For the third time in 12 months, a UN investigation has expressed concern over Rwanda’s role in arming and training the M23 militia accused of indiscriminate killing, rape and mass displacement in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Yet even as the Mouvement du 23 Mars (M23) encircles Goma – a city of 2 million people and the strategic capital of eastern DRC – and cuts off people’s access to food and healthcare, in London and Washington the patrons of the Rwandan president Paul Kagame are moving at a glacial pace. With low-key condemnations of the murderous violence in DRC they disgracefully continue to fund Kagame’s regime, including his brutal Rwanda Defence Force (RDF), and block the creation of an international criminal tribunal for DRC to end the impunity enabling the violence.
The full scope of the west’s complicity in the human suffering inDRC has been partly obscured since the International Rescue Committee stopped updating its DRC mortality report in 2008. That year, excess civilian deaths reached 5.4 million, making the situation in DRC the world’s deadliest crisis since the second world war. Last October, the UN’s International Organization for Migration said 6.9 million Congolese people had been displaced by violence, up from 5.6 million in 2022, when the UN says Kagame resumed support for the UN-sanctioned M23 militia.
Kagame counterclaims that Rwanda does not support the M23 and has no troops in DRC. He has also denied fuelling violence in 2012, when the US and UK government, among others, were shamed into freezing and suspending military and budgetary aid to his regime over his role in mass killings and rapes in DRC. Yet, the UN’s midterm report, published last December, as in previous investigations, included aerial footage and photographic evidence of RDF troops alongside the M23 in DRC.
In one attack last October in Rutshuru and Masisi, the UN says almost 200,000 residents were displaced. In another, the M23 killed two peacekeepers, a Kenyan and a South African, tasked with protecting civilians.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) interviewed a survivor, a 46-year-old woman, who ran into 10 M23 fighters when she was fleeing Masisi with her 75-year-old mother. “They wanted to rape us,” she said. “My mother said no, so they shot a bullet into her chest, and she died on the spot. Then four of them raped me. One said: ‘We’ve come from Rwanda to destroy you.’”
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It is incredible to understand how the UK or US can not only sit idly by while their Rwanda puppet goes on a destructive spree of historic proportions, but actively continue to provide the Kagame regime with the training, arms and funds he needs. Perhaps it would be different if his victims were white? Indeed, in Ukraine, International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutors were quick to call out killers in the name of international human rights and humanitarian laws – even when it included the president of the Russian federation.
Despite two decades of overwhelming evidence against the Rwandan government – including that presented by the UN, HRW and Amnesty investigators – the ICC, which has been investigating war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in DRC since 2002, still seems to lack the will to indict anyone from his regime or his militias, denying the Congolese people their right to the protection of international justice.
Last May, HRW investigators discovered 14 mass graves in Kishishe, where the UN says the M23 massacred 171 people and raped at least 66 women and girls in November 2022. The M23 invaded Kishishe again last November, ending six months of relative calm, leading to the current escalation.
Unsurprisingly, the huge number of displaced people brings with it a food crisis and has also triggered a cholera outbreak – with more than 41,000 cases and 300 deaths – according to the World Health Organization. The latest UN projection indicated that nearly 26 million Congolese people faced starvation in 2023 because of violence.
Without Kagame and his regime’s support, including weapons and troops, the M23 couldn’t have killed, raped, tortured and displaced as many Congolese people as they have. Without US and UK guns, funds and impunity, Kagame could not have continued to aid violence in DRC to the extent he has done since 1998, resulting in more than 5.4 million Congolese deaths in the first 10 years. British and North American taxpayers are funding violence in DRC – and I cannot but wonder what exactly the policymakers get in return for enabling all this suffering?