In 1963, nearly three dozen newly independent African nations met in Addis Ababa to establish the Organization of African Unity. Among the core principles they embraced was the inviolability of existing, colonial-era national borders. Failure to uphold them, they agreed, would open the way for one irredentist claim after another and threaten to tear the continent apart. For much of the past six decades, although borders have repeatedly been flouted and—in a few notable cases—redrawn, that legal precept has generally held.
Since January, however, the rapid conquest and occupation of a huge area of the Democratic Republic of Congo by Rwanda and the M23 rebel group it supports has raised concerns that the principle may now be endangered. Over the past two months, the M23, together with as many as 10,000-12,000 Rwandan troops, has overrun an area of eastern DRC that is home to more than five million people. In late January, the rebels captured Goma, the largest city in the province of North Kivu; less than three weeks later, they also seized Bukavu, the capital of South Kivu, as well as a key airport, thereby cutting off Congolese forces from resupply. The Congolese government puts the number of dead so far at 7,000.
The M23 claims that it seeks to counter Hutu extremist groups that perpetrated the Rwandan genocide and then took refuge in eastern DRC. But the UN and Rwanda’s various donor states have long dismissed these justifications, aware that Rwanda, a densely populated, resource-poor state, has acquired a taste for DRC’s smuggled minerals and is driven by naked self-interest. Worryingly, Rwandan President Paul Kagame claimed in a 2023 speech that the precolonial borders of the Kingdom of Rwanda extended much farther than the country’s current frontiers, spilling over into modern-day Uganda to the north, Burundi to the south, and the DRC to the west.
The question now is whether the outside world is prepared to do anything to stop the rebel advance. Watching the events of the past few weeks, analysts and diplomats have wondered whether Kagame merely aims to balkanize the DRC, the better to pursue his economic and political agenda, or whether he actually seeks to redraw the colonial-era frontiers of his giant neighbor, setting up a de facto protectorate whose leadership will take orders from Kigali, Rwanda’s capital. An even more dramatic possibility also looms: in a repeat of history, Kagame might be planning regime change in the Congolese capital of Kinshasa, some 930 miles to the west.
Although the Rwanda offensive has raised growing global alarm, Western and international powers have been slow to take meaningful action. After the M23 seized Goma,, U.S. and European officials issued statements of concern, but little more. Only on February 21, after Bukavu also fell, did the UN Security Council pass a resolution formally condemning the M23 offensive and calling for a cease-fire and the immediate withdrawal of Rwandan forces from Congolese territory.
Since then, the United States has sanctioned a key Rwandan minister, the UK has announced that it is suspending bilateral aid to Rwanda, and the European Union has said it is reviewing an agreement with Rwanda to jointly exploit critical minerals. Meanwhile, African states are considering deploying yet another regional peacekeeping force to the area, although it is not clear how they could succeed where two predecessors have clearly failed. But none of the moves adopted thus far look either strong or prompt enough to deter Rwanda’s ongoing land grab.
If the M23 and its Rwandan backers get their way, a country already hosting seven million displaced people could be engulfed in a destabilizing war—its third since the late 1990s. Perhaps equally important, by allowing Rwanda, which has received billions of dollars of backing from Europe, the United States, the World Bank, and the IMF, to effectively appropriate part of an adjacent state, the West risks contributing to the further breakdown of one of the most crucial principles upholding international order.
THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT
Although Rwanda has long meddled in eastern Congo, the events of the last few months took many by surprise. Among diplomats and analysts working on Africa’s Great Lakes, the prevailing assumption had been that Kagame—whose support for the M23 has been exhaustively documented by the UN—was using the rebel group to project hegemonic power in the region. According to this view, Kagame was upset that Burundi, Congo, and Uganda’s leaders had bypassed Rwanda in a series of road and rail transport plans, and was signalling that they ignored his position as the dominant player at their peril. The fact that supporting the M23 also gave Rwanda improved access to the coltan, gold, tin, and other mineral resources buried in Congolese soil was merely an added benefit.
