Oct 1917 min read

Endless Rumble in the Jungle: Is Peace in the D.R. Congo Possible?

25th May 1994. Goma, Zaire. Machine guns, assault rifles and ammunition provided by the French government are unloaded by Zairian soldiers, transported across the Rwandan border, and delivered to the Hutu military. Hundreds of thousands of Tutsi women had been raped by this point in the 100-day genocide, with thousands of others soon to be massacred. The French consul in Goma attempted to justify the shipments in referencing a previous contract. According to Human Rights Watch, however, the weapons supplied by Paris to the Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR) violated a UN arms embargo that had come into force on 17 May. By mid-July 1994, when the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (FPR) had control of Kigali, 800,000 people were dead.

The Rwandan genocide traumatised a generation. Its aftermath erupted into an ongoing conflict in East Africa that has killed six million people, with much of today’s violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), formerly Zaire. A mix of colonial legacy, corruption, ethnic tensions, geopolitical rivalries, and a vast wealth of natural resources have caused the region to be infested with armed groups. The abundance of cassiterite, gold and coltan in particular offer a colossal supply of wealth to whoever controls the territory – needless to say, the sovereignty of the DRC is rarely respected.

The Second Congo War, also called Africa’s Great War, was the deadliest conflict since World War Two – it officially ended in 2003 but its aftermath has kept the region embroiled in violent instability.

Omar Khan

It began with a Rwandan invasion of the DRC in the late 1990s – today, Kinshasa and Kigali, under Presidents Félix Tshisekedi and Paul Kagame respectively, are once again at loggerheads primarily over this year’s resurgence of the M23 offensive.

On 30th November 2022, the rebel group M23 “arbitrarily executed” at least 131 civilians in North Kivu, Eastern DRC, including 12 children, according to the UN’s MONUSCO mission. The report said the violence “was carried out as part of a campaign of murders, rapes, kidnappings and looting” as reprisals. Less than a week later, the East African Community (EAC) announced peace talks between the DRC government and some 50 armed groups to be held in Goma and Bunia in January 2023, following “inter-Congolese dialogues” held in Kenya. M23 will not participate.

This winter also saw the deployment of Kenyan troops as part of an EAC mission to support the Congolese government’s fight against the scores of militias competing for the country’s rich mineral wealth. The DRC only joined the EAC in March. Rwanda, though a member, will not participate as Kinshasa-Kigali relations have deteriorated. As the situation escalates, many will look to the scheduled talks as an indication of the region’s future.

To assess whether January’s peace talks have any chance at success, it is important to understand the broader context of the conflicts waging in eastern DRC, particularly the role of foreign powers. Given the interconnected histories of the Great Lakes nations, it is hard to discuss one in isolation. What caused the conflict in the DRC? Why has the violence lasted so long? And is there any genuine hope for peace?

Source : Human Rights Watch

Endless Rumble in the Jungle: Is Peace in the D.R. Congo Possible? Shaking Hands with the Devil

The Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) extensive intervention in the crisis-ridden Congolese politics of the 1960s, as detailed in recently declassified documents, enabled the young Ngbandi military officer Joseph-Désiré Mobutu and his allies, the Binza Group, to seize power in 1965, four years after allowing the assassination of independence leader Patrice Lumumba. With US and broader Western support, Mobutu Sese Seko ruled Zaire (as they were both known from 1971) as a kleptocratic, one-party dictatorship. Opposition movements gained momentum after the Cold War ended with the concurrent Great Lakes refugee crisis exacerbating ethnic violence. Eventually in 1996, Rwanda, Uganda and Angola intervened to help the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (AFDL) wage the First Congo War against Mobutu’s regime. But how did regional politics get to this point?

