Rwanda Advances toward Annexing DRC’s Kivu Provinces with the West’s Tacit Blessing
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 27 Jan 2025
Ann Garrison | Black Agenda Report – TRANSCEND Media Service
Rwandan colonization of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) proceeds apace.
22 Jan 2025 – On Obama’s 2009 Inauguration Day, the Congrès national pour la défense du peuple (CNDP)—a Rwandan militia—was “integrated” into the Congolese army. This was a de facto concession of territory to longtime US/EU ally Rwanda, which the US State Department applauded.
The CNDP renamed itself the March 23 Movement (M23) and started fighting again three years later, in 2012, horrifying the world with their atrocities as the CNDP had. They said they hadn’t gotten all they’d been promised and resumed Rwanda’s expansionist project. Some members of M23 were reporting to Uganda, but Rwanda led the aggression, a gross violation of DRC’s sovereignty that the world has tolerated for the past 30 years.
Sixteen years later, on Trump’s Inauguration Day, the Rwandan Defense Forces (RDF) were openly fighting alongside M23, and Rwanda controlled far more territory. The day before Trump’s inauguration, Defense Post reported that M23 had taken Lumbishi, a key mining settlement in the DRC’s South Kivu Province, and that they were advancing on Numbi and Shanje, two other locations in the surrounding Kalehe territory.
On the day after Trump’s inauguration, Reuters reported that M23 had seized Minova, a key supply route to Goma, the capital of Congo’s North Kivu Province, which sits on its border with Rwanda.
The December 2024 UN Group of Experts Report noted that from April to early November 2024, M23 and the RDF increased the area they controlled by 30 percent, advancing on multiple territorial fronts and on political, administrative, and ideological fronts as well.
The Experts also describe the systematic support from the Rwanda Defence Force to M23 and Rwanda’s administrative control of Congolese territory it has seized, including administration of the minerals traffic from DRC to Rwanda and taxation by M23. “At least 150 tons of coltan were fraudulently exported to Rwanda and mixed with Rwandan production, leading to the largest contamination of mineral supply chains in the Great Lakes region recorded to date.”
They estimate that M23 collects $800,000 per month in taxation alone, amounting to $9,600,000 per year. The minerals traffic itself supports rich Rwandan traders and Rwanda’s ruling elite.
M23 and the Rwandan Defense Force are equipped, the experts report, with advanced weaponry far better than that possessed by the Congolese army. This weaponry is manufactured far from Africa and smuggled across the Rwandan-Congolese border in violation of the longstanding, long-ignored UN arms embargo.
According to David Himbara, a Rwandan exile and former advisor to Rwandan President Kagame, these weapons are purchased with profits from the illegal minerals traffic.
The experts also report more of the mass displacement and civilian suffering that has been part of this story since its beginning.
US and EU Support for Rwanda Is Unwavering
There’s no doubt where this situation is headed. Rwandan President Kagame and the Tutsi elite surrounding him intend to annex all of DRC’s resource-rich North and South Kivu Provinces, formally if possible. The displacement of Congolese people and Rwandan migration into the Kivus may make it possible for Rwanda to demand a referendum on whether or not the people of the Kivus want to be part of DRC or part of Rwanda.
The US and EU have tolerated and collaborated with Rwanda’s invasion and colonization project since Rwanda first invaded DRC, at that time Zaire, in 1996, and it goes on. The minerals traffic is so profitable and convenient that the European Commission shocked Congolese in February 2024 by announcing a “Memorandum of Understanding on Sustainable Raw Materials Value Chains ” between the EU and Rwanda.
Kagame hobnobs with the Davos set and opens Rwanda to its experiments in world government, from digital IDs and “sustainable cities ” to mandatory or even forced vaccination .
He also offers the Rwandan Defense Force in service to Western military objectives on the African continent.
Between Two Inaugurations
The US has sustained its support and collaboration with Rwanda since the Rwandan Patriot Army led by Paul Kagame invaded Rwanda from Uganda in 1990.
It’s a long, tragic history, but this week I began with Obama’s Inauguration since that was the date of the de facto concession of Congolese territory to Rwanda that eventually led to the CNDP reconstituting itself as M23 and waging the war, which it has continued off and on since 2012.
On that day the world exulted in the rise of the first Black president in the most powerful country in the world, imagining that he would usher in a new age of liberation for the world’s dark-skinned colonized and neocolonized peoples, and Africa was especially hopeful. Code Pink was dancing the “Yes We Can Can,” and the world was mesmerized by the sight of Aretha Franklin singing a gospel version of “My Country Tis of Thee” in a hat topped with a giant bow outlined in rhinestones.
Obama came in with a huge mandate, nationally and globally, with Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress and, in short order, a Nobel Peace Prize. He could have conditioned aid and political support to Rwanda on withdrawal from DRC, but instead he sustained the alliance, even as one UN report after another documented Rwanda’s violence and resource theft in DRC.
In 2014, still on Obama’s watch, Congo’s army, led by the heroic Colonel Mamadou Mustafa Ndala , defeated Rwanda, driving M23 combatants back into Rwanda and Uganda. The US/EU, however, engineered farcical “peace talks ” in which the Congolese victors conceded everything to the Rwandan and Ugandan losers.
Fast forward to Trump’s inauguration, and Rwanda’s colonization project proceeds apace with no reason to expect any change in policy. For Democrats or Republicans, Black or white, neocolonization is the name of the game, and the Congolese people continue to suffer.
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Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She attended Stanford University and is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment. In 2014 she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at ann@anngarrison.com
Go to Original – blackagendareport.com
Tags: Africa, DRC, Rwanda
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