But that analysis began to break down when the M23 started gobbling up more territory in Congo’s two Kivu provinces. Many commentators now point to Kagame’s 2023 speech, given during an official visit to Benin in April 2023, as a key declaration of intent. He asserted that “the borders that were drawn during colonial times had our countries divided. A big part of Rwanda was left outside, in eastern Congo, in southwestern Uganda . . . this is a fact. It is a fact of history. . . . And these people have been denied their rights.” This is a line that has since been echoed by Rwandan intellectuals, providing a historical rationale for the “Greater Rwanda” that may now be emerging in eastern Congo.
These claims—which both simplify and misrepresent the historical record—signaled a major shift, Up until 2023, Kagame had insisted that there were no Rwandan troops inside DRC and that Kigali did not support the M23. By publicly laying out a historical case for a Rwandan presence in the DRC, he appeared to be preparing the way for some form of annexation. In fact, these ideas were present in Kagame’s thinking for many years. “In the past, within the inner kitchen cabinet I belonged to, Kagame constantly alluded to the Greater Rwanda idea,” said Theogene Rudasingwa, former ambassador to the United States and Kagame’s chief of staff from the 1990s to the early years of this century.
By December 2024, the outlines of Rwanda’s larger project were becoming clearer. That month, an expert panel reported to the UN that a “parallel administration” was being established in territories seized by the M23 in North Kivu—arrangements that included the systematic processing of coltan smuggled to Rwanda from North Kivu’s Rubaya mine. Diplomats separately noted that the M23 appeared to be burning documents in the areas it controlled—a practice that, if applied to title deeds, would make it impossible for farmers to prove ownership of the land, helping make way for Tutsi families being bused in from Rwanda to resettle it. It began to look like a well-prepared plan for territorial expansion, carried out by a rebel group equipped—thanks to Rwanda’s supply lines—with laser-guided antitank and surface-to-air missiles, as well as sophisticated antidrone systems.
In early January, the M23, backed by 4,000 Rwandan troops, seized the town of Katale in the hills northwest of Goma. Once Minova and Sake on Lake Kivu had fallen to the advancing rebels, Goma was encircled, and its capture was only a matter of time. Within days of Goma’s fall, Corneille Nangaa, the tubby, white-bearded leader of the Congo River Alliance, a coalition embracing the M23 and a spray of other rebel groups, announced that he planned to march all the way to Kinshasa, where he would topple DRC President Félix Tshisekedi.
THE ROAD TO KINSHASA
For foreign correspondents who covered the Great Lakes region in the 1990s, there’s a surreal sense of déjà vu. Back in late 1996, another chubby Congolese rebel leader serving as camouflage for a Rwandan military intervention also declared—to a deeply skeptical audience—that he would march all the way to Kinshaha and depose then President Mobutu Sese Seko. That man’s name was Laurent Kabila. No one believed him at the time, but six months later, after Congo’s army had folded like a pack of cards before the advance of his Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (AFDL), his prediction came to pass. I was one of many journalists who watched Kabila’s forces, many of them child fighters, trudge wearily into Kinshasa as Mobutu and his family boarded a flight to Togo.
The sheer speed of the current M23 advance, and the dramatic collapse of Congolese forces, also feels familiar. Although some Congolese units have fought bravely, many—just as in Mobutu’s day—stripped off their uniforms or fled; thousands of demoralized Congolese troops have also joined the M23. Scores of soldiers have been charged by the Congolese authorities with the murder and rape of civilians they were meant to protect. The auxiliary forces Tshisekedi has relied on further underscore the weakness of the Congolese army: alongside European military contractors—288 of whom swiftly surrendered—the DRC has deployed barely trained local militias known as Wazalendo, supposedly working in conjunction with the world’s longest-running UN peacekeeping operation and a southern african force.
Still, for the moment, the chances of the current rebel alliance taking over Kinshasa seem slim. In 1996, the end of the Cold War had radically altered the dynamics propping up a generation of African despots. Mobutu’s long-standing Western supporters were tired of his corruption and brutality. Neighboring countries were exasperated by his destabilizing impact on the region and ready to rally behind the Kabila’s rebels. What’s more, Mobutu, who had withdrawn to his palace in Gbadolite, was a sick man: he died of prostate cancer less than four months after fleeing the country.
This time around, none of those dynamics are present. Although there are lingering questions about the legitimacy of Tshisekedi’s first election victory in 2018, his reelection, in late 2023, was accepted internationally as largely credible. In late February, he announced plans to set up a government of national unity, in a clear attempt to win over opposition parties angered by the nepotism and incompetence that has characterized his administration, who might be tempted to try and oust him.
