Introduction
Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo has been burning for decades. Behind the smokescreen of diplomatic speeches, facade agreements and carefully calibrated military communiqués, a strategic reality is becoming increasingly clear to observers of the Great Lakes region: Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda, is reproducing a pattern he knows intimately — that of proxy war, the total seizure of power without sharing, ethnic reward, and forced territorial recomposition.
But the times have changed. What worked in the 1990s, in a context of a fading Cold War, nascent African institutions, and a world where the Internet did not exist, can no longer function in the same way today. Satellite phones, United Nations investigations, social media, and the pressure of African public opinion make strategic opacity far more difficult to maintain.
Kagame is wrong. Not because he lacks tactical intelligence, but because he is applying the logic of the past to a context that has fundamentally evolved. He has always acted with a form of overconfidence, without fully measuring the consequences of his decisions. This manifested itself tragically in the assassination of President Habyarimana, at a time when genuine opportunities for power-sharing had been created through the Arusha Accords. The aggression against the DRC follows the same logic of strategic recklessness. The repeated attempts to assassinate President Tshisekedi add to this alarming portrait of a leader who confuses military audacity with political foresight.
The Museveni Precedent: A Successful Adventure with Catastrophic Consequences
To understand the war Rwanda is waging today in the DRC, one must go back to the 1980s in Uganda. Paul Kagame, a young refugee Tutsi officer, joined Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Army. He fought alongside Museveni against the regime of Milton Obote, and then against that of Tito Okello. He climbed the ranks with method and discipline. He became head of Ugandan military intelligence. He mastered the art of guerrilla warfare, deep infiltration of enemy structures, and the seizure of power by arms. In exchange for his loyal service, Museveni offered him a promise: a return to Rwanda, and political and military recognition for himself and his people.
In 1990, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, composed predominantly of Ugandan Tutsi, invaded Rwanda from the north. This military venture, which benefited from obvious Ugandan logistical support despite Kampala's official denials, culminated in 1994 with the RPF's seizure of power. Kagame reached the apex of the Rwandan state. The objective had been achieved.
But the price paid was one of extraordinary violence. Between the outbreak of war in 1990 and the end of the genocide in 1994, nearly one million Tutsi and moderate Hutu were exterminated. Rwanda was devastated. The Great Lakes region plunged into lasting instability. Museveni and Kagame each bear, in their own way, a share of moral responsibility for this tragic chain of events. Not that they intended the genocide, but their military adventure created the conditions for the extreme radicalisation of the Habyarimana regime and the Interahamwe forces. History has delivered its verdict: the adventure succeeded militarily; it was a humanitarian catastrophe.
From 1996 onwards, Kagame extended this same logic into the DRC to overthrow Mobutu. Since then, more than fifteen million Congolese have died, including Hutu refugees massacred in the Congolese forests. Today, under the effective de facto occupation imposed by Kigali, the Kivu region is the theatre of civilian massacres and documented human rights abuses, including systematic sexual violence used as a weapon of war.
The Debt to the Banyamulenge: The Logic of Ethnic Reward
When the RPF went to war, it did not do so alone. Among its fighters and supporters were Congolese Tutsi, principally the Banyamulenge, a community long established in the high plateaus of South Kivu. Marginalised by poverty like hundreds of other Congolese ethnic groups, and often denied formal citizenship recognition by the Kinshasa authorities, the Banyamulenge saw in the RPF's victory a political and identity opportunity. Some of them fought directly alongside Kagame. Others served as local relay points, intelligence providers, and rear bases in eastern Congo.
The logic that then took hold was one of debt. Kagame, as a man faithful to his alliances, intended to honour his commitments to those who had helped him seize power, exactly as Museveni had done for him. The parallel is strikingly precise. Within this logic, the reward offered to the Banyamulenge and, more broadly, to Congolese Tutsi could only be territorial and political: a space of their own sovereignty, a stable zone of influence, a sanctuary sheltered from real or perceived persecution.
