Keys to the conflict in eastern DR Congo

A few months after the 30th anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide in 2024, the conflict in that part of Africa has once again escalated in a complex game of multi-sided interests. The attack on the Congolese city of Goma by a Tutsi armed group , supported by Rwanda, threatens to create a humanitarian crisis.

January 27, 2025 will remain engraved in the collective report of the inhabitants of the city of Goma, in the DR Congo, as the date of the takeover of the city by the armed group M23. The capital of North Kivu province, bordering Rwanda, is one of those places we are not used to hearing about in the media. However, the armed conflict between the Rwandan-backed armed group M23 and the DR Congo army and a number of related militias threatens to create a humanitarian crisis and an escalation of the conflict at the regional level.

The M23 rebellion can be framed as the last movement of the security crisis in which the Great Lakes region has been plunged since the early 1990s, during which there have been scenarios of violence and insecurity such as the Rwandan Genocide of 1994 or the Second Congo War, also known as the African World War. This rebellion is drawn as an intermittent conflict within this crisis, since it covers a first period of hostilities between 2012, the moment of creation of the M23, and 2013 and a second one from 2021 to the present.

The M23 was born in 2012 as the heir of a series of local ethnic Tutsi militias that had emerged since the early 1990s in eastern DR Congo and which, in 2009, agreed with the government to give up arms and join the Armed Forces of the DR Congo (FARDC). However, in 2012 they took up arms claiming that the government is neither fulfilling its commitments nor protecting the rights of the Tutsi minority.

This first phase will end when a strong offensive by the FARDC and the loss of Rwandan support in November 2013 will bring the M23 to the negotiating table. However, in 2021, the group will denounce that the government is not fulfilling its commitments agreed in 2013 regarding the conditions of the ex-combatants, nor protecting the rights of the Tutsi population and includes among its demands the reform of the Congolese army as a preliminary step to an eventual re-incorporation into it. As far as Rwanda is concerned, in this second phase, the United Nations has documented that, in addition to exercising " de facto control over M23 operations in a systematic manner", it maintains at least 3,000 soldiers of its armed forces deployed in the territory of its neighbor.

For its part, the regular army of the DR Congo fights alongside a number of local armed groups known as Wazalendo (patriot in Swahili) and the FDLR armed group , heir to the Hutu extremist groups responsible for the 1994 Rwandan Genocide that fled to neighboring DR Congo. To this mosaic of actors must be added the presence of the United Nations peacekeeping mission statement in the Congo (MONUSCO) and the Southern African development Community, which has an offensive mandate to help the government restore peace and security in the east of the country. So far in 2025, 13 South African soldiers from the CDAA peacekeeping mission statement , as well as two Malawians and one Uruguayan from MONUSCO, have lost their lives as a result of the fighting.

DR Congo accuses Rwanda of using the M23 as a proxy to occupy part of its mineral resource-rich territory and Rwanda accuses DR Congo of harboring and collaborating with the FDLR, which it considers a direct threat to its security. The exploitation of coltan ore, essential for the manufacture of batteries for cell phones, computers and electric vehicles, is often identified as the cause of the conflict. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that the exploitation of minerals plays a decisive role in the development the conflict as an incentive and as a source of income that allows the actors to assume the economic cost of the conflict. However, to limit the causes of the conflict to this phenomenon alone would be to reduce the depth of its dimensions.

Thus, the causes of this security crisis can be found in the combination of three factors: a process of militarization of local governance through the emergence of armed groups; what the doctrine has called the 'Rwandan Question', i.e. the continuation of the Rwandan Civil War in DR Congo territory; and the incentives generated by the presence of vast mineral deposits in the area.

The process of militarization of local governance is caused by the overlapping of three factors: ethnicity, land and anomie. Firstly, North Kivu is an ethnically diverse region where members of the Nande ethnic groups are present, representing approximately 50% of the total population, Hutu 30% and the remaining 20% is mainly composed of Hunde, Nyanga or Tutsi. These ethnic groups are differentiated between the so-called autochthonous, i.e., those present in the area prior to the waves of migration organized during the colonial era, the Hunde, Nyanga and Nande, and the allochthonous groups, of Hutu and Tutsi ethnicity, who settled in the area during the colonial era and later from present-day Rwanda.

The mere phenomenon of ethnic diversity does not per se explain the emergence of a conflict. In this case, it should be noted that North Kivu is a region with a high population density compared to the African continent, where arable land is particularly fertile and 90% of the population is engaged in subsistence agriculture or livestock farming, which makes land a scarce and valuable commodity. The current land ownership system, by its configuration, discriminates against allochthonous groups, which has been a source of conflict between the two groups since the 1960s. The current war is therefore defined as an attempt to securitize land ownership in the long term and, in particular, the defense by the M23 of land acquired by the Tutsi community.

The emergence and survival in the area of armed groups such as the M23, the FDLR or the Wazalendo can be explained taking into account the status of anomie existing in the east of the country, that is, one in which the state cannot exercise its basic functions such as the protection of the population through the maintenance of law and order or the control over public resources, which is of particular incidence in Kivu due, among other factors, to the lack of communication infrastructures in such a vast extension of territory that is twice that of some European countries such as Belgium.

Another core topic in this conflict was the so-called Rwandan Question. In 1990 a civil war broke out in neighboring Rwanda between two dominated factions, one dominated by ethnic Hutu members and the other by Tutsi members. In the framework this conflict, the Rwandan genocide was perpetrated against ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutu individuals. After the genocide, the Tutsi groups seized power and large sectors of Hutu extremists fled to the neighboring DR Congo, where they received shelter and formed their own militias. Since then, the Rwandan government has considered the presence of these groups on the other side of its border as a threat to its security.

By its nature, this conflict is characterized by the resource by two state actors, DR Congo and Rwanda, to collaborate with non-state actors in achieving their goals and by the number and intensity of violations of international law perpetrated during the conflict. To the illegal exploitation of natural resources, mainly timber and minerals, must be added the systematic violation of the International Law of Armed Conflict through acts that could constitute war crimes such as the indiscriminate killing of civilians, the use of child soldiers or the resource of sexual violence as an instrument of war.

So far, international efforts to end this conflict, which has displaced more than half a million people, have not been result. Neither Angola's efforts as African Union-appointed mediator nor UN Security committee resolutions urging de-escalation have achieved a sustainable cease-fire over time. In the days immediately following the M23 takeover of Goma, mobs of demonstrators have raided, burned and looted the embassies of, among other countries, France and the United States in Kinshasa, accusing their governments of complicity with Rwanda by failing to exert their influence to stop their actions.

The truth is that in recent years, Rwanda and France have strengthened their strategic cooperation, materializing in the sending of Rwandan peacekeepers to Mozambique who, in the internship, have protected the oil exploitations of France's Total, as well as other French commercial interests. As for the United States, some analysts point out that Rwanda may be taking advantage of the reluctant stance on conflict involvement that the new Trump Administration has brought to the White House.