Moreover, there is no coalition of African states backing the rebel alliance, as there was in 1996. The position of Uganda, which was a key Rwandan partner in the earlier war, is the most ambiguous. Soon after the M23’s assault on Goma began 2,000 Ugandan forces crossed into the DRC near Butembo and Lubero, 150 miles north of the city, raising fears that Uganda was joining forces with Rwanda. But Ugandan troops had already gone into the DRC in late 2021 at Tshisekedi’s invitation to deal with an Islamist group. And relations between Kagame and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni have been chilly for decades. Despite a series of characteristically excited tweets by General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, Museveni’s son and the head of the land forces, threatening to attack the DRC town of Bunia and claim the length of DRC’s border with his country Uganda may simply be marking out what it regards as its Congolese backyard to keep it off limits to the M23.
Angola, Burundi, and Zimbabwe are certainly unlikely to back Rwanda The 12,000 troops Burundi had stationed in South Kivu to support the Congolese army are now withdrawing, but there is little love lost between Rwanda and Burundi. As for Angola and Zimbabwe, they both sided with the DRC in 1998 when Rwanda launched the Second Congo War, aimed at ousting Kabila. Although Angola has brokered peace talks between Rwanda and the DRC for the last three years, its relations with Rwanda are strained. Kagame refused to turn up to sign a peace deal with Tshisekedi in Luanda, Angola, in December, and Angolan President João Lourenço has indicated he no longer intends to play a mediating role.
Yet even as Rwanda appears, so far, to be going solo, it has also met with very little regional resistance. Some African leaders have undoubtedly been dismayed by Kigali’s aggression, with its obvious echoes of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. But there is not much that East African nations can or want to do about it, given the state of their own military forces. Consider what happened to South Africa, which saw 14 of its peacekeepers killed in the M23 attack on Goma and then signed a truce allowing its remaining contingent to be disarmed and cantoned by the M23 and the Rwandan Defense Forces. “The last time South African troops were captured or confined in large numbers was during World War II,” said Darren Olivier, director of the African Defence Review.
The response of multilateral bodies such as the African Union, the East African Community, and the South African Development Community has also been decidedly limp. At an early February summit in Tanzania, EAC and SADC leaders notably failed to join the UN Security Council in demanding that Rwandan forces withdraw from eastern Congo. They later endorsed the resumption of peace negotiations under the aegis of three retired African leaders. The slogan “African solutions to African problems” has never looked more threadbare.
THE WAFFLING WEST
With African governments seemingly overwhelmed by events, the West’s response has become critical. Back in 2012, when an earlier iteration of the M23 entered Goma, stiff Western resistance proved decisive. Key donor nations, along with the World Bank, suspended $240 million in aid to Rwanda, putting a squeeze on Kigali that effectively ended the crisis: M23 fighters dispersed to camps in Rwanda and Uganda within a matter of months. Western aid subsequently resumed. But donor countries have dithered over applying effective pressure this time around, and Kagame has taken advantage of those delays to press home his advantage on the ground.
Take the United States. The timing of the assault on Goma, which coincided with the arrival of the second Trump administration, is unlikely to have been a coincidence. Previously, no Western official was more bracingly critical of Rwanda’s support for the M23 and its troops’ presence in DRC than President Joe Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken. By January, however, Washington was distracted, and Kagame knew that Trump was unlikely to have the same human rights priorities as his Democrat predecessor. Moreover, by suspending all U.S. global aid, the Trump administration had momentarily removed a potential lever. On February 20, the U.S. Treasury finally sanctioned Rwandan government minister and former army chief James Kabarebe, chief military architect of every Rwandan incursion into DRC since the 1990s, along with M23 spokesman Lawrence Kanyuka Kingston. The move represents the severest Western reaction to date, but by the time it was unveiled, the M23 was already firmly ensconced in Bukavu.
