By Theogene Rudasingwa
Photos: WFP/Moses Sawasawa\YouTube Screenshots\Wikimedia Commons
For the last several months, Rwandans, Congolese, Africans, and the international community have watched as the predictable drama from Paul Kagame’s regime plays out once again in the Kivu region of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. With the birth of M23, the Kigali regime re-engineered the mutation of an old proxy force, the CNDP, into a new one with the same agenda: 1) weaken DRC, 2) loot its natural resources, 3) pretend that Rwanda can now solve the problem by paying lip-service to negotiations, 4) deceive the world that Rwanda is after Rwandan armed groups, especially FDLR and 5) use this presence in DRC to manipulate the international community against looking at the problems within Rwanda itself. President Kagame’s trademarks remain deception, disregarding human life and disrespecting the international community.
First, where is Africa in all this? African countries, notably through the African Union, chose Rwanda to represent the continent at the UN Security Council. Like Rwanda, DRC has been bleeding for several years and has lost 6 million of its citizens due to Kagame’s wars of plunder and killings. Can’t Africa save DRC and Rwanda from the most vicious and brutal dictator since Idi Amin?
Second, the United Nations has a peacekeeping operation in DRC: over 20,000 personnel and an annual budget of nearly $1.5 billion. What is the United Nations doing in DRC if it cannot defend a small African city like Goma, women and children? The United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has become so close to President Kagame that he has lost objectivity in dealing with the crisis in DRC. In 2010, when the Mapping Report was published, Ban Ki-Moon hurriedly packed his bags and went to Kigali to beg Kagame not to pull out Rwandan troops from Sudan. The Mapping Report has been shelved. As the Goma drama unfolded, Ban Ki-Moon called Kagame, pleading that the latter (Kagame) “use his influence” to stop the advance of M23 on Goma. Incredible! The same United Nations has rewarded Kagame with a seat on the Security Council. Still, it is now failing to hold him and his officers accountable for the violations of international law.
What is the stand of the United States and British governments on the unfolding tragedy in Goma? Rwanda has invaded a neighboring country and violated the DRC’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. President Kagame’s regime is brutal and dictatorial at home and belligerent in the Great Lakes region.
Washington and London have been Kagame’s allies since 1994, and friendship with powerful nations has made him more intransigent and willing to undertake costly risks. Washington and London must re-evaluate their relationship with Kagame to avoid the “French-Rwanda” disease. In the early 1990s, France was able and yet unwilling to read the signals showing the regime’s last days, committed sins of omission and commission, and has regretted this since. France could play a good influence through the friendly regime of President Habyarimana. It chose not to. The consequences were catastrophic.
Washington and London have a narrow window of opportunity to stop and reverse their unquestioning policies towards Rwanda’s Paul Kagame. Failure to do so in the short and medium term will worsen tragedies in Rwanda and the Great Lakes region. The tide of change may not seem evident to the uncaring, distracted, or biased eyes. President Kagame is now the butcher of Rwanda and DRC. He will undoubtedly go. The question is: will he do so peacefully or with unprecedented bloodshed in Rwanda and the region? If Washington and London cannot help Rwandans and Congolese to end this bloodshed and human suffering, at least they should not make matters worse by keeping silent or supporting Kagame as he puts the whole region on fire. It is time for Washington and London to make a choice.
As a matter of urgency and survival, the Rwandan and Congolese people must work together to save themselves and their motherlands. Rwandans and Congolese people must seek the solidarity of Africans in the struggle against a minority clique under Kagame’s rule. Rwandans and Congolese must seek partners in the international community who regard respect for human rights, peace, freedom, and shared human progress as cornerstones of international relations.
Goma is now in the hands of Rwanda’s troops masquerading as M23. It is a teachable moment that DRC’s forces could not defend an outpost like Goma against Rwandan invaders. It is shameful but understandable that UN peacekeepers could not protect the Congolese people. There are such moments of betrayal in the history of the UN in DRC and Rwanda. After all, Rwanda deployed its special forces and almost a division of its armed forces, equipment, and other resources to take Goma. Rwanda is poised to take Bukavu in South Kivu and most likely will be lured into DRC’s tempting but dangerous belly as far as the capital, Kinshasa.
As Goma fell to Rwanda’s troops, President Museveni of Uganda and President Kagame of Uganda, both condemnable co-authors of this latest outrage against the Congolese people, met President Kabila of DRC in Kampala in a sham diplomacy designed to serve him with a fait accompli and an ultimatum to accept M23 as a Congolese organization with legitimate demands. Even then, Kagame must know this: it will be a futile exercise since, like all his ventures in DRC, he will be forced to abandon it, leaving with bags of coltan, diamonds, and gold, and behind him a trail of blood, tears, and sweat of Rwandans and Congolese. DRC will, sooner than later, prove to be Paul Kagame’s Achilles heel, as wars that he has perpetuated abroad finally reverberate on the hills of Rwanda. This worst-case scenario is not inevitable, but the time to act to prevent continuing bloodshed is now.
We must organize, not agonize.
Those words are still as relevant now as they were in 2012. At that time, a diplomatic yet forceful call from then-US President Obama to General Kagame, combined with the actions of the Intervention Brigade of South African and Tanzanian troops, forced Rwanda’s army to withdraw from Goma ten days later.