On 1st November 1959, Dominique Mbonyumutwa, an activist in the Party of the Hutu Emancipation Movement (PARMEHUTU) was attacked in Gitarama Province, Rwanda, sparking a revolution that overthrew the Tutsi mwami (king), saw independence from Belgium, and established a Hutu-ma- jority republic under Grégoire Kayibanda in 1962. Colonial rule over Rwanda (first by the Germans in the 1890s) was exerted through the existing power structures of the mwami’s kingdom – upon arrival, Europeans identified Hutus and Tutsis as separate races despite theories that these were class (not ethnic) labels. Irrespective of this, the division was institutionalised under tough Belgian rule as Rwandans’ physical characteristics (e.g. height, skulls, nose size) were measured and used to categorise them, as Hutu or Tutsi. Belgium issued identity cards to enforce their social order. As class labels, Tutsi referred to landowning nobles and Hutus as workers. Under Belgian rule, Hutus were made to harvest coffee (and other resources), work that was overseen by Tutsi enforcers – Tutsis were consequently favoured in colonial society. A UN directive, after the Second World War, to prepare Rwanda for majority rule saw a rapid wave of social reforms aimed at Hutu emancipation. Amid competition between now-Belgian-favoured PARMEHUTU and the Tutsi, pro-monarchy Rwandese National Union (UNAR), Mbonyumutwa was attacked. Belgium (now having firmly switched sides) intervened militarily during the revolution to ensure the termination of the monarchy and arrange elections that Kayibanda used to establish an independent, de facto one-party republic. Over 300,000 Tutsi refugees fled in mass exodus, many to Burundi and Uganda from where armed groups, labelled inyenzi (cockroaches) by the Hutu government, started launching attacks on the new FAR. This set the foundations for the Congo wars.

Omar Khan

Burundi’s monarchy initially survived its independence transition. Unlike in Rwanda to the north, the Burundian mwami was ethnically Ganwa (neither Hutu nor Tutsi) – as the Belgian territory Ruanda-Urundi broke into the two separate states in 1962, Burundi became an independent consti- tutional monarchy. Hutu-Tutsi violence was endemic. The assassination of the Hutu prime minister in January 1965 led to the monarchy’s abolition and the seizure of power by Michel Micombero, a Tutsi nationalist dictator in charge during the Ikiza (catastrophe), genocidal violence in 1972 that killed 200,000 Hutus. In 1973, Juvénal Habyarimana toppled Kayibanda in Rwanda – the Ikiza disabled any attempt at community cohesion. Under Habyarimana’s one-party rule, the prominent Akazu, a clique of influential figures who championed the extreme Hutu Power ideology, grew in power, led most infamously by Colonel Théoneste Bagosora and First Lady Agathe Habyarimana. Catalysing the Congo conflicts was the Rwandan Civil War triggered by an FPR invasion in 1990 – to under- stand this, it is important to consider the situation across the northern border with Uganda.

Idi Amin fled Kampala on 11th April 1979 as Tanzanian forces captured the city, accompanied by Ugandan rebels opposed to the despot and self-styled “conqueror of the British Empire”. Chief among these rebels were former President Milton Obote and head of the Front for National Salvation (FRONASA), Yoweri Museveni. When Museveni contested Obote’s victory in flawed elections in 1980, he was joined by leaders of the Rwandese Alliance for National Unity (RANU) in launching an insurgency. Recall that hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Tutsi refugees had escaped to Uganda two decades earlier. Among those Tutsis that fought with FRONASA as part of the combined an- ti-Amin forces were Fred Rwigyema and Paul Kagame who grew up together in the same refugee camp. These men shaped Rwanda’s fate. Rwigyema and Kagame, active members of RANU, were among the few to join Museveni at the start of the Ugandan Bush War – they consequently held high positions in the eventual National Resistance Army (NRA) that defeated government forces in 1986. Now as president, Museveni came under pressure for his close alliance with the Rwandan Tutsis. RANU (rebranded the FPR) had formed with the intent of repatriating the refugees – in the late 1980s, this plan was accelerated.

French soldiers were deployed to support Habyarimana’s FAR against the FPR which invaded Rwanda on 1 October 1990. Rwigyema was among the first killed. The Akazu grew in influence as the guerrilla war waged on – Bagosora oversaw the growth and supply of the Interahamwe, a loosely-connected, Hutu extremist paramilitary group. Peace came tentatively with the Arusha Accords in 1993 – then on 4 April 1994, Habyarimana’s plane was shot out of the sky. The culprit remains unknown. Bagosora and the Akazu seized power in Kigali, the FPR restarted the war, and a Hutu extremist radio station issued the genocidal order to “cut the tall trees” unleashing unthinkable violence across the country. The UN’s mission chief Roméo Dallaire later said: “I know there is a God because in Rwanda I shook hands with the devil.” The genocide ended with the FPR capture of Kigali causing hundreds of thousands of Hutus to flee in mass exodus, most to Zaire, from where armed groups started launching attacks on Kagame’s new government. In this context, the Congo wars broke out.

