As if this world needs more bloodshed, here comes another major war knocking on the door of the crumbling international order. This week’s ferocious assault and capture of the largest city in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) by rebels backed by troops from its tiny neighbour, Rwanda, marks an escalation with far reaching consequences beyond Africa. It also exposes the complacency of western governments, who many Congolese accuse of paving the way for this crisis.
The rebellion, known as the M23, has been snowballing since 2021. In recent months, M23 seized swathes of territory as it encircled Goma, a city nestled below a group of volcanoes facing the Rwandan border. This week, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, called for Rwanda to stop supporting M23 and to remove its troops from Congolese territory, adding that the conflict had inflicted a “devastating toll” on civilians, millions of whom need aid. In DRC’s capital, Kinshasa, angry protesters lit fires and attacked the Rwandan, French and US embassies.
The M23 rebellion is the latest in a line of several Congolese insurgencies backed by Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, over nearly three decades. A darling of many western countries, Kagame rose to power in the wake of the 1994 genocide, against whose perpetrators he fought as a rebel commander. He has long argued his interventions in DRC are driven by his mission to safeguard his ethnic Tutsi group, which has at times been the butt of pogroms and political persecution in eastern Congo and from which M23 draws its leadership.
Yet the series of wars involving Rwanda and the Congolese state since Kagame took power have been about much more than this. Rwanda-backed rebels, who controlled much of eastern DRC in the late 1990s, extracted massive amounts of mineral wealth. After a national peace deal in 2002 that integrated Congolese Tutsi officers and politicians into military and political institutions under the watch of the world’s biggest UN peacekeeping mission, some of them again rebelled in 2004 and 2008 as they pushed for more military privileges and access to power and local resources. Formed in 2012 as the latest iteration of those rebellions, the M23 briefly took Goma before they were defeated the following year.
Throughout the cycle of wars, western officials defended Rwanda in closed diplomatic circles, routinely playing down evidence of Rwandan backing for these rebellions. Kagame had charmed donors with his government’s efficient implementation of aid projects. His western friends held up Rwanda as a feelgood story of post-genocidal reconstruction. Only when the evidence unearthed by UN security council investigators of Rwandan involvement in DRC became overwhelming in 2012, did the UK, EU and US finally temporarily halt some aid to the country. Today as much as a third of Rwanda’s budget is still donor supported.
When DRC’s president, Felix Tshisekedi, took power in 2019, he tried to reset the dial, inviting the Rwandan army into eastern DRC to attack and degrade Rwandan Hutu rebels, whose leadership included commanders who participated in the 1994 genocide. But by this time, M23 soldiers had begun to re-establish a camp near one of the volcanoes and were looking for outside support again. The rebellion escalated in 2021 after a series of stalled talks between M23 representatives and the Congolese government concerning the possible reintegration of some M23 members into state institutions.
Rwanda had by then become an even more prized ally for the west. The UK’s Conservative government had hitched its immigration policy to a plan to deport migrants to Rwanda. In mid-2021, thousands of Rwandan troops began deploying into northern Mozambique, where a jihadist rebellion now backed by Islamic State has taken root around an area where a massive gas deposit is being developed by the French energy giant TotalEnergies. The European Union has provided financial assistance for Rwanda’s operations there. Brussels has also inked a minerals supply agreement with Rwanda, inviting criticism from rights groups who say this legitimises war booty from Congo. Western officials, including the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, have demanded that Kagame withdraw from DRC. But it is unclear whether they will force the hand of Rwanda’s president, who now also courts countries such as Turkey and Qatar as alternative friends.
The Congolese government has meanwhile fallen back on a motley crew of military allies. They include UN-hatted troops from South Africa and Tanzania, and a range of ethnic militia, including the Rwandan Hutu rebels that Tshisekedi had previously allowed the Rwandan army to target. Hundreds of eastern European mercenaries backing DRC’s army have surrendered. Some western diplomats now fear Congolese military commanders will seek Russian government assistance to fight against a rebellion that can be compared to the Russian-backed insurgency in Donbas.
Western officials need to now use all their remaining leverage to demand the M23 withdraw and force political negotiations that can settle the political and material underpinnings of the repeated cycle of rebellions. If not, the war in DRC could yet draw in a number of regional actors, as it did in the 1990s. It could also open space for coup-mongering and Russian interference in the giant central African nation. That playbook has already unfolded in the Sahel region of west Africa. It must be avoided at all costs in DRC. The international order, already close to unravelling, will depend on it.
