Peacekeeping or War-Mongering? The UN's Complicity in Rwanda's War on the DRC.
The Blue Helmet Shield: How Rwanda Uses UN Peacekeeping to Sustain Impunity in the DRC.
Rwanda is simultaneously one of the United Nations' most significant troop-contributing countries and, according to UN experts, a primary driver of the deadliest conflict on African soil. This analysis examines how Kigali has transformed its peacekeeping reputation into a structural lever of impunity — and whether the UN bears partial responsibility for the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
Introduction: A System Exploited from Within
The United Nations peacekeeping system was designed to project multilateral authority into fragile states — to hold the line between war and peace in the world's most volatile corners. It was not designed to be weaponised by an aggressor state. Yet evidence accumulated over more than a decade, and now formalised through US Treasury sanctions and unanimous UN Security Council resolutions, points to an uncomfortable truth: Rwanda has systematically exploited its role as a major UN troop contributor to insulate itself from accountability while conducting a military campaign in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) that has displaced over seven million people and left an untold number dead.
As of August 2024, Rwanda ranked as the third-largest contributor of uniformed personnel to UN peacekeeping operations globally, with 5,874 soldiers and police deployed under the Blue Helmet. That status — earned through disciplined troops, a reputation forged in the aftermath of its own catastrophic genocide, and a government skilled in the cultivation of international goodwill — has conferred upon Kigali something no diplomatic communiqué could openly acknowledge: a near-guarantee against punitive action from the very institution it is simultaneously defying.
This is not coincidence. It is architecture.
The Mechanics of the Shield: How Peacekeeping Buys Diplomatic Cover
When a country contributes troops to UN peacekeeping operations, it enters a relationship of mutual dependency with the United Nations Secretariat and the broader membership. The UN receives capable, deployable forces — often at short notice, in difficult environments. The contributing country receives financial reimbursement (the standard rate is USD 1,428 per soldier per month), international legitimacy, and a form of institutional credit that is extraordinarily difficult to revoke.
Rwanda recognised early that this credit was convertible into diplomatic capital. As Phil Clark, Professor of International Politics at SOAS University of London, has stated plainly, Rwanda uses peacekeeping as leverage. In his words, Kigali 'realised that the international system is really fragmented. They can weaken criticism from the UN Group of Experts on the DRC because they know their value is in contributing to peacekeeping.'
The threat is never stated openly. It does not need to be. Senior UN Secretariat officials, troop-requirement planners, and Security Council members all understand that Rwanda's withdrawal from its peacekeeping commitments — in the Central African Republic, in South Sudan, in Sudan, in Mozambique and elsewhere — would create serious operational gaps that no alternative contributors could immediately fill. The implicit logic is that criticism must be carefully calibrated to avoid provoking a walkout. This calibration constitutes a systemic failure of accountability.
Judi Rever, a journalist who has extensively investigated Rwandan state conduct, and exiled Rwandan military official Jean-Paul Rusesabagina (son of the hotelier immortalised in Hotel Rwanda) have both documented how Rwanda's leadership views its peacekeeping participation as a strategic asset — not a humanitarian commitment, but an instrument of state power. According to testimony reviewed by Forbidden Stories and its investigative partners in 2024, Rwandan President Paul Kagame 'will always use this card if he has any problem with the UN.'
The Financial Architecture: Who Benefits from the Blue Helmet
The financial dimension of Rwanda's peacekeeping participation is rarely examined with sufficient rigour. The UN reimburses contributing governments — not individual soldiers — at a standard rate. For Rwanda, with nearly 6,000 personnel deployed at any given time, this generates in excess of USD 100 million annually, flowing directly to the Rwandan government. There is no independent mechanism within the UN system to verify that soldiers receive this compensation in full.
Former Rwandan military personnel interviewed by Forbidden Stories have stated that soldiers received only approximately half of what the UN paid Rwanda on their behalf. The remainder, in this account, was absorbed into government channels controlled by the Rwanda Defence Force and, ultimately, by structures linked to the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). The RPF's commercial empire — operating through Crystal Ventures Limited, its investment holding company — encompasses enterprises across multiple sectors. Revenue streams from peacekeeping reimbursements, funnelled through the Defence Ministry, represent a significant contribution to this ecosystem.
In effect, the UN's peacekeeping payment system has, in the Rwandan context, functioned as an indirect subsidy to the very military enterprise that the Group of Experts has repeatedly documented as operating illegally in the DRC. This is not merely a moral embarrassment. It is a structural contradiction at the heart of the UN's operations in the Great Lakes region.
UN Institutional Complicity: The Price of Silence
The question of whether the United Nations bears partial responsibility for the catastrophe in eastern DRC is not a comfortable one to pose, but it is a necessary one. The evidence suggests that the UN's institutional interests — specifically, the maintenance of Rwanda as a reliable troop-contributing country — have shaped the Secretariat's public posture in ways that have directly enabled Kigali's impunity.
The DRC's Permanent Representative to the United Nations stated before the Security Council with unusual directness: 'It appears that Rwanda has been guaranteed impunity and enjoys a blank cheque thanks to its participation in United Nations peacekeeping operations as one of the troop-contributing countries.' This was not a fringe allegation. It was a formal submission to the principal organ responsible for international peace and security — and it went unanswered by the Secretariat.