Endless Rumble in the Jungle: Is Peace in the D.R. Congo Possible?

Many of the nation-building efforts Mobutu made, such as expanding education and building the Inga dams, started to unravel fast in the 1990s. Although he had been careful during his hard-line rule to prevent any one ethnic group from representing more than a quarter of the military and to promote the unifying “Zairian” identity, by 1996, ethnic violence, especially in the northeast, escalated. Banyamulenge (Congolese Tutsis) were already at odds with other communities in Kivu – the refugee influx of mostly Rwandan Hutu exacerbated tensions. Mobutu, along with France, had been a close ally of the Hutu government but was unable to control the conflict breaking out between the new Tutsi leadership in Kigali and the ex-FAR and Interahamwe forces based in Zairian refugee camps. A Banyamulenge rebellion against Mobutu in 1996 created the conditions for Kagame’s Rwanda and Museveni’s Uganda to invade. These foreign powers were instrumental in the multi-ethnic AFDL’s coalescence under leftist Luba leader Laurent-Désiré Kabila.

Angola’s government, under José Eduardo dos Santos’ MPLA, intervened on the side of the AFDL following years of Mobutu’s support for UNITA (with which the communist MPLA was at war). Sudan’s government supported Mobutu to prevent South Sudanese rebel group, the SPLA, from using Zaire as a safe haven. Uganda also hunted Sudanese-backed Islamist rebels, the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF). French support for the Zairian Armed Forces (FAZ), accompanied by mercenaries, was limited under US pressure. Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Burundi (among others) also provided support to the AFDL which by May 1997 had mostly defeated the FAZ. Horrific war crimes were committed by all parties. Mobutu fled on 16 May, and Kabila became president the next day. Under Kabila’s (and his son’s) governance, the now-renamed DR Congo would fall into violent chaos.

‘I’m Not a Warlord’

Source: Foreign Policy

“When the M23 comes, they kill people,” explained a community leader at a refugee camp in Kanyaruchinya, north of Goma, in December 2022. Another man told journalists: “We want to go home to look for food. The government needs to decide between negotiation and war.”

Omar Khan

Negotiation or war. A choice that should be simple. The threat of a Rwandan military incursion in the DRC has not been as high as it is now (2022) since 1998. Tshisekedi, who became president in 2019 after Joseph Kabila (son of Laurent-Désiré) stepped down, maintains that Kigali is assisting the M23 rebels. In August 2022, the UN confirmed it had “solid evidence” of Rwandan troops supporting M23. Kagame denies this. The situation today may be very different to that of the late 1990s, but their link remains important. It is well known that regional powers use militias as proxies in the DRC – to understand why, it is necessary to recall one of recent history’s bloodiest conflicts.

The Second Congo War began when Banyamulenge soldiers defected from the DRC military in August 1998 and formed the Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD) rebel group. Supporting these anti-Kabila rebels was the pretext Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi used to invade. But if these coun- tries fought to put Kabila in power just one year prior, what changed? Ex-FAR, Interahamwe and other Hutu-aligned militias were unimpeded by Kabila’s victory over Mobutu – indeed, the new president tried to dissociate himself from the Tutsi-Hutu conflict. When he fired his chief of staff, James Kaberebe, a Rwandan, in July 1998 (precipitating the RCD defection), he inadvertently condemned his country to years of ferocious violence and suffering.

The fall of Kitona, Matadi and the Inga dams in just a few days in August 1998 put the Rwan- dan-Ugandan side in prime position. Evocative of the First World War, however, Kabila’s alliances with other African states dragged the rest of the continent into the conflict. Angola, Zimbabwe, and Namibia, who shared Kabila’s leftist leanings, intervened on his behalf, sending troops and supplies – Rwanda intensified its support for UNITA rebels (to whom, Namibian President Sam Nujoma’s SWAPO was also opposed). While Chad backed Kabila at the behest of France, Sudan’s involvement was primarily in support of anti-Ugandan groups including the Islamist ADF and Joseph Kony’s Christian “cult-like” Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). The war became a bloody stalemate. More importantly, a tangled web of proxy militias now plagued the region.

