328 - The Fall of Goma: Another Autocrat Invades a Neighbor to Create Mayhem

Congo and Rwanda

After a week away there is abundant foolishness (David Brooks calls it “stupidity”) in Washington about which to comment. But, first, let’s turn to unbridled despotism in a part of Africa that is central to the globe’s second (after Sudan) most endangering humanitarian crisis. Thousands are losing their lives and experiencing severe hunger.

When Goma, the capital of North Kivu Province in eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), fell last week to M23 rebels calling themselves the Congo River Alliance, 500,000 Congolese lives were vastly endangered.

Today, the rebels are marching on Bukavu, the capital of South Kivu, 135 miles south by road. They claim that they are ultimately heading toward Kinshasa, 1,550 road miles away, to oust the elected government of the giant DRC. Defending Bukavu are Congolese army forces and several thousand soldiers from neighboring Burundi.

Rwanda's President Paul Kagame is calling the shots. Asserting falsely that his own Tutsi people are being threatened within the DRC, Kagame seeks to control the resource rich lands just across Lake Kivu from his own country in order to make its growing wealth his own. In the process, especially since 2022, M23 depredations have forced Kivuites to flee into Goma, a city of 2 million. Now those who fled are trapped, short of food, water, and freedom. Already, 200,000 civilians have lost their lives with as many as 21 million now facing severe hunger.

For at least fourteen years, Kagame has been orchestrating a series of guerilla wars in North and South Kivu to destabilize the DRC. He may also try to annex the Kivu provinces, Putinlike, to his own Rwanda. Its population is only 14 million compared to the DRC’s 102 million. The DRC is also roughly the geographical size of the United States east of the Mississippi River and Rwanda is no larger than Maryland.

Nevertheless, Kagame is an ambitious authoritarian who rules Rwanda with a mailed fist and arranged the overthrow of two earlier DRC regimes. Now he seeks to bend the DRC’s President Felix Tshisekedi to his will as well as to grab the abundant mineral wealth in the Kivu provinces.

For those reasons, as well as because Kagame considers himself more astute than other African heads of state, he long ago funded the M23 rebel group, which constitutes the driving force within the Congo River Alliance. M23 is an ethnically Tutsi collection of rebels who have laid waste in recent years to much of the Kivus, and who occupied Goma briefly in 2012 (before President Obama told Kagame to back off and clear out). This time, several European nations and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio have condemned Rwanda’s military presence in the eastern Congo. But neither President Trump nor any other powerful Western leader has ordered Kagame to desist. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has asked Rwanda to withdraw its troops, without any response.

Since 2012, M23 has specialized in terrorizing villagers throughout North Kivu, especially targeting Hutu who had fled into the DRC in the 1990s after perpetrating genocide against Rwandan Tutsi. Kagame, the Tutsi leader, has sought for years to limit Hutu power among refugees in the DRC. But now he wants more.

With his backing, M23 has also attempted with great success to plunder the gold, copper, diamonds, and coltan that artisanal miners dig up throughout much of North Kivu. Minerals forcibly purloined from Indigenous miners pay for lethal arms that M23 employs to terrorize the region. In turn, M23 sells its mining off-take in Rwanda. Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, is now known for its gold, none of which comes from within the country. The lucrative results are then shipped to Dubai, with some of the gold, copper, diamonds, and coltan ending up in Moscow.

Coltan is unusually valuable. It is a composite of tantalum and columbite, two minerals essential for mobile phones, laptops, electric cars, and aircraft engines. Tantalum is notably heat and corrosion resistant.

Now that the Congo River Alliance and M23 have secured Goma (in part taking advantage of Washington’s inattention), Kagame has effectively demonstrated his consummate agency within the region. Kagame, according to the UN and other observers, sent 4,000 Rwandan troops to join 6,000 M23 rebels in their joint capture of Goma.

Kagame may now be able to compel Tshisekedi and other regional leaders to pay him greater heed. He will also reemphasize Tutsi hegemonic roles in the DRC. Kenya’s President William Ruto attempted last week to broker an accord between Kagame and Tshisekedi, but the DRC president has not yet agreed to talk. He says that Ruto is pro-Kagame.

One of the remaining mysteries of the conflict in Kivu is why 16,000 UN peacekeepers, based in Bukavu, south of Goma, and the Congolese army, with battalions nearby, have not stopped the M23 advance. Indeed, one of the great failures of war prevention in Africa is the pusillanimity of UN peacekeepers, hamstrung somewhat by narrow mandates and led indifferently. Monusco, the UN Stabilization Mission in Congo, has totally failed to protect civilians from attacks from M23 and a further twenty rebel groups who operate in the Kivus.

With the failure of Monusco, Congolese army, and Southern African Development Community troops who have been defending Congo against the rebels (thirteen South African soldiers lost their lives), the major powers of the world need urgently to intervene to save human lives. But Trump, who could lead, is focused haphazardly on lambasting our trade partners with punitive tariffs and combating wokeness by illegally transferring or firing loyal American civil servants.