The evidence supporting this assessment is substantial. Despite the UN Group of Experts systematically documenting Rwandan military involvement in eastern DRC across successive annual reports — establishing troop deployments, command structures, supply chains, and the laundering of Congolese minerals through Rwandan export certification — the Security Council failed, for years, to name Rwanda explicitly in resolutions, to impose targeted sanctions, or to initiate accountability processes. The 'A3 plus' grouping of African and Global South Council members were regularly reluctant to name Rwanda, reflecting both regional solidarity considerations and Rwanda's cultivation of diplomatic relationships across the continent.
It was left to the United States — acting through the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control — to impose the first direct institutional sanctions on the Rwanda Defence Force in March 2026, designating the RDF and four of its senior officers for their operational support to the M23 armed group. By contrast, the UN Security Council, despite passing Resolution 2773 unanimously in 2025 — including with the votes of China and Russia — had stopped short of the kind of enforcement measures that a state flagrantly violating Chapter VII obligations would ordinarily attract.
The United States Mission to the UN had itself acknowledged this paradox before the Security Council: 'It is irresponsible for Rwanda as a major troop-contributing country to UN peacekeeping to tolerate the M23's behaviour.' The observation is significant precisely because it illustrates the cognitive dissonance that has pervaded Council deliberations — Rwanda's peacekeeping role was still being treated as a mitigating factor in discussions of its military aggression, even as its forces were firing on MONUSCO peacekeepers, deploying GPS jamming systems against UN air operations, and seizing provincial capitals in a UN member state.
Rwanda's Forces Attack the UN's Own Mission: A Threshold Crossed
Perhaps the most striking illustration of Rwanda's confidence in its structural protection is the documented conduct of its forces towards MONUSCO — the UN's own peacekeeping mission in the DRC. In January 2025, as M23 advanced on Goma, forces under Rwandan command fired on MONUSCO positions. Several Blue Helmets were killed. The United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Peace Operations, Jean-Pierre Lacroix, confirmed to the Security Council that peacekeepers had been 'killed in carrying out the tasks entrusted to them by this Council.'
Rwanda was, at the time of these attacks, itself a troop-contributing country to UN peacekeeping operations elsewhere. Rwandan soldiers wearing the Blue Helmet were serving under UN auspices in the Central African Republic and other theatres while Rwandan soldiers in eastern DRC were killing their counterparts.
The United States Treasury, in its March 2026 sanctions designation, formally documented that 'In January 2025, the RDF carried out attacks against Congolese armed forces, the Southern African Development Community Mission in the DRC, and defensive positions of the UN Organization Stabilization Mission in the DRC.' Rwanda's RDF additionally introduced GPS jamming systems into the conflict, which the US Mission noted had 'significantly impacted UN and humanitarian air operations in eastern DRC.'
A state that attacks UN peacekeeping forces while simultaneously contributing troops to UN peacekeeping operations is exploiting the system at its most fundamental level. The absence of an automatic mechanism to suspend a country's troop-contributing status upon credible evidence of attacks on UN personnel represents a critical gap in the institutional architecture — one that Rwanda's conduct has now laid bare for the entire international community.
The United States Names the Hypocrisy: A Peacekeeping Nation That Kills Peacekeepers
At the emergency Security Council session of 26 January 2025 — convened as M23 and Rwandan forces entered the outskirts of Goma — the United States representative delivered what amounted to the most direct official indictment of Rwanda's institutional hypocrisy on record before the Council. The charge was precise: Rwanda, one of the world's largest contributors to UN peacekeeping, was simultaneously killing peacekeepers, strangling humanitarian access, imprisoning UN personnel inside a captured city, and deploying systems specifically designed to blind and ground the very mission it nominally supported through its Blue Helmet contributions elsewhere.
The United States representative stated unequivocally that 'Rwanda's support to M23 remains wholly at odds with its robust support to UN peacekeeping.' This formulation — juxtaposing Rwanda's celebrated peacekeeping identity against its operational conduct in the DRC — was a deliberate rhetorical strategy, designed to strip away the diplomatic insulation that Rwanda's Blue Helmet status had long provided. The message to the Council was explicit: Rwanda cannot simultaneously claim the legitimacy of a peacekeeping partner and conduct operations that target, trap, and kill the peacekeepers it claims to support.
The four dimensions of Rwanda's hypocrisy, as they emerged from the Council record and the briefings of UN officials, were each distinct and together formed a comprehensive picture of systematic obstruction.
First, the killing of peacekeepers. On 23 and 24 January 2025, forces under Rwandan command fired directly on MONUSCO positions. Under-Secretary-General Jean-Pierre Lacroix confirmed that Blue Helmets had been 'killed in carrying out the tasks entrusted to them by this Council.' In total, at least thirteen peacekeepers from South Africa, Malawi, and Uruguay died in the fighting around Goma. The United States representative made clear that these 'threatening and violent actions by RDF and M23 against UN peacekeepers, equipment, or positions are entirely unacceptable' and warned that should such conduct continue, 'this Council should consider effective response measures.' France's representative added that attacks on peacekeepers may constitute war crimes — a characterisation that multiple Council members, including China, Greece, and the United Kingdom, explicitly endorsed.