The Rwandan-backed RCD fractured into various factions while Uganda backed an alternative rebel group, the Movement for the Liberation of the Congo (MLC). Kigali-Kampala relations deteriorated into violence – Rwandan and Ugandan soldiers briefly fought each other in diamond-rich Kisan- gani in June 2000. Pierre Buyoya, the Tutsi dictator of Burundi, was focused on the CNDD-FDD and FROLINA, Hutu groups engaged in the concurrent Burundian Civil War. The Sun City and Pretoria agreements signed in 2002, after Kabila was killed by his own child soldier bodyguard in January 2001 and succeeded by his son, saw Rwandan-allied nations withdraw. Despite the international community considering the conflict over in 2003, Kivu was quickly overwhelmed by clashes between the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR; consisting of ex-FAR, Interahamwe and other Hutu génocidaire groups) and RCD factions (eventually evolving into the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP)) led prominently by “renegade” general Laurent Nkunda. Nkunda, who told the New York Times in 2007, “I’m not a warlord...I’m a liberator of the people,” while asserting that the “only reply to war and ammunition is war and ammunition,” received (alleged) Rwandan support. Kinshasa and the UN’s MONUC mission (later MONUSCO) failed to maintain order as the CNDP-FDLR conflict saw horrendous war crimes committed. On 23 January 2009, Nkunda was arrested, surprisingly in Rwanda.

Endless Rumble in the Jungle: Is Peace in the D.R. Congo Possible?

Kagame now saw his proxy as a liability and agreed (for the first time) with Joseph Kabila on a joint operation called Umoja Wetu to combat FDLR. On 23 March 2009, the CNDP, then led by Bosco Ntaganda, signed a peace deal with the DRC government. In 2012, ex-CNDP fighters claimed Kinshasa was reneging on the deal and defected, forming the March 23 (M23) Movement (under the alleged leadership of Ntaganda) and capturing the North Kivu capital, Goma. Peace talks accompanied M23 withdrawing and effectively ending the rebellion in 2013. A UN report established that Rwanda was backing them.

On the Brink... Again

“We do what we must do,” Kagame told the Rwandan parliament in February 2022, “with or without the consent of others.” Calling regional relations tense at the moment is woefully underplaying the situation. By the end of this year, as part of an EAC mission, Kenyan, Ugandan, South Sudanese, and Burundian troops will have deployed to the DRC, the largest military intervention in twenty years. As ever, though, the context is very significant.

Source: People’s Daily

At the time of Kagame’s speech on 8 February suggesting a Rwandan incursion without Tshisekedi’s consent (nominally to combat the FDLR which Kagame alleged had links to the ADF), Uganda and Burundi were already conducting military operations in the DRC – months before the recent EAC deployment was even on the table. Bombings in Kampala in November 2021 were condemned by Museveni as ADF terrorist attacks; that month, after bilateral discussions, Tshisekedi allowed his Ugandan counterpart to send thousands of troops into the eastern DRC where the ADF (whose largest faction swore allegiance to ISIS in 2019) has been based since the Congo wars. Uganda’s incursion greatly annoyed Kagame.

Omar Khan

Rwandan-Ugandan relations hit their nadir in February 2019 when Kigali shut the crucial Gatuna border crossing, disrupting trade across the region. This followed years of economic rivalry and hostility between Kagame and Museveni who exchanged accusations about their respectively poor responses to the ADF. Museveni’s tacit support for the Rwandan National Congress (RNC), a Tutsi opposition group with an armed unit in the DRC, infuriated Kagame. Most importantly, the two autocrats were locked in a bitter economic struggle, competing over: oil reserves in Lake Albert, mining rights, gold smuggling routes, and Uganda’s mega-road project offering an alternative to the Gatuna crossing.