Europe has also struggled to muster a meaningful response. Germany has suspended aid talks with Rwanda, and the United Kingdom has also paused both aid and defense cooperation. But Luxembourg—which has a deal to develop Kigali as a financial center—has unilaterally blocked tough sanctions by the European Union itself, highlighting how easily the narrow interests of individual European states can undermine action. Meanwhile, the M23 operation has acquired a seemingly unstoppable momentum. According to veteran Congo analyst Stephanie Wolters, “Kagame took a calculated risk when the M23 took Goma and Bukavu, and he’s now going to run with it.”
For the Congolese government, the ineffective Western responses follow a dismaying pattern. Decades of development support and military aid to Rwanda, along with the West’s heavy reliance on Rwandan forces for UN peacekeeping operations, have enabled one of Africa’s smallest and poorest countries to turn its army into one of the most lethal in sub-Saharan Africa. Now that military capacity is being put to destructive, self-serving use. During a visit to London in mid-February, DRC Foreign Minister Thérèse Kayikwamba Wagner warned, “This is a Rwanda that is seeking violent regime change.”
CARVE OR CONQUER
The Rwandan government is nonetheless paying a high price for its latest Congo adventure. Satellite imagery shows that Kigali’s Kanombe military cemetery has added more than 600 graves in the last three years, while intelligence sources estimate that Rwanda Defense Force casualties may run into the “thousands.” Funeral notices for Rwandan soldiers are regularly published on Facebook pages run by anti-government activists in exile, while bereaved families post “RIP” tributes to these fresh-faced young men, many of them only recently recruited, on TikTok, accompanied by emojis of weeping faces and sounds of sobbing. Members of the Rwandan diaspora are regularly contacted by army deserters asking for help. They say these men feel their small country has been endlessly at war and do not see the rationale for the latest military intervention.
But Kagame, who claimed 99.18 percent of the vote in last year’s elections, has maneuvered himself over three decades into a position where he is largely immune to dips in public support. A generation of independent journalists were first either silenced, killed or forced into exile; the YouTubers and citizen journalists who took their place now languish in jail. Both the judiciary and civil society have been steadily politicized. In this highly controlled context, a stream of returning body bags has minimal impact. “Casualties do not deter Kagame,” says a former Rwandan military commander.
Of course, Rwanda may decide that it is enough to Balkanize eastern Congo, leaving this swathe of the country nominally under Kinshasa but with Kigali effectively controlling its cities and its mineral-rich economy via a local puppet administration. This outcome, in itself, would have serious consequences for DRC, setting a precedent other resource-rich parts of this giant country might seek to emulate and destabilising the entire region. As the M23 continues its advance, what was previously unthinkable becomes possible. There are growing signs that Kagame might aim for more.
Sultani Makenga, the Congolese Tutsi in charge of M23 military operations in 2012 and 2013, has been seen only sporadically in public since Goma’s fall. Instead, Corneille Nangaa, leader of the Congo River Alliance, has become the public face of the offensive. Nangaa comes from Haut-Uélé Province, near Congo’s border with Sudan, and is not a Tutsi. He can therefore more credibly give the Rwanda-backed rebels the veneer of a national Congolese movement with a broad agenda, rather than appearing to defend only the narrow interests of Congolese Tutsis. His backers will hope those factors play in their favor as the rebels advance, with the M23 tapping into growing widespread popular dismay at the disorganization, weakness, and corruption of Tshisekedi’s administration.
Nangaa will still struggle to muster popular support. Every Congolese knows that during his time as director of Congo’s Electoral Commission, he helped bring about Tshisekedi’s controversial 2018 election win. But a more independent candidate would represent a risk for Kigali, as it learned three decades ago with Laurent Kabila, who it unsuccessfully attempted to topple the year after installing him as president of DRC. “The decision-makers in Rwanda may come to the conclusion that regime change is more trouble than it’s worth,” says Wolters. “It will mean negotiating with a whole new leadership, after all, and whoever is installed risks being rejected by the Congolese population, while the international community will be hostile. Rwanda may accordingly decide to hang back and build on its gains in the east.”
Peering over the abyss of a looming third Congo War, Rwanda must decide how far it intends to reshape the geography of the African Great Lakes: whether to settle for a de facto Kivu protectorate or attempt, yet again, to engineer a new government with a benevolent eye to Kinshasa-Kigali resource sharing. For the inhabitants of what is now the world’s most populous Francophone country, the cost of either option is likely to be high, and they know they may not be able to count on their African neighbors, or the West, to support them.
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