Is Western support for Rwanda fuelling DRC war?
Publish date: 03 February 2025
Issue Number: 1111
Diary: IBA Legalbrief Africa
Category: General
Western governments continue to prop up Rwanda, with its President Paul Kagame held up as a darling of the west, but unless they act urgently against the assault on the DRC, the escalating conflict threatens to unravel the international order, writes Dino Mahtani, independent researcher. He says in a Guardian commentary, the M23 rebellion is the latest in a line of several Congolese insurgencies backed by Kagame, over nearly three decades. '... 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,' writes Mahtani. '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.'
Mahtani says 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.' However, notes Mahtani in The Guardian, today as much as a third of Rwanda’s budget is still donor supported. '... 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, notes Mahtani. '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. 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.'