Second, the closure of Goma airport and the paralysis of humanitarian relief. Rwanda-backed M23 forces seized control of Goma International Airport upon entering the city, declaring its airspace closed. The UN's Special Representative for the DRC, Bintou Keita, reporting to the Council from inside the city, described the situation with stark economy: roads were blocked, the airport was shut, and UN personnel were unable to move. 'In other words, we are trapped,' she told the Council. The airport's closure was not a tactical incidental — it was the deliberate severing of the humanitarian lifeline for a regional hub of two million people. Humanitarian access, already severely constrained before the fall of Goma, collapsed entirely. Hospitals were overwhelmed, medical evacuations became impossible, and the delivery of food, medicine, and protection equipment to hundreds of thousands of displaced persons was halted. Refugees International documented that the airport closure, combined with the suspension of Lake Kivu boat traffic and electricity cuts, made the delivery of humanitarian aid across the entire eastern region functionally impossible.
Third, the absence of freedom of movement for peacekeepers. The Security Council Record and subsequent reports established that MONUSCO's operational capacity had been directly and deliberately compromised by Rwanda-backed forces. MONUSCO bases received large numbers of civilians and surrendering combatants seeking refuge, but the Mission was unable to perform rotations of its troops, resupply its positions, or evacuate its wounded through normal channels. The US representative noted reports of GPS signal interference traceable to Rwandan positions, which had 'significantly impacted UN and humanitarian air operations in eastern DRC.' Rwanda's deployment of surface-to-air missile systems — acknowledged by Kigali itself in early 2024 — compounded the restrictions on MONUSCO's air operations. France, in particular, repeatedly pressed for the reopening of Goma airport, recognising that without it, peacekeepers could neither rotate effectively nor sustain operational capacity. Security Council Report confirmed that the inability of troop-contributing countries to rotate their forces remained a critical operational challenge well into 2025.
Fourth, the prevention of humanitarian access. The US representative's concern over the illicit exploitation of mining areas under M23 and RDF control — explicitly raised before the Council — was directly connected to the question of humanitarian access: territories under Rwandan-backed control were characterised by the systematic exclusion of independent humanitarian monitoring, the blocking of aid corridors, and the weaponisation of civilian infrastructure. DRC Foreign Minister Thérèse Kayikwamba Wagner, at the same Council session, confirmed that Rwanda's forces had 'knowingly cut water supply lines, electricity, access routes, as well as shutting down the airport and all capacity to fly over Goma.' These were not the incidental consequences of military operations — they were deliberate acts designed to accelerate civilian collapse and force the surrender of the city.
The cumulative picture presented to the Security Council was of a state that claimed, in other theatres, to uphold the principles of civilian protection, mandate compliance, and peacekeeper safety — while in eastern DRC simultaneously violating every one of those principles in the most direct manner possible. The US representative's invocation of Rwanda's peacekeeping identity was not rhetorical decoration. It was an argument that the Council had to choose: either Rwanda's peacekeeping status meant something — in which case its conduct in the DRC was an immediate and automatic disqualifier — or it meant nothing, in which case the entire institutional framework of troop-contributor legitimacy was hollow.
The Council did not, at that session, draw the conclusion the evidence demanded. Rwanda retained its status. Its troops continued to wear the Blue Helmet in the Central African Republic and elsewhere. And the UN continued to reimburse the Rwanda Defence Force at the standard rate — the same force whose soldiers had, days earlier, fired on MONUSCO positions and sealed the fate of Goma's two million inhabitants.
The Fear Factor: What Would Rwanda's Withdrawal Actually Mean?
The fear of Rwanda withdrawing its peacekeepers is frequently cited, implicitly or explicitly, as a reason for institutional restraint. This fear merits serious examination, because it has been allowed to function as a political trump card without adequate scrutiny.
Rwanda's 5,874 peacekeepers are distributed across multiple missions. Their sudden withdrawal would create operational challenges — gaps in patrol coverage, reduced formed police unit capacity, and logistical complications in theatres where Rwandan troops have embedded institutional knowledge. These are real operational concerns.
However, the UN peacekeeping spokesperson has stated that 'no single troop contributor can credibly undermine the long-term viability of a peacekeeping operation,' noting that over 120 countries contribute to UN operations. The mathematics of this are instructive. Nepal, Bangladesh, and India all contribute comparable or larger numbers of troops than Rwanda, and each has demonstrated sustained institutional commitment to UN peacekeeping. The market for troop contributions is not so thin that Rwanda's exit would be irreplaceable.
Moreover, the fear of withdrawal must be weighed against the cost of capitulation. By allowing Rwanda's peacekeeping status to function as a shield against accountability, the UN has sent a signal to every potential future aggressor that strategic troop contributions can purchase immunity from enforcement. This moral hazard is not theoretical. It is already shaping the behaviour of states watching the DRC precedent.
