335 - The Killing Fields of Africa, II: The Congo Disintegrates

The rebel Rwandan-backed M23 guerilla movement in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo has laid waste to much of North and South Kivu, adjoining Lake Kivu and bordering Rwanda, and is also exploding northwards toward Ituri Province adjacent to northern Rwanda. It has breached the walls of three key cities: Goma, the 2 million sized capital of North Kivu; Bukavu, the 1.5 million-sized capital of South Kivu; and Butembo, another large town (154,000) in North Kivu near Lake Albert.

The regular Congolese army has melted away, fleeing from Goma and Bukavu on foot and by barge across Lake Kivu. Burundian soldiers, part of the official UN Monusco peacekeeping force, have fled back into neighboring Burundi in the face of the M23 assaults. So have South African troops from a Southern African Development Community (SADC) contingent sent to protect the eastern Congo from rebels.

As a result of M23 depredations, this region of eastern Congo is now the locus of the world's third most intractable humanitarian crisis, after Yemen and Sudan. It is entirely home- grown, but still intolerable given the killings that are continuing, the overwhelming of key Kivu cities by displaced civilians seeking shelter, the lack of food everywhere, and the spread of well-known diseases like cholera and mysterious ones similar to Ebola. The U.S. neglects this human tragedy as it does others in Africa.

In their taking of the three key eastern Congolese cites, about 8,000 M23 marauders have been assisted and accompanied by about 4,000 combatants from the Rwandan army. President Paul Kagame of Rwanda denies that they are part of the onslaught, but every local observer and UN officials have remarked and bemoaned their presence. Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi has asked for African Union and UN intervention, and has pledged American access to cobalt and other minerals in the hope of arousing Trump's interest.

Since January, about 7,000 Congolese civilians have lost their lives in the M23 advance, 3,000 when Goma was captured. Hospitals in Goma and Bukavu are overwhelmed with civilians and soldiers presenting with myriad gunshot wounds and other war casualties. Approximately 450,000 citizens have lost shelter, becoming displaced persons within their own province. About 43,000 persons have become refugees in Burundi and Tanzania.

M23, originally March 23, the date of its founding, is a largely Tutsi militia movement securing the rights of Tutsi who have lived in the eastern Congo since at least the days of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Kagame originally employed them as opponents of Hutu genocidaires who fled into the Congo after helping to perpetrate the killing of Tutsi during the genocide. But in recent years they are only the best funded and most murderous of more than 120 rebel groups infesting and upsetting life in the two Kivu provinces. Another major militia is the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), aligned with the Islamic State, and focused on gaining power in Ituri Province as well as parts of North Kivu.

Each of the 120 groups prey on villagers, forcibly appropriating their crops and imposing payments on commerce carried on village to village. M23 has been masterful in so extorting hapless denizens of Kivu. But it and the ADF have also found it very rewarding arbitrarily to steal precious metals like copper, cobalt, tin, and tungsten from artisanal miners who dig them up laboriously. M23 has been particularly interested in gaining control of gold and coltan (tantalum and columbite); they fetch high prices in Kigali, capital of Rwanda, and much higher rewards in Dubai and Moscow.

Kagame, personally and on behalf of his nation, is profiting immensely from the transfer of gold ad coltan from North Kivu into Rwanda. Most observers think that is the main reason why he backs M23 so thoroughly. But sheer greed possibly motivates his funding and direction of M23 less than his desire to punish Tshisekedi for attempting to rebuff Kagame's interventions in Congolese politics. Kagame is the head of but a tiny African state, especially as compared to the Congo, the continent's second largest, but he fancies himself as someone more astute and more successful than other African presidents, and someone to whom Tshisekedi should pay heed.

Kagame's current invasion of next-door Kivu is reminiscent of his intervention in 1997 and 1998, when Rwanda helped oust dictator Mobuto Sese Seko and install President Laurent Kabila. Kagame has different aims than Putin in Ukraine, but what he is about in Africa is an invasion nevertheless.

In 1998, Rwanda had troops in Kinshasa, Congo's capital city on the lower reaches of the River Congo. Angola and others forced Rwandan soldiers to retreat. Now, after taking Bukavu, a city 1500 road miles from Kinshasa, M23 (speaking perhaps for Kagame) is threatening to march the entire distance to oust Tshisekedi and organize a new Congolese government. That may be Kagame's ultimate goal. Meanwhile, he controls much of the world's coltan and a reasonable amount of Africa's gold. Wealth follows, especially because M23 has annihilated the available opposition to its hegemony in North and South Kivu.

It has effectively neutered Monusco, once a 17,000 strong, now a 12,000 strong international force that, for want of a clear mandate and determined leadership, has totally failed (along with SADC troops) to contain M23 and ADF, and even to come close to preserving the peace in the Kivu provinces. All went reasonably well for the people of Kivu and Monusco until gold prices soared and coltan became immensely valuable because of mobile phones and electric cars. Monusco kept to its bases, too, and hardly ventured into the rural areas of Kivu to halt M23 and ADF advances in the rural heartlands of both provinces.

Now there is nothing to stop Rwanda's proxy army, small as it is, from advancing westward toward Kinshasa. When M23 took Goma in 2012, President Obama ordered Kagame to send it back into the bush. Neither Trump nor Secretary of State Marco Rubio have much time for distant places like the Congo, but Tshisekedi's offer of minerals may pique their interest since China now purchases and largely controls much of Congo's cobalt, copper, diamonds, and gold. Cobalt is essential for electric car batteries and about half of the world's cobalt lies in Congo.

Only concerted American diplomatic attention can keep the Congo from disintegrating further. But whether Washington cares is the bigger question. If not, China and Russia may benefit from Rwanda's quest for power and wealth and Trump’s contempt for Africa.