A surface-level détente was reached this year, mediated by Museveni’s son (who referred to Kagame as his “uncle” in a Tweet in January). But mixed messages about Kampala’s military operation, suspected of prioritising Uganda’s economic interests alongside the counter-ADF insurgency, and the shocking resurgence of M23 continue to strain the presidents’ relationship.

If 40 Congolese soldiers being killed, allegedly by M23, on 24 January 2022 in Nyesisi (suspiciously close to Ugandan roadworks) was not enough, shooting down a UN peacekeeping helicopter in March certainly proved that the rebel group were back. After a decade in the dark, M23 resurged in November 2021. Uganda was shocked – both Kampala and Kigali had (allegedly) backed the original M23 offensive, but Rwanda’s current unilateral support now threatened the entire region. Tshisekedi’s failures to enact the 2013 peace treaty terms with all M23 factions precipitated the resurgence spearheaded by rebel leaders Bertrand Bisimwa and Sultani Makenga. Some observers suspect that Tshisekedi will use the rebellion as a way of postponing the 2023 Congolese election. M23 took territory fast over the summer with many fearing an encroachment on Goma soon.

The EAC force will see regional forces deployed specifically to target armed groups in the region: Burundi will pursue the anti-Gitega RED-Tabara militia in South Kivu; South Sudan will combat what is left of the LRA; Uganda will continue its counterinsurgency against the ADF; and Kenya will focus on rebels in North Kivu, where M23 is based. This is a highly risky operation – all partaking nations have vested economic interests to develop and protect in the DRC. With Kigali-Kinshasa relations teetering on the brink of all-out conflict and given the history of combating rebels in this region, it seems unlikely this deployment will bring stability any time soon.

Blood Phones

The tantalum in your phone almost certainly came from the DRC. Most of the world’s 3T minerals are mined in this region. Smelted 3T minerals, tantalum (from coltan), tin (from cassiterite) and tungsten, are essential for the manufacture of mobile phones, computers, automotive systems, and many other electronics. Additionally, the immense quantities of gold, diamonds, cocoa, timber, and charcoal contribute to the mind-boggling $24 trillion estimated worth of the DRC’s untapped resources. Unfortunately, though, the nation’s greatest asset is also its curse. As a local official in Ituri province (north of the Kivus) reported: “There is never a lack of armed groups. It never stops as there is always a resource for them.”

Endless Rumble in the Jungle: Is Peace in the D.R. Congo Possible?

Source: The Seattle Globalist

It never stops. To get an insight into the power of these resources, consider coltan and gold, in particular. Up to 22 tonnes of gold is mined in the DRC every year - in 2018, only 56 kg were reported. Smuggling illegal Congolese gold is a vital source of income for Rwanda and Uganda. Indeed, working with an array of armed groups, both countries (as well as others like Burundi) use the DRC’s resources to fuel their own economies. For example, neither country has any indigenous diamonds yet have exported millions of dollars’ worth to the rest of the world. The armed groups operating the mines use the proceeds of smuggling to buy weapons and supplies. Regarding gold specifically, the US Treasury understands that over 90% of Congolese gold is smuggled through Rwanda and Uganda, primarily to the UAE, depriving the Congolese people of billions of dollars. 73% of the DRC’s 92 million people (third most populous in Africa) live on less than $1.90 a day. The crimes are flagrant. In 2018, Uganda reported 12 kg of domestic gold production and then exported over 25 tonnes in 2019 when the market rate was $45,000 per kilogram. Almost 13 tonnes of gold that entered the UAE was flagged as transiting through Rwanda, despite Kigali’s official figure of only 2,000 kg

Global Witness asserts that systems put in place to counter the trade in conflict minerals have them- selves been used to launder blood coltan. Working conditions at the mines, regardless of who operates them, are abysmal. Child labour and work-related injuries and deaths are common. The International Tin Supply Chain Initiative (ITSCI) was formed to verify that minerals used by the hundreds of companies that receive Congolese resources are conflict-free and not linked to child labour. Less than 20% of the 80 tonnes of tagged 3T minerals from Nziburu, South Kivu in early 2021 came from validated mines. Chris Huber, as another example of ITSCI’s failings, is a businessman who directly worked with militias in eastern DRC and laundered the minerals through the notoriously-secretive Swiss banking system - he is currently on trial, it is worth noting that being caught makes his case unique.