This is where what several analysts and Congolese officials now call the Republic of Kivu project took root: a distinct political entity carved out of eastern DRC, intended to accommodate the Banyamulenge, other Congolese Tutsi, and potentially Rwandan Tutsi who would migrate to this new territory. A Rwanda-bis to the west, a demographic outlet for a small, landlocked, densely populated country, and above all, a strategic buffer zone between Kigali and the forces that, from the Congolese forests, continue to threaten the Rwandan regime, notably the FDLR, those Hutu fighters exiled since 1994.
The M23: Armed Wing of a Territorial Project
The March 23 Movement did not appear from nowhere. It is part of a succession of armed rebellions supported, directly or indirectly, by Kigali since the late 1990s: Laurent Nkunda's CNDP, and the various incarnations of the National Congress for the Defence of the People. Each time, the rhetoric is identical: protect Congolese Tutsi, demand integration into the national Congolese army, defend a persecuted community. Each time, UN expert reports precisely document the flows of weapons, ammunition and human reinforcements crossing the Rwandan border.
The M23's military advances since 2021, which allowed it to seize Goma at the beginning of 2025, represent the most advanced stage of this project. Territories under M23 control are administered according to logics parallel to those of the Congolese state. Attempts at civilian organisation, tax collection, and control of mineral resources are all documented. These are no longer the characteristics of a rebel group awaiting negotiation. They are those of a proto-administrative structure in the making.
Why Kagame Is Wrong: The World Has Changed
Kagame's first fundamental error is believing that the same recipe can work indefinitely. In 1994, the international community was paralysed, the United Nations was in a state of post-Somalia shock, and sub-Saharan Africa lacked institutions capable of opposing a determined military dynamic. The United States, under the influence of Democrats favouring political changes in the region to serve their own interests, had ceased supporting Mobutu, the historic ally of Habyarimana. The geopolitical terrain was favourable to Kigali's adventurism. That is no longer the case.
In 2025, the East African Community, the African Union and the Southern African Development Community have deployed forces and mediation mechanisms directly into the conflict zone. UN expert group reports are now public, circulate instantly on social media, and fuel debates in Western parliaments. African investigative journalists, notably Congolese, diaspora Rwandans and Angolans, produce continuous coverage that makes disinformation far more difficult to sustain. Governments across the Great Lakes region, from Angola to Tanzania, have developed diplomatic and sometimes military capacities that make Rwandan adventurism an increasingly risky and costly gamble.
The second error is demographic and geographic. The DRC is not Rwanda. It is eighty times larger and has a population one hundred times greater. The Banyamulenge, despite their long presence in the region, remain a minority in an eastern Congo itself composed of dozens of ethnic groups with profoundly divergent interests. Any attempt to found an ethnically homogeneous state in this region would inevitably produce new waves of violence, mass population displacement, and chronic structural instability. The Republic of Kivu, should it ever materialise, would be born in war and would live in war, confronted with permanent resistance from the Wazalendo and all other communities of eastern Congo.
The third error is economic and political. Rwanda, despite its remarkable economic performance since 1994, remains a country of twelve million inhabitants, without access to the sea, whose macroeconomic stability depends in significant part on international aid and foreign direct investment. A prolonged military involvement in the DRC, increasingly impossible to deny, places Kigali at growing risk of economic sanctions from Western partners who constitute its principal donors. Britain, the United States and the European Union have already suspended or reduced certain bilateral aid packages. This signal cannot be ignored indefinitely without serious consequences for the Rwandan economy.
The Human Consequences of a Short-Term Strategic Vision
Beyond the geopolitical calculations, there are millions of shattered lives. Since 2021, more than seven million people have been internally displaced within Congolese territory, making the DRC one of the greatest humanitarian crises on the planet. Displacement camps around Goma, even before the city was seized, already constituted spaces of extreme misery and vulnerability. Women and children pay the heaviest price, with documented rates of sexual violence among the highest in the world.
Kagame, who built part of his international legitimacy on the argument of having ended the 1994 genocide, now finds himself in the deeply uncomfortable position of being associated with a large-scale humanitarian catastrophe. This is a contradiction that his Western supporters find increasingly difficult to defend publicly before their own populations and their parliaments.
