten. And they've been in the DRC since the early 1990s. And in the period they've been in the DRC, Uganda and Rwanda have been in the area where they operate for the past two decades. As you know, Congo has known a world that started in 1996 with two invasions of its neighbors, Rwanda and Uganda. And they've occupied the territory of the Congo. They elicitly exported, extracted Congo's minerals. It's been documented in numerous UN reports on the illegal pure foreign or Congo's resources. And even worse, Rwanda and Uganda fought each other in the Eastern Port of Congo in the town called Kisangani, where they were fighting over a diamond mine. And during their fight, they dropped over 4,000 bombs in the city. And the victims of that war still wait for justice. And there was, of course, the U.S., the UN condemnation of the attacks. The other element that's really important to look at even the entering of Uganda and the soldiers is the political and historic connections of the conflict in the Congo with Uganda. Congo sued the Uganda, sued Uganda at the International Court of Justice for war crimes, for pilfering of Congo's resources and so on. They won the case at the ICJ in 2005. And the ICJ ordered Uganda to pay over $4 billion of reparation to the DRC. So that's a very important context. Uganda today, which is entering the Congo to go after so-called ascension groups owed the Congo over $4 billion in reparation. Because of war crimes, because of pilfering resources, and they have operated in the region where these rebels are, and they've never stopped them. Now, as I say in the beginning, we all were informed that they're coming into the DRC to go after the ADF. The first question that I had in my head is, why is this happening after almost two to three years campaign of the U.S. government of connecting rebels in the DRC to ISIS? The U.S. State Department and the Pentagon have continuously stated that the ascension group, ADF, is connected to ISIS. We've no evidence that they're able to provide, but we have people who have provided evidence about who ADF is. Now, the UN group of experts every year publish a report about the situation in the DRC, and in their reports, they have clearly stated categorically that the ADF, the ascension group in the DRC, has no connection whatsoever with ISIS. But we know what that means. Whenever the term ISIS is used, we know that you will have U.S. military presence. You know that we have oil more than likely in those areas. And that's what we see unfold with the U.S. propaganda campaign of connecting ADF to ISIS. We see increased militarization. So the entering of Ugandan soldiers in the DRC was very predictable. And they enter in the area that's very rich of oil. I predicted a year ago, even much before that, in the mid-2000s, in Lake Albert, in Lake, that's at the border of Uganda and the DRC. Over 2 billion barrels of oil was discovered. The killings in that region started about a decade ago, targeted at very specific villages. The killings were usually attributed to the ADF. U.N. group of experts said that it's the mixture of the surgeons. Some of them speak foreign languages, others speak local languages, and the ADF itself, not connected to ISIS, does not have the military power, military might, to do many of the operations that's taking place there. So now we have oil in Lake Albert to be in balance of oil. Who is controlling this oil? We have Total, the French oil company that's controlling this oil. So we have clearly connected the killing, the inhumane killing that's happening in the DRC, in the East, where the Ugandan forces have now crossed over directly to the discovery of this oil, a tacit displacement of the population in the area which are ours, then being presented as rebels massacring them. Are they clear connection between the surgeons and Total as their own company? I think the future will let us know how we can connect it. But as we've seen with Iraq, with Afghanistan, with U.S. military engagement, the U.S. Special Forces now in DRC working on the Congolese Army, Ugandan forces which work with the U.S. military, all of them concentrating their military power where there is oil, we clearly can say it's really a bad oil. Not because, as you said it, because on African intelligence this week in December, they have an article where they clearly stated that Total energies, Total subsidiary in Uganda is very happy with the military operations in DRC because it brings some form of peace and stability in the area. So we know it's connected to us, but what's the way forward? I think today we're talking about ADF, tomorrow we may talk about another rebel militia, but we really need to understand the essence of Congo's conflict. At the center of Congo's conflict is that the Congolese people, since its mother, they're funding in 1885. They have not been able to control their land, their resources, and virtually their sovereignty. So our struggle since 1885, even with the coming of Patrice Lumumba in 1960, has been that we want to make sure that the resources of the Congo benefit the Congolese people, that the land belongs to the people themselves so they can transform the country and transform the African continent. But through that process from 1996 now to present, in the Congolese struggle of controlling their land and resources, they found themselves in war of evasions, the 96 war they have taken the lives of over 60 million people. They've seen mining cooperation illegally and preferring Congo's resources, in the case of the coal town, the cobalt that's used in electric vehicles and so on. And now with a military, what I'll call a military occupation of Uganda soldiers in the Congo, while the Congolese people are not clear why they are there, and it's a deal between the president of the Congo and Uganda. A military occupation and still no discussion about justice. As I said a moment ago, Uganda owes Congo over four billion dollars of reparations for war crimes and preferring Congo's resources. Until they pay their reparation, they have no business being in DRC and we Congolese will continue to fight to regain our sovereignty and regain control of our land.