There is also a question of institutional coherence. A peacekeeping system that tolerates a troop-contributing country attacking its own missions, laundering conflict minerals, and occupying the territory of a fellow member state has ceased to function as a peacekeeping system. It has become a source of institutional cover for precisely the conduct it was designed to prevent.
Calls to Revoke Rwanda's Troop-Contributing Status: What Advocacy Has Demanded
The Democratic Republic of Congo's Foreign Minister, Thérèse Kayikwamba Wagner, presenting before the UN Security Council in January 2025, called explicitly for the revocation of Rwanda's status as a troop-contributing country. Her proposed measures also included an assets freeze and travel ban on Rwandan leaders, an embargo on minerals exported under Rwandan certification — particularly coltan and gold — and the establishment of a systematic notification regime for all arms transfers to Rwanda.
Security Council Report's analysis confirmed that DRC's call was accompanied by requests to impose targeted measures including 'the immediate revocation of its status as a troop contributor to UN peacekeeping missions.' These calls were made in the context of a functioning Security Council member's government, not a marginal civil society position.
The Black Agenda Report has further documented that, despite the 2010 UN Mapping Report identifying Rwandan crimes in the DRC that 'could be judged as genocide if brought to a competent court,' the Security Council has never referred Rwanda to the International Criminal Court. The ICC accountability gap in the Great Lakes region — where perpetrators of mass atrocities have systematically escaped international prosecution — is inseparable from the structural protections that Rwanda has cultivated through its peacekeeping participation and its relationships with powerful Security Council members.
Should Rwanda Be Replaced? The Case for Structural Reform
The question of whether Rwanda should be replaced as a troop-contributing country is, at its root, a question about whether the UN is prepared to enforce the most basic principle of its peacekeeping system: that participation in Blue Helmet operations confers legitimacy, not licence.
The case for replacement — or at minimum, formal suspension — rests on several grounds. First, the factual record is not ambiguous. Multiple UN Group of Experts reports, the US Treasury designation, MONUSCO's own operational reporting, and the unanimous adoption of Security Council Resolution 2773 together establish that Rwanda's Defence Force has been operating in the DRC in violation of international law. Second, Rwanda's forces have attacked MONUSCO peacekeepers — an act that the Security Council itself has identified as constituting a basis for sanctions designations. Third, the financial flows from UN peacekeeping reimbursements have, on available evidence, contributed to sustaining the military apparatus conducting the DRC operation.
Replacement need not — and should not — be framed as punitive for its own sake. The objective is systemic integrity. Several countries could provide capable troop contributions in theatres where Rwanda currently serves. Nepal, Bangladesh, Burundi, Ghana, Ethiopia, Senegal, and Tanzania — all among the top contributors to UN peacekeeping — could absorb redeployments from those missions over a managed transition period. The operational challenge is real but manageable. The institutional cost of inaction is not.
The US sanctions on the RDF, imposed in March 2026 under Executive Order 13413, create an additional legal dimension. As The East African has reported, US sanctions regulations provide an exception for official UN activities — meaning the UN has no immediate legal obligation to sever its financial relationship with the RDF over peacekeeping reimbursements. But it could take the political decision to do so. The question is whether there is sufficient political will within the Secretariat and among Council members to convert the legal permissibility of continued engagement into an actual policy choice.
The answer to that question will define whether the UN peacekeeping system remains a credible instrument of international order — or whether it has become, as the DRC has charged, a blank cheque dispensed to states that have learned to exploit the system's structural vulnerabilities.
The Broader Pattern: Rwanda's Military Reach Across Africa
Rwanda's peacekeeping leverage operates within a wider strategic pattern. Kigali has concluded bilateral military cooperation agreements with Mozambique, the Central African Republic, and Benin, often financing deployments that serve simultaneously as peacekeeping contributions and instruments of Rwandan commercial and geopolitical expansion. In at least one documented case, reviewed by Forbidden Stories and its investigative partners, a high-ranking Rwandan officer leading operations in Mozambique — partly financed by the European Union — was simultaneously directing attacks in the DRC in 2022.
Rwanda's deployment model, as described by sources to Forbidden Stories, follows a pattern in which Rwandan forces 'first come on a peacekeeping deal, they spend a year achieving peace, and then they use that base to get a lot of contracts.' This commodification of peacekeeping — in which Blue Helmet participation functions as a market-entry strategy for defence contracts, commercial relationships, and political influence — represents a far more systematic exploitation of the system than has been publicly acknowledged.
Rwanda's autocratic governance structure facilitates this model. Unlike democratic troop-contributing countries, where parliamentary scrutiny, civil society pressure, and free press reporting impose constraints on how peacekeeping participation is managed, Rwanda's government faces no meaningful domestic accountability for how troop contributions are deployed or how reimbursements are allocated. This absence of domestic oversight amplifies the institutional accountability deficit that exists at the UN level.
