Solidarity with Congo Requires Avoiding the Traps of Oversimplification

TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH BY LÉOPOLD LAMBERT

Since late 2023, calls for solidarity with the Congo, particularly from the diaspora, have become increasingly pressing. Countless social media posts talk about hundreds of thousands—even millions—of killings in Kivu, genocide, a Rwandan invasion, Western extractivism… This text, commissioned from Onesphore Sematumba, who fled Goma a few hours before the invasion of the city by the M23, is the first outcome of our long learning process of a “political blind spot”—obscured by our understanding of the Great Lake region through an imaginary mostly influenced by the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda. We wanted a reference text that would allow us to unravel the multiple layers of complexity in the situation, which Onesphore has generously provided.

The Return of the M23 ///
Since November 2021, the March 23 rebellion—better known as M23—has resurfaced in Kivu in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), bordering Rwanda and Uganda. Defeated in 2013 by military pressure from the Congolese army and an intervention brigade from the UN Mission in the DRC (MONUSCO), in combination with strong diplomatic pressure on Rwanda (which was already accused at the time of supporting the group), the M23 disintegrated shortly before its fighters and political leaders went into exile in Uganda and Rwanda. Since returning to Congolese territory from the Virunga National Park region on the borders of Uganda, Rwanda, and the DRC, the well-structured and heavily armed M23 quickly gained the upper hand over the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC), once again benefiting from strong support from Kigali. At that time, FARDC was undermined by structural problems such as lack of training, disparity in command, low pay for troops, corruption, and profiteering by officers.

Faced with the obvious ineffectiveness of this army, Félix Tshisekedi quickly resorted to external military support. In 2023, the regional bloc of the East African Community (EAC), which the DRC had joined a few months earlier, deployed a regional force (EACRF) made up of Burundian, Kenyan, Ugandan, and South Sudanese contingents under Kenyan leadership. The EACRF, which was deployed with difficulty, did not remain on Congolese soil for long. President Tshisekedi was eager to see results against the M23 in an election year where he was running for a second term. The security problems in the east—of which the M23 rebellion is only one aspect—were the president’s Achilles’ heel in the face of his rivals.

Accused of failing to achieve results and of being complacent towards the rebels, the EACRF was dismissed in December 2023 and replaced with short notice by SAMIRDC, a military mission of the Southern African Development Community (SADC). The SADC is led by South Africans and also comprises of contingents from Malawi and Tanzania, the latter two groups which are by far the most numerous. The Burundian contingents—whose state has terrible relations with Rwanda—were spared the humiliation of the EACRF and continued their support alongside the SAMIRDC. The latter was defeated in January 2025 after the battle of Goma, the capital of the North Kivu province, a strategic city that Tshisekedi had turned into an impregnable citadel opposite Gisenyi, the Rwandan border town just a stone’s throw away.

The Congolese president spared no expenses or alliances to prevent Goma from falling. In addition to these state contingents, he invested millions of euros in recruiting Romanian and French mercenaries and remobilized armed groups and ethnic militias roaming the region to form the Wazalendo (“Patriots” in Swahili). But he also called on the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a rebellion against Paul Kagame’s regime formed by former organizers of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in their country. This heterogeneous collection of armed actors collapsed on January 27, 2025, after a lightning war that left thousands dead in the city of Goma, which has since been plunged into a multifaceted crisis of nighttime insecurity. There has been cash shortages following the closure of local bank branches by Kinshasa, and isolation, with the airport out of service following clashes there before the city fell. Caught in the trap, the defeated SAMIRDC contingents negotiated and obtained their exit by land through Rwanda. The first soldiers left on April 28, after three months of virtual captivity in the city held by the M23.

The capture of Goma in late January, followed by the fall of Bukavu in mid-February, the capital of South Kivu, reawakened slumbering African diplomacy and reignited the rest of the world’s interest in this highly unstable but resource-rich region. Of all the mediators and other facilitators, Qatar made a strong impression in a very short time. On March 18, the emir brought together Presidents Kagame and Tshisekedi in Doha—whose relations are frosty—after several months of intense but discreet negotiations. In the wake of this, Doha received delegations from the Kinshasa government and the M23 for negotiations that are still ongoing at the time of this writing. The US, for its part, has initiated contacts between Rwanda and the DRC that could lead to economic cooperation agreements in the region.

This convergence of interests on the “eastern question” in the DRC should have been an opportunity to resolve it once and for all, as promised by the Congolese president.”

It would have been crucial to avoid the usual clichés and oversimplifications that make this crisis an ethnic problem—of which the genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda was only an acute manifestation—and of these wars of competition and greed for minerals.

However, the irony is that each “school of thought” on the matter adopts one of these aspects and clings to it, without taking into account the intertwining causes and effects, as well as the complexity and dimensions of a crisis that has been going on for more than three decades.

A Cycle of Violence, a Never-Ending Crisis ///
The 2021 version of the M23 is the fourth incarnation of a cycle of rebel movements that have been destabilizing eastern DRC since the 1990s, succeeding groups such as the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (AFDL) led by Laurent-Désiré Kabila from 1996, which overthrew President Mobutu after 25 years in power; the Congolese Rally for Democracy from 1998 (RCD), which saw Kabila’s former allies turn against him; the National Congress for the Defense of the People from 2009 (CNDP); and the first version of the M23 starting 2012. Each time, movements consisting mainly of Congolese Tutsi, often with the support of Rwanda, emerged under a new name but retained similar demands and close ties to complex regional dynamics, notably the alleged involvement of Rwanda (and sometimes Uganda) and the issue of Rwandophone communities, particularly the Tutsi of Kivu. Some political leaders and military commanders have even been part of these successive movements, forming a kind of base for continuity in their transfer of power. Their ideological and geographical proximity to Rwanda means that their demands generally reflect Kigali’s concerns.