I now wake up to another repeat of history as General Kagame’s army (RDF), masquerading as M23, reconquers Goma, thus perpetuating a seemingly unending tragedy.
In the intervening years, General Kagame’s territorial ambitions for economic purposes in the Democratic Republic of Congo have never ended. After two major wars in DRC, Rwanda maintained its presence there through proxies. These multiplied as Rwanda became a major exporter of minerals plundered from this mineral-rich nation, while the humanitarian consequences on the Congolese people exponentially grew. The United Nations Peacekeeping Force (MONUSCO) remained deployed in DRC for over two decades. Countless reports by the United Nations Group of Experts have been written, providing facts and evidence of Rwanda’s actions of plunder and destabilization. The United States, United Kingdom, and lately, France remain General Kagame’s backers.
Thus, when Rwanda’s army struck again in 2022 under the same name, M23, it had spent thirteen years in active hibernation to prepare, refurbish, and redeploy on familiar territory
Two factors provoked this action. First, President Museveni of Uganda and DRC’s President Tshisekedi announced joint efforts to build road infrastructure and fight the terror group ADF on DRC territory. This happened at a time when the Rwanda-Uganda and Rwanda-Burundi borders were closed. No foe provokes more tremendous anger, suspicion, frustration, vitriol, and violence in General Kagame than President Museveni. Their armies have ventured together in DRC and yet fought pitched battles against each other. To General Kagame, the Tshisekedi-Museveni deal was a plan of encirclement against Rwanda.
Secondly, As Rwanda’s army conquered village after village in eastern DRC, a flurry of international condemnations, UN meetings, and peace initiatives from Kenya, Angola, and the East African Community proliferated but to no results. The inconsequential East African Community military force (EACRF)was deployed and then dismissed by DRC when it did not deter Rwanda’s belligerent actions. While Burundi” army remained deployed in DRC, and a Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) force (SAMIDRC) was added to the MONUSCO and FARDC (DRC National Army), General Kagame understood that he could still act with impunity and get away with it.
Last week on January 2025. General Kagame assembled all diplomatic corps in Kigali, Rwanda, to give an hour-long boring but pregnant monologue full of lies and in which he could hardly conceal what was coming next on the DRC frontline. He chided the international community for having double standards and questionable values. He alleged that the international community acts in disregard of facts and evidence. He charged that MONUSCO was a useless and costly force. He insulted DRC President Tshisekedi and called him an unelected leader who is an idiot! This was vintage Kagame on display when faced with risky choices. In psychology, you could easily diagnose him as projecting his feelings, thoughts, and behaviors onto others.
In capturing Goma, General Kagame is executing on a familiar business plan that has served him well since April 1994. He is a general who never does cost-benefit analysis. To him, his power-and-money-by-all-means-necessary calculus compels him to look at Rwandans, Congolese, and human beings, in general, to be expendable. When he ordered the shooting down of the plane in which two African Presidents and their entourage were killed, this triggered genocide. Millions of Rwandans and Congolese people have perished from the actions of his conquering army. He has acted with impunity and without accountability for more than three decades. With Goma in hands, his mental state deceivingly tells him that he has condemned the Kenya-Angola peace process to irrelevance, effectively thwarted the Tshisekedi-Museveni deal, humiliated Tshisekedi, successfully engineered withdrawal of EACRF, given a knock-out to the combined FARDC-MONUSCO-SAMIDRC and especially shown South Africa and Tanzania that he is a force to be reckoned with.
It is imperative that every stakeholder in this tragic drama, besides General Kagame, take stock of the sequence of current events and draw the necessary lessons. It is time for all of us to go back to the drawing board, for we cannot expect to get different and better results by doing the same half-hearted things without full commitment over and over again.
The general is a man who has no shame in deceiving Rwandans and the world that he has been re-elected 99.9% and has no troops in DRC. Fighting, rolling back, and finally defeating him requires more time and resources to understand his mindset. He has made provisions to keep himself in power until 2034. We all better have a broader, deeper, and long-term view of a tyrant determined to keep power and accumulate more personal wealth using a Greater Rwanda paradigm that incorporates eastern DRC.
Second, the struggle to overcome current and future hazards of General Kagame’s actions in the Great Lakes region demands that we struggle as one with different dimensions on the political, diplomatic, economic, and military fronts. We are East African citizens, and governments, faced with a mutating virus in our midst. We must move faster ahead of him, proactively creating a realm of collaborating networks to detect his covert actions, anticipate his moves, deter his subversion, and ultimately defeat him.
Short of an urgent common struggle that the international community should support, the capture of Goma will evolve into an inter-state conflict and broaden into a regional war with all the catastrophic consequences, some of which we have seen before.
Let us mobilize, organize, and not agonize!
Dr. Theogene Rudasingwa*
Co-Founder, Rwanda Truth Commission, and Rwanda Freedom Movement-ISHAKWE
Contact: [email protected]
*Dr. Rudasingwa previously served with General Kagame as Secretary General of the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF), Ambassador of Rwanda to the United States, and as his Chief of Staff.