Kagame's War Preparation Tactic: Undermining MONUSCO to Clear the Field
One of the most calculated elements of Rwanda's preparation for its military campaign in eastern DRC was a sustained public relations offensive waged by President Paul Kagame against the United Nations Organisation Stabilisation Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo — MONUSCO. For years before the full escalation of 2025, Kagame and Rwandan government officials repeatedly criticised the peacekeeping mission as ineffective, wasteful, and fundamentally incapable of delivering stability. On its face, this appeared to be a principled critique of a genuinely troubled mission. In reality, it was a strategic operation designed to achieve a specific military objective: the removal of the UN force from North and South Kivu, creating an unobserved operational space in which Rwanda and M23 could commit atrocities and grave human rights violations without the inconvenience of international witnesses.
The arguments Kagame and Rwandan officials deployed were carefully calibrated to resonate with legitimate international frustrations. MONUSCO had indeed been in the DRC for over two decades without achieving a definitive resolution of the conflict. Its budget — running at approximately USD 1 billion per year, making it one of the most expensive peacekeeping operations in UN history — had drawn criticism from member states, including major financial contributors. Its troop numbers, at approximately 14,000 personnel, were considered by some analysts as insufficient for the territory it was asked to cover. Rwanda seized on each of these vulnerabilities and amplified them — not to improve the mission but to delegitimise it sufficiently that the DRC government would feel political pressure to request its departure.
The strategy worked with alarming effectiveness. The DRC government, facing domestic political pressures and genuine frustrations with MONUSCO's operational limitations, agreed in November 2023 to a phased withdrawal of the mission. MONUSCO withdrew from South Kivu by June 2024. The withdrawal process in North Kivu was ongoing when M23, under Rwandan command, launched its offensive towards Goma in January 2025. The UN's Special Representative Bintou Keita, reporting from inside a besieged Goma, noted that M23 had seized precisely the territories from which MONUSCO had recently withdrawn or was in the process of withdrawing. The correlation was not accidental. It was the intended outcome of a multiyear campaign to remove the international witness most capable of documenting and impeding Rwanda's military operations.
Rwanda's critique of MONUSCO's size, duration, and budget was a case of deliberate misdirection. The mission's scale and cost were cited by Kigali as evidence of failure — yet Rwanda's own military campaign is the primary reason MONUSCO required such a scale and duration. Every year that Rwanda supported M23 and its predecessor armed groups, it extended the conflict that made MONUSCO's continued presence necessary. Every ton of Congolese minerals that Rwanda's military enterprise extracted and exported deepened the political economy of war that MONUSCO was deployed to manage. Rwanda was, in effect, criticising the symptom while perpetuating the cause — and doing so strategically, to engineer a result that would serve its military interests.
The withdrawal of MONUSCO from South Kivu — which Rwanda had lobbied for, directly and through proxies — was followed almost immediately by a catastrophic deterioration of the security situation in that province. Bukavu fell to M23 in the months following MONUSCO's departure. The humanitarian consequences were severe and immediate. Far from the stability that Rwanda's critique implied would follow the mission's exit, the withdrawal produced exactly the vacuum that Kigali had anticipated and required. The peoples of South Kivu paid the price for a diplomatic manoeuvre that the international community failed to identify for what it was.
The United States Mission to the United Nations, in its statement before the Security Council in early 2025, explicitly acknowledged this dynamic, stating that the Council 'should not support MONUSCO's departure from North Kivu or Ituri until more progress is made to de-escalate.' This position — that MONUSCO's continued presence was a direct bulwark against Rwandan military expansion — was a direct rebuttal of the Kagame position. It confirmed that Washington understood Rwanda's criticism of the mission not as a good-faith assessment of peacekeeping effectiveness, but as an instrument of war preparation.
This episode represents one of the most cynical applications of peacekeeping discourse in the recent history of the UN system. A state that was simultaneously deploying thousands of its own troops in violation of international law into the DRC publicly argued that the international community's lawful peacekeeping presence in that country was a wasteful failure. It channelled its criticism through diplomatic frameworks, through public statements, and through the political processes that govern MONUSCO's mandate renewal — using the UN's own institutional mechanisms to weaken the institution's capacity to monitor and constrain Rwanda's military conduct. The UN, for its part, failed to identify or publicly name this strategy for what it was, proceeding with the withdrawal process even as the Group of Experts was documenting the concurrent build-up of Rwandan forces in precisely the areas from which MONUSCO was departing.
The lesson is stark. Rwanda's relationship with the UN peacekeeping system has not been passive exploitation of institutional gaps. It has been active, strategic manipulation — using Blue Helmet contributions in other theatres to build diplomatic capital, and using criticism of the DRC mission to clear the operational field for military expansion. Both instruments served the same end: the consolidation of Rwanda's military and economic presence in eastern DRC, at the expense of the Congolese people and in defiance of the international order that the United Nations exists to uphold.
The United Nations Mapping Report, published in 2010, documented mass atrocities committed by Rwandan forces in the DRC between 1993 and 2003. Its findings were unambiguous: systematic killings, targeting of civilian populations, and conduct that, in the words of the report itself, 'could be judged as genocide' if brought before a competent court. The report was produced under UN auspices, by UN experts, reviewed by UN lawyers.