The protection of Kinyarwanda-speaking communities, and particularly that of the Tutsi, has regularly been at the forefront of these rebellions’ demands. This protection has two main aspects: the return of refugees living in camps in neighboring countries, particularly Uganda and Rwanda, some of whom have been there for several years; and the fight against the FDLR, which operates in eastern DRC and collaborates intermittently with the various regimes in Kinshasa whenever the latter is in need of support. The FDLR issue is particularly sensitive for Rwanda, as this movement, initially composed of officers and political dignitaries from the former Hutu government of Juvénal Habyarimana, aims to regain the power it lost following the offensive by the 1994 Tutsi rebellion of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, with the support of Uganda. Kigali also accuses the FDLR of perpetuating genocidal ideology and their dreams of returning to Rwanda to complete the genocide that began three decades ago.

However, the FDLR issue is one of the most controversial in this complex crisis. For some, including Kinshasa, the Hutu fighters—of whom only a thousand or at most 2,500 remain according to sources—no longer pose an existential threat to the excellent Rwandan army, one of the best in the region. For proponents of this understanding of the limited FDLR threat, the latter has become a useful pretext, which Rwanda hides behind to wage wars whose real motivations are purely mercenary. Some officials have even gone so far as to sarcastically state that when the Rwandan authorities refer to the FDLR, they are in fact referring to minerals in eastern Congo.

For the M23 and Rwanda however, the Hutu rebels are a major threat to the security of Rwanda and the Congolese people, particularly the Tutsi—some of whom have been exiled to Rwanda following the presence and abuses of former genocide perpetrators in Congo. Kigali believes that the threat posed by the FDLR should not be assessed in terms of their numbers, but rather in terms of the spread of genocidal ideology in the region. The involvement of FDLR elements in the war alongside the FARDC and the Burundian army—controlled by a government dominated by Hutus—is a source of exasperation for Rwandans, who denounce the strengthening of the operational and financial capacities of Hutu rebels by Kinshasa.

The socio-economic marginalization of eastern Congo and unequal access to resources are also among the grievances of the M23 and its predecessors. This issue has been analyzed from various angles, ranging from the most caricatural to the most absurd—but always with astonishing naivety. However, when looking at the issue of poor resource distribution as a whole, it is clear that it is not unique to the east. The Congolese state has remained highly centralized despite a constitution that has advocated strong decentralization since 2006. By demanding more responsibilities at the local level and less dependence on the central government in Kinshasa, even proposing a transition to federalism, the M23 is suspected of advocating the balkanization of the country for the benefit of Rwanda, a tune that Kinshasa regularly sings to mobilize the Congolese against the “Rwandan threat.”

The issue of balkanization goes hand-in-hand with the question of “plundering” Congo’s minerals, which is often misrepresented and oversimplified by “experts” on the Congolese crisis as the root cause of the cycles of war in our part of the world. It is true that the soil in eastern DRC is rich in strategic minerals such as columbite-tantalite, which is so valuable to the electronics industry and of which the Rubaya mine, not far from the town of Masisi, contains a large proportion of the world’s reserves. It is also true about tin, which is mined by the US company Alphamin in the Walikale territory, and gold in South Kivu, among other minerals. However, even if the presence of mineral deposits is undoubtedly a factor exacerbating the crisis—in that the group that controls them has access to more funding to strengthen its capacity in terms of equipment and recruitment—minerals are not the trigger for these wars. In the case of the current war with M23, the rebels operated without controlling a single mining site until April 2024. But since taking Rubaya, the M23 has had access to substantial sources of income that are likely to enable it to remain in the field for a long time to come.

Levels of Complexity ///
To say that the ongoing crisis in eastern DRC is complex may seem trivial. However, all mediators and analysts involved should truly convince themselves that it is, so as not to repeat the mistakes of the past.

The first level of complexity lies in the scale of actions and actors, coupled with their interpenetration. The problems raised by the M23 and most of the armed groups in eastern DRC are primarily rooted in the local context, in the governance of the communities themselves.

Faced with a central state that claims to be everywhere but is nowhere, ethnic communities have developed parallel, marginal yet reassuring, protection mechanisms.

The M23 and its predecessors carry the demands of the Tutsi, but they are opposed by other community groups that demand protection of their land, often against neighboring and rival communities—and not solely out of patriotic fervor against the M23 and Rwanda. This includes grievances as diverse as the right to nationality, access to land and power, and identity issues.

The second level is national and raises the question of the Congolese central government’s ability to manage its territory, ensure its overall security, and protect the country’s borders and the Congolese people within those borders. At this level, it is necessary to analyze economic and social policies, key issues relating to the army, the police, and the justice system, as well as problems related to the rights, duties, and freedoms of all.

The third level is regional. The M23 crisis proves how transnational the challenges in the region are, and how they function interconnectedly. The impunity enjoyed by the FDLR is a consequence and extension of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994. Successive Congolese governments have used them for years as auxiliaries whenever faced with rebellion from the east; as a result, they enjoy passive protection from Kinshasa. This situation creates serious antagonism in inter-state relations in the region, with different countries suspecting their neighbors of genocidal intentions. This regional aspect is also economic; in this region where borders are porous and identities transnational, trade has been going on for centuries. However, cyclical wars involving neighboring countries have marred this trade and given rise to the concept of resource plundering, with slogans such as “blood minerals” and “no blood on my cell phone.” Projects and programs have even been developed to make sites “green” or “red” in a vain attempt to clean up the minerals extracted from a land where men continue to fight each other. The various mediation efforts, and there are many, should avoid the biggest pitfall: simplifying a dramatically complex situation. ■