Africa’s Latest Growing Conflict

         As the world rightly focuses on the Ukraine-Russia conflict, which has inflicted such misery on other countries, there is a growing conflict that promises to wreak significant havoc on East Africa, on top of the ongoing civil war in Ethiopia.  The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Rwanda are longtime adversaries with a more than troubled history.  It isn’t as though this conflict is going unnoticed, but less attention is being paid to it than the war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region despite a history of DRC conflicts being exceedingly destructive.

            In what was called the First Congo War or Africa’s first World War (1996-97), what began as a civil war was rapidly internationalized by the entry of Rwanda and eventually spilled over into Sudan and Uganda and also involved Burundi and even Angola.  The Rwandan genocide and the flight of Rwandan genocidaires into eastern Zaire destabilized that part of the country, a condition that continues to this day.  That conflict ended the reign of the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, which already was tenuous, but it didn’t improve the situation for Congolese – just produced a different name for the country.  Corruption continued, as did unrest and DRC and Rwandan rebel activity, as well as Ugandan rebel incursions from DRC.  

            I was part of a multi-country Congressional delegation that visited DRC the day after Laurent Kabila took power.  Members of Congress, using the cachet of Congress having called on the Clinton Administration weeks before to abandon support for Mobutu, urged Kabila to do better than Mobutu and bring stability to a vital country in central Africa.  The delegation had been cautioned by then-South African President Nelson Mandela on the previous stop to deal with Kabila diplomatically, but a large part of the issues facing DRC were out of his control.

Ethnic tensions had existed between various groups in eastern Zaire for centuries, especially between the farming tribes native to what was then Zaire and semi-nomadic Tutsi tribes that had emigrated from Rwanda at various times. The earliest of these migrants arrived before colonization of the territory in the 1880s, followed by emigrants whom the Belgian colonizers forcibly relocated to Congo to perform manual labor in the early years of the 20^th century, and by another significant wave of emigrants fleeing the social revolution of 1959 that brought the Hutu to power in Rwanda.  The so-called Bayamulengue, originally from Rwanda, were not considered truly Congolese by many citizens, which led to perpetual conflicts and resentments.

            The Rwandan government eventually decided to take matters into their own hands, forming Tutsi militias to attack the Hutu genocidaires inside DRC, but given the resentment Mobutu had engendered during his rule, Congolese joined what was called the Banyamulengue Rebellion.  With Laurent Kabila as the figurehead of the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo, the invaders swept across the country, as Mobutu’s military didn’t put up much of a fight to maintain the regime.  Kabila, who reportedly was not envisioned by the Rwandan leadership as their choice to become president of what was to be called DRC, found himself the head of the new government.

            Unfortunately, the Rwandans never found Laurent Kabila to be a suitable partner.  The chaos in the East continued.  With Kabila suspected by his own people as a puppet of Rwandan President Paul Kagame, he was between a rock and a hard place.  A little more than a year after the first conflict officially ended in 1997, the Second Congo War started in August 1998.  I was part of a Congressional staff visit to Goma before that war started, and the activities of Rwandan dissidents allegedly was being organized within United Nations refugee camps that were seen as too close to the border.  We were in a meeting with the governor of North-Kivu, who had to abruptly end our meeting because he was urgently called to Rwanda to provide answers about what his province was doing to stem the constant flow of Rwandan Hutu rebels back into the country to destabilize the Tutsi-led government.  

            Various sources told us during that trip that the Rwandan rebels were using the camps as bases for raids and had even taken over cattle rustling and butchering out of the camps.  A few weeks after our visit, fighting broke out again.  The war officially ended in July 2003, when the Transitional Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo came into power. Despite a peace agreement signed in 2002, violence continued in many regions of the country, especially in the East.  Hostilities were exacerbated by the ongoing Lord’s Resistance Army insurgency, and the Kivu and Ituri regional conflicts. Nine African countries and as many as twenty-five armed groups became involved in the second war.

When both wars were finally ended in 2008, the conflicts and their aftermath had caused as many as six million deaths—not just through direct war casualties, but also due to disease and malnutrition, making the conflicts, especially second war, the deadliest conflict worldwide since World War II. Another two million people were displaced from their homes or sought asylum in neighboring countries. Despite a formal end to the war in July 2003 and an agreement by the former belligerents to create a government of national unity, 1,000 people died daily in 2004 alone from easily preventable cases of malnutrition and disease.