More than fifteen years later, not a single Rwandan official has faced international prosecution for the crimes documented in that report. The ICC has never received a Security Council referral concerning the DRC Great Lakes conflict that would capture Rwandan conduct. The UNSC has never imposed targeted sanctions directly on Rwanda as a state — only on individual M23 commanders and entities. This accountability debt is not incidental. It is the cumulative product of exactly the political dynamics this article examines: the leverage Rwanda has derived from its strategic utility to international actors, including its peacekeeping participation.
The UN as Complicit Actor: Silence in the Face of Defiance
There is a word that international lawyers and diplomats handle with great caution when applying it to institutions rather than individuals: complicity. Yet the accumulated record of the United Nations' response to Rwanda's conduct in eastern DRC makes the question unavoidable. When an institution possesses the authority to act, is fully informed of the facts, and repeatedly chooses not to act — not because the facts are unclear, but because the political costs of action are considered too high — it bears a share of moral responsibility for the consequences of its inaction. By that standard, the United Nations has become, at minimum, a passive enabler of the war in eastern DRC.
The case rests on three interlocking failures. The first is the failure to enforce Resolution 2773. Adopted unanimously by the Security Council in February 2025 under Chapter VII of the UN Charter — including the votes of China and Russia, who cannot be accused of reflexive Western bias — the resolution demanded the immediate cessation of M23's military advances, called for an unconditional ceasefire, and explicitly expressed the Council's readiness to consider additional measures against those contributing to the continuation of the conflict. Rwanda's response was to continue the war. Within days of the resolution's adoption, M23 — under Rwandan command and with Rwandan logistical and combat support — seized Goma. It subsequently seized Bukavu and then Uvira. The resolution was treated by Kigali not as a legal obligation but as a statement of concern to be managed and absorbed.
The Security Council's response to this brazen non-compliance was, in institutional terms, negligible. No automatic enforcement mechanism was triggered. No sanctions were imposed on Rwanda as a state. No referral was made to the International Criminal Court. The Council issued further statements of concern. It renewed MONUSCO's mandate. It urged a return to dialogue. And in doing so, it sent a signal that Security Council resolutions adopted under Chapter VII — the most authoritative legal instrument available to the international community short of military force — are, in practice, optional for states with sufficient leverage. This is not merely a precedent damaging to the DRC. It is a precedent damaging to the entire architecture of international order.
The second failure is the absence of any expulsion mechanism or formal suspension procedure for troop-contributing countries that conduct armed aggression against fellow UN member states. The UN Charter and the peacekeeping framework contain no automatic trigger that would remove a state from its Blue Helmet contributions upon credible evidence of armed aggression, attacks on UN personnel, or violation of Security Council resolutions. This gap was tolerable in theory as long as no troop-contributing country was simultaneously waging war. Rwanda has exposed the gap as a structural crisis. The UN Secretariat has made no public effort to propose a reform that would close it. The Security Council has not debated one. The institution has, in effect, decided that the current arrangement — in which Rwanda continues to serve as a Blue Helmet contributor while its forces kill Blue Helmets — is preferable to the political difficulties of addressing the contradiction.
The third and perhaps most telling failure is the UN's refusal to actively seek alternative troop-contributing countries that could replace Rwanda. The institutional narrative, reinforced by Secretariat briefings and the political calculations of member states, presents Rwanda as a uniquely indispensable contributor — a country whose combination of troop quality, deployment speed, and institutional commitment cannot be replicated by alternatives. This narrative does not survive scrutiny. It is not a description of operational reality. It is a rationalisation of political convenience.
The United Nations draws on a pool of more than 120 troop-contributing countries. Among those not currently engaged in armed conflict with any neighbouring state, and with demonstrated capacity for large-scale peacekeeping deployments, are: Nepal, which as of August 2024 contributed 6,122 personnel and ranked first globally; Bangladesh, with 6,059 personnel ranking second; India, with 5,394 personnel ranking fourth; Indonesia, with 2,738 personnel; Ghana, with 2,625; Pakistan, with 2,602; Morocco, with 1,700; Tanzania, with 1,551; and Ethiopia, with 1,539. Every one of these countries exceeds or approaches Rwanda's contribution in scale. Not one of them is prosecuting a military campaign in the territory of a neighbouring UN member state. Not one of them has had its military designated under US sanctions for supporting an internationally proscribed armed group.
The UN has made no public effort to approach any of these governments about gradually assuming the operational roles currently filled by Rwanda. It has commissioned no independent review of the feasibility of a managed transition away from Rwandan troop contributions. It has published no assessment of the operational risk of such a transition set against the institutional risk of continued engagement with a sanctioned military. The Secretariat's silence on this question is not an oversight. It reflects a deliberate institutional choice to treat Rwanda's position as untouchable — a choice shaped not by operational necessity but by the same political calculus that has paralysed the Security Council throughout.
This treatment of Rwanda as an irreplaceable actor is itself a form of complicity. It validates Kigali's leverage, reinforces its confidence that the costs of continued aggression will remain manageable, and communicates to the DRC and its people that the institution established to guarantee their sovereignty regards the convenience of its operational arrangements as more important than their security. The UN was the body that produced the Group of Experts reports systematically documenting Rwanda's violations. It was the body whose peacekeepers were killed by Rwanda's forces. It was the body whose own Special Representative declared herself 'trapped' in a city seized by a Rwanda-backed armed group. And it is the body that has continued, month after month, to pay the Rwanda Defence Force for peacekeeping services rendered in other theatres — a financial relationship that has not been suspended, reviewed, or even publicly questioned by the Secretariat.
