Musanze, Rwanda – The Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) was built on an ideology that cast the Tutsi as enemies, according to four of its former senior officers, who say they were taught to hate them long before the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi ethnic group.

“In our history and ideology, Tutsis are referred to as ‘snakes’,” said Anastase Munyaneza, a former FDLR major general.

“The analogy is that if a snake bites you, it injects poison and you die. Therefore, it is better to kill the snake before it bites you.”

The former officers say such ideas were reinforced through Rwanda’s political and military institutions before the 1994 genocide and persisted among those who fled into neighbouring Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), after the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) took control of Rwanda in July 1994.

More than three decades later, the FDLR remains a source of regional security concerns, with its presence in eastern DRC a major point of contention between Kigali…