Conclusion: History Does Not Repeat Itself, It Stutters
Paul Kagame is a strategist of undeniable intelligence, but one who systematically underestimates the details that tip history in unexpected directions. For him, the assassination of Habyarimana was merely a tactical detail. The consequences were horrific and precipitated the fastest genocide of the twentieth century.
He transformed a devastated country into an apparent model of administrative reconstruction. But this reconstruction is concentrated in the hands of a narrow group of Tutsi close to the regime. Political, military and economic segregation along ethnic lines exists in Rwanda, carefully concealed behind an official discourse of national unity. It is this same contradiction between discourse and reality that one finds reproduced in the war in the DRC: a discourse of protecting Tutsi populations masking a project of territorial domination and geopolitical expansion.
Tactical intelligence is not enough when the strategic vision is founded on outdated premises. Reproducing the Museveni template in an entirely different geopolitical, media and diplomatic context amounts to a troubling historical blindness. The Rwandan adventure of 1994 cost one million lives and thirty years of regional instability. Kagame's Congolese adventure risks costing far more, first to the DRC, but also to Rwanda itself, whose long-term stability cannot rest on endlessly renewed proxy wars.
The future of the Great Lakes region will not be built through the ethnic fragmentation of existing states, but through regional cooperation founded on respect for sovereignty, transitional justice and shared economic development. Kagame, more than anyone, should know this. And history, which he knows intimately because he helped shape it, will remind him of this truth if he persists in ignoring it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does Rwanda support the M23 in the DRC?
United Nations expert reports have documented Rwandan military and logistical support for the M23 for several years. Kigali officially justifies its interest in eastern Congo through the threat posed by the FDLR, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, composed notably of Hutu fighters involved in the 1994 genocide. But independent analysts point out that the real objectives include control of strategic mineral resources, the securing of a buffer zone, and the protection of the political and territorial interests of Congolese Tutsi aligned with Kigali.
Who are the Banyamulenge and what is their role in the conflict?
The Banyamulenge are a community of Tutsi herders established for several generations in the high plateaus of South Kivu. Their Congolese nationality has long been contested by the Kinshasa authorities. Certain members of this community fought alongside the Rwandan RPF in the 1990s and subsequently served as a recruitment base for the various armed rebellions supported by Rwanda in eastern Congo.
What is the Republic of Kivu project?
The Republic of Kivu project refers, according to several analysts, diplomats and Congolese officials, to a political objective attributed to Kigali aimed at creating an autonomous or independent entity in eastern DRC, intended to accommodate the Banyamulenge and potentially Rwandan Tutsi migrating from Rwanda. This project is never officially claimed by Kigali, but the elements of parallel governance in territories controlled by the M23 lend it growing credibility.
What role does the international community play in the DRC conflict?
The African Union, the East African Community, SADC and the United Nations have deployed mediation mechanisms and military forces in the region. Negotiation processes, notably the Luanda process under Angola's aegis, have attempted to create diplomatic channels. Several Western countries have suspended part of their bilateral aid to Rwanda in response to documented evidence of support for the M23.
Why is Kagame's strategy risky for Rwanda itself?
Rwanda depends significantly on international aid and foreign direct investment to finance its development. A military involvement in the DRC that is increasingly impossible to deny exposes Kigali to economic sanctions and a lasting loss of diplomatic credibility. Furthermore, prolonged instability in eastern Congo weakens the entire Great Lakes region, from which Rwanda itself cannot isolate itself economically or politically.
References
Stearns, J. (2012). Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa. New York: PublicAffairs.
Reyntjens, F. (2011). The Great African War: Congo and Regional Geopolitics, 1996–2009. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
United Nations Group of Experts on the DRC (2023). Final Report of the Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo. New York: United Nations Security Council.
Prunier, G. (2009). Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Human Rights Watch (2024). DRC: M23, Rwandan Forces Committing War Crimes. New York: Human Rights Watch.
International Crisis Group (2024). Eastern Congo: Averting an Escalating Crisis. Africa Report No. 323. Brussels: ICG.
Lemarchand, R. (2009). The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
By: The African Rights Campaign, London, UK
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