The language of institutional neutrality cannot obscure what this represents. When an institution is informed, authorised to act, and declines to act in the face of grave and continuing violations — when it treats the aggressor's operational value as more important than the victim's right to protection — it has crossed from bystander into something closer to accomplice. The peoples of eastern DRC, whose suffering is the direct and documented consequence of Rwanda's conduct and the international community's failure to constrain it, are entitled to name that failure honestly. So is the international advocacy community. The UN is not merely failing to solve the problem. It is, through its institutional choices, helping to sustain the conditions that allow it to continue.
Conclusion: Reclaiming Institutional Integrity
The facts of Rwanda's dual role — as both a significant UN peacekeeping contributor and, simultaneously, a documented aggressor in the DRC — have been available to the international community for years. What has been lacking is the institutional will to act on them consistently. The result is a humanitarian catastrophe in which more than seven million people have been displaced, provinces have been occupied, peacekeepers have been killed, and minerals have been looted and laundered through Rwanda's export certification system — all while Kigali continued to receive UN reimbursements and diplomatic protection rooted in its Blue Helmet contributions.
This cannot continue without consequence for the credibility of the entire multilateral peacekeeping project. If a state may attack UN peacekeepers, occupy the territory of a fellow member, and exploit a fellow member's mineral wealth, and do so without losing its status as a UN troop contributor — then the peacekeeping system has ceased to be a system of collective security and has become a tiered arrangement in which some states are above the rules.
The US sanctions of March 2026 represent a significant but partial step. They impose real costs on Rwandan military leadership. They do not, on their own, resolve the structural contradiction at the heart of the UN's relationship with Rwanda. That resolution requires political courage from Security Council members, a willingness by the UN Secretariat to prioritise systemic integrity over short-term operational convenience, and a formal policy framework that makes continued troop-contributing status conditional upon compliance with international law.
Rwanda should be replaced as a troop-contributing country in UN peacekeeping operations until the Rwanda Defence Force has fully withdrawn from Congolese territory, as demanded by Security Council Resolution 2773, and until an independent accountability mechanism has been established to investigate the crimes documented in the UN Mapping Report and the successive Group of Experts reports. The peoples of eastern Congo have paid — in blood, in displacement, in destroyed futures — a price that can be attributed, in part, to the institutional failures of the very organisation tasked with their protection.
The United Nations was not designed to protect aggressors. It was designed to protect people. In eastern DRC, that distinction has become dangerously blurred.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Why did Rwanda's Kagame publicly criticise MONUSCO and what was the real purpose?
President Kagame's sustained criticism of MONUSCO — focusing on its size, cost, duration in the DRC, and alleged failure to bring stability — was not a genuine assessment of peacekeeping effectiveness. It was a strategic operation designed to pressure the DRC government into requesting the mission's withdrawal from North and South Kivu, the precise provinces where Rwanda intended to intensify its military campaign. By delegitimising MONUSCO as wasteful and ineffective, Rwanda sought to remove the international witness best placed to document and impede Rwandan atrocities. The strategy succeeded in accelerating MONUSCO's phased departure from South Kivu, which was followed almost immediately by the fall of Bukavu to M23 forces. A state that was simultaneously deploying thousands of illegal troops into the DRC was publicly arguing that the lawful international peacekeeping presence there was a failure — a manipulation of peacekeeping discourse that the UN failed to publicly identify and challenge.
Why has the UN not sanctioned Rwanda for its actions in the DRC?
The UN Security Council has been constrained by a combination of factors including Rwanda's status as a major troop-contributing country, the reluctance of African and Global South Council members to name Rwanda explicitly in resolutions, and the geopolitical calculations of permanent members. Rwanda's peacekeeping contributions have functioned as a form of diplomatic insurance. While UN experts have systematically documented Rwanda's involvement in eastern DRC, the political will to convert that documentation into formal enforcement has been insufficient — a gap that the United States began to address through unilateral sanctions in 2026.
Is the UN responsible for what is happening in eastern DRC?
The UN bears institutional responsibility in a sense that goes beyond mere structural failure. The Security Council adopted Resolution 2773 unanimously under Chapter VII — yet when Rwanda openly defied it, no enforcement followed. The UN continued to reimburse the Rwanda Defence Force for peacekeeping contributions in other theatres even as that same force was attacking MONUSCO personnel in the DRC. The Secretariat made no public effort to identify and recruit alternative troop-contributing countries to replace Rwanda, treating Kigali's position as untouchable. These are not inadvertent oversights. They are institutional choices that have materially sustained the conditions enabling Rwanda's continued military operations. The UN's failure to enforce its own resolutions, expel or suspend Rwanda from peacekeeping, or actively seek replacements constitutes a form of complicity — not in the legal sense of intentional collaboration, but in the moral sense of choosing institutional convenience over the protection of the civilians the organisation exists to serve.
Could Rwanda really withdraw its peacekeepers and destabilise UN missions?