Omar Khan

Most of those guilty of aiding war crimes, enforcing horrific working conditions and impover- ishing the Congolese people are still free. Apple, Samsung, Intel, Nokia, Tesla, and Motorola are just some of the technology companies Global Witness identified as receiving smuggled conflict minerals from intermediaries in Dubai, Hong Kong, Austria, China and more. This is often the case: armed groups, corrupt politicians and shady businessmen adapt the process to work with whatever protections the international community puts in place. For instance, after the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act passed in the US Congress, militias relied more heavily on looting civilians’ homes and illegal gold extraction (in invalidated mining areas) to supplement their income. (Gold has been identified as being easier to smuggle than tantalum or tin).

Ultimately, Western consumer economies fuel instability in the eastern DRC and realistically very little will be done in response. If international systems designed to prevent conflict minerals being traded both legally and illegally have failed, the only solution must target the problem at its root. In a telling analogy, the approach of militias (many with foreign allegiances) and imperialists is not too far apart – addressing the impact of the latter, Patrice Lumumba once told a conference in Léopoldville (later Kinshasa) that “The colonialists care nothing for Africa for her own sake. They are attracted by African riches... For [them] all means are good if they help them to possess these riches.”

Of Glory and Dignity

There are over 100 armed groups in the region - here we have focused on the M23 conflict. In Ituri, foreign-backed militia groups have hijacked a centuries-old conflict between agriculturalist Lendu and pastoralist Hema communities. Since the Congo wars, Ituri has seen terrifying violence and currently, both Congolese groups (like the notorious CODECO) and transnational groups continue to fight over resources. As always, millions have been displaced and many made to suffer.

Mai-Mai militias, defined as self-defence groups, have been abundant in the eastern DRC for decades. Named for the belief that water can protect against bullets (in Swahili, water is “maji”), these informal and highly-adaptive groups are a dynamic part of the forever changing security scene in the region. As these militias recruit, split up, combine, combat each other, and work with the various rebel groups/foreign powers in the region, the people get caught in the middle. Ethnic cleansing, sexual violence and crimes against humanity are just as abundant in a region where the rule of law is practically non-existent. Any peaceful solution that somehow reconciles the scores of factions involved must surely deliver justice for the people.A cocoa farmer originally from Béni, North Kivu and born before independence told journalists after she fled an ADF attack on Bulongo in September: “We haven’t had peace in a long, long time. I cannot remember if we ever had.”

Another front of violence in the DRC (among the many that this article has not mentioned) is the ongoing Katanga insurgency. Located in the country’s south-east, Katanga is a mineral-rich region that declared independence in the 1960s during the Congo Crisis. Belgium intervened, nominally to protect its civilians, in July 1960 after a mutiny by black soldiers against their white commanders (a colonial remnant).

Endless Rumble in the Jungle: Is Peace in the D.R. Congo Possible?

Belgium supported the secession of Katanga (under Moïse Tshombe) and South Kasaï. Before his seizure of power in 1965, Mobutu also launched a coup in 1960 which ousted Lumumba, the inde- pendence leader who was later killed and his body dissolved in acid. (Belgian mercenaries who were present kept his remaining gold tooth which was recently returned by the King.) His supporters in northeastern DRC declared their own state after his death. International forces quelled the brewing secessionist states with Belgium and the US heavily involved throughout the crisis - after another intervention to combat Maoist rebels (the Simba in Katanga and Kwilu under Pierre Mulele), the CIA-backed Mobutu took control.

War in the Congo is fought over resources along national and ethnic lines. Observers are not optimistic about the talks scheduled in January 2023 based on historic failings. It is clear no single solution exists but what is equally apparent is that any peace process cannot exclude any of the hundreds of belligerents in this multipolar conflict. Perhaps the greatest challenge is simply agreeing to talk in the first place. In a letter to his wife from Thysville prison, Lumumba claimed: “The day will come when history will speak. But it will not be the history which will be taught in Brussels, Paris, Washington or the United Nations...Africa will write its own history and in both north and south it will be a history of glory and dignity.” Maybe that day will be sooner than we think.