So, in a region of Africa that has already suffered massive displacement and food insecurity from conflicts in Ethiopia, Sudan and South Sudan, as well as massive locust infestations, droughts and even a 2021 volcanic eruption in DRC, a new conflict poses serious threats to stability in the Horn of Africa.  Both sides blame each other for attacks by armed groups that have continued despite the official end of the wars.  Uganda shares this concern. DRC either cannot or will not restrain militants attacking Rwanda, and Rwanda apparently has come to the conclusion that it has to interject forces inside DRC to protect its territory.

The March 23 Movement (M23) rebels have recently captured the Congolese town of Bunagana, marking a dramatic escalation in tensions between the two neighbors.  According to a UN report from several years ago, Rwanda created and commanded the M23 rebel group. Rwanda purportedly ceased its support following international pressure as well as the military defeat by the DRC and UN forces in 2013.

However, in 2017, M23 elements resumed their insurgency in DRC, but the operations of this splinter faction had little local impact at that point. In 2022, a larger portion of M23 started an offensive, eventually resulting in the capture of Bunagana by the rebels. After the M23 attacks of 2022, the Congolese government blamed Rwanda, and accused President Kagame's government of supporting the rebels, charges that Kigali denied.

M23 came to international attention more than a decade ago when its fighters seized Goma, the largest city in DRC’s east, which sits along the border with Rwanda.  After a peace deal, many of M23’s fighters were integrated into the Congolese national military, but earlier this year, the group appeared to make a comeback, launching its offensive against the DRC military after saying Kinshasa had failed to live up to its decade-long promises.

The latest fighting has led to more than 30,000 Congolese asylum seekers and 137 DRC soldiers crossing into neighboring Uganda in the past weeks, Shaffiq Sekandi, Uganda’s resident district commissioner for Kisoro district, told Reuters.  “They are all over, the streets are full, others have gone to churches, they are under trees, everywhere. It’s a really desperate situation,” he said.

“The Rwandan defence forces have this time decided to violate … our territorial integrity by occupying the border town of Bunagana,” General Sylvain Ekenge, spokesman for the military governor of North Kivu province, said in a statement, adding that the seizure of the border town constituted “no less than invasion” of the Democratic Republic of Congo

Meanwhile, Al Jazeera reports that Rwanda has accused the UN mission in DRC of “taking sides” and supporting Kinshasa as relations between the neighbors worsen.  According to the news service, Rwandan government spokeswoman Yolande Makolo hit out at the United Nations Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO), accusing it of being biased against Kigali.

“When the DRC bombs Rwandan territory unprovoked, this is a serious matter that has consequences, and it has to stop once and for all,” Makolo said. “The UN force, MONUSCO, cannot be part of this aggression, or stand by and watch it happen as has been the case, otherwise they become complicit,” she said on Twitter.

“By taking sides in this conflict, MONUSCO has contributed significantly to the intransigence of the DRC government in cross-border shelling of Rwandan territory,” she added.

The UN recently urged all parties involved in growing tension between Kinshasa and Kigali to “immediately cease all forms of violence” in border regions.  “We are concerned over the deteriorating security situation in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo,” Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, said in a statement.

My Congolese friend Guillaume Mapendo Tchomba, who heads a local non-governmental organization near Goma, confirmed this dire situation in the area in a text to me the other day.  “I am in the area where there is this armed conflict.  The rebels are supported by the Rwandan and Ugandan army,” he told me.  “I have no way to take refuge in another city or province while waiting for this war to end.  The countries that support this negative force want to come and help our country militarily. What irony.

“The clashes are towards Bunagana, Jomba, Rwanguba and Karambi. People are moving to Kiwanja and the Rutshuru center where there are some refugee camps, but the camps cannot accommodate all the refugees.”

Despite the presence of more than 16,000 UN peacekeepers various armed groups continue to terrorize communities and control weakly governed areas. Millions of civilians have been forced to flee the fighting: the UN estimates there are currently 4.5 million internally displaced persons in the DRC, and more than 800,000 DRC refugees in in other nations.

Again, East Africa can ill afford a widened conflict in the Great Lakes area, adding to the ongoing conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray region.  The DRC-Rwanda conflict could easily involve Uganda and could spread to Sudan, South Sudan and the Central African Republic as various armed groups could form alliances for mutual benefit.

One hopes diplomatic efforts to end the DRC-Rwanda conflict are more successful than that applied to the Tigray war, which has been raging since November 2020 despite numerous efforts to negotiate cease-fires and force peace through sanctions.