Rwanda's withdrawal would create operational challenges but would not fundamentally compromise the long-term viability of UN peacekeeping operations. The UN draws on more than 120 troop-contributing countries. Nepal, Bangladesh, India, Ghana, Ethiopia, Senegal, and Tanzania are all major contributors who could, over a managed transition period, absorb redeployments. The risk of Rwanda's withdrawal has been somewhat overstated as a deterrent to accountability — while operational disruption is real, it is manageable and preferable to the systemic precedent set by continued impunity.
What are the US sanctions on Rwanda and what do they mean?
In March 2026, the US Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control designated the Rwanda Defence Force and four senior RDF officers under Executive Order 13413 for their operational support to the M23 armed group in the DRC. The sanctions were triggered by Rwanda's continued military operations in eastern DRC following the Washington Accords signed in December 2025, which Rwanda-backed M23 violated within days. The sanctions freeze US-held assets and prohibit US persons from engaging in transactions with designated parties. They represent the first direct institutional sanction on the Rwandan military as an entity.
Should Rwanda be removed from UN peacekeeping and replaced by other countries?
On the available evidence, yes. Rwanda's continued participation in UN peacekeeping while its forces conduct military operations in violation of international law — including attacks on MONUSCO peacekeepers themselves — is a structural contradiction that undermines the integrity of the entire system. Replacement does not require a sudden withdrawal. A managed transition, in which Rwanda's contributions in the Central African Republic, South Sudan, and other theatres are progressively absorbed by alternative troop-contributing countries, is operationally feasible. The political decision to initiate such a process requires Security Council will and Secretariat leadership that has so far been absent.
What is the ICC accountability gap in the Great Lakes region?
The International Criminal Court has never received a Security Council referral specifically designed to investigate Rwandan military conduct in the DRC. The UN Mapping Report (2010) documented atrocities that could potentially amount to crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes — yet no accountability process has followed at the international level. This gap reflects the same structural dynamics examined in this article: Rwanda's strategic utility to key international actors has insulated its leadership from the prosecutorial exposure that less strategically valuable states have faced before the ICC.
References
Black Agenda Report (2025) Why Hasn't the UNSC Sanctioned Rwanda or Referred Its President to the ICC? Available at: https://www.blackagendareport.com [Accessed 10 March 2026].
Clark, P. (2024) cited in Forbidden Stories, How Rwanda Leverages Peacekeeping for Influence, June 2024. Available at: https://forbiddenstories.org [Accessed 10 March 2026].
Forbidden Stories (2024) Rwanda Classified: How Rwanda Leverages Peacekeeping for Influence. Forbidden Stories Investigative Project, June 2024.
Human Rights Watch (2024) DRC: M23, Rwandan Forces Committing War Crimes. Available at: https://www.hrw.org [Accessed 10 March 2026].
Lacroix, J-P. (2025) Briefing to the UN Security Council on the Situation in the DRC, January 2025. United Nations Press Release SC/15981.
Passblue (2025) Congo Wants Stiffer Sanctions on Rwanda, Envoy Tells UN Security Council, 28 March 2025. Available at: https://passblue.com [Accessed 10 March 2026].
Security Council Report (2025) Democratic Republic of the Congo: Briefing. What's In Blue, January 2025. Available at: https://www.securitycouncilreport.org [Accessed 10 March 2026].
The East African (2026) How Sanctions on Rwanda Army Affect Congo Peace, March 2026. Available at: https://www.theeastafrican.co.ke [Accessed 10 March 2026].
United Nations (2010) Report of the Mapping Exercise Documenting the Most Serious Violations of Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law Committed within the Territory of the Democratic Republic of the Congo between March 1993 and June 2003. Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
United Nations Group of Experts on the DRC (2024) Final Report of the Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo. S/2024/[relevant report]. United Nations Security Council.
United Nations Peacekeeping (2024) Contribution of Uniformed Personnel to UN by Country and Personnel Type, August 2024. Available at: https://peacekeeping.un.org [Accessed 10 March 2026].
United Nations Security Council (2025) Resolution 2773 (2025). Adopted unanimously. S/RES/2773(2025).
United Nations Security Council (2025) Press Statement on the Situation in the DRC, 27 January 2025. SC/15982.
US Department of State (2026) Sanctioning Rwandan Violators of the Washington Accords for Peace and Prosperity, March 2026. Available at: https://www.state.gov [Accessed 10 March 2026].
US Department of the Treasury, OFAC (2026) Treasury Sanctions Rwanda Officials, Condemns Blatant Violations of Washington Peace Accords, March 2026. Available at: https://home.treasury.gov [Accessed 10 March 2026].
US Mission to the United Nations (2025) Explanation of Vote Following Adoption of UNSC Resolution on the DRC. Available at: https://usun.usmission.gov [Accessed 10 March 2026].
Wagner, T. K. (2025) Statement by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the DRC to the UN Security Council, 28 January 2025. United Nations Press Release SC/15981.
THE AFRICAN RIGHTS CAMPAIGN
London, United Kingdom
africanrightscampaign@gmail.com
For the Peoples of the African Great Lakes Region
Comments
Post a Comment