President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) Felix Tshisekedi convened the country’s Supreme Defense Council on Wednesday, following the capture of the town of Bunagana, on the border with Uganda, by forces from the M23 militia.
Speaking late that day, Congolese Minister of Communication Patrick Muyaya said the council “has taken the following measures: first, it demands that Rwanda immediately withdraw its troops, operating under the cover of the terrorist M23 group, from Congolese territory; secondly. it requests that the Government of the Democratic Republic of Congo suspends all protocols of agreements, accords and conventions concluded with Rwanda.”
Among those deals that would be suspended is one from June 2021 allowing the Congolese state-owned mining company Sakima SA and Rwandan firm Dither, Ltd. to mine and refine goal and coltan in the eastern Congo “in order to deprive the armed groups of the revenue from this sector,” according to Kenya’s The Nation daily. It also includes an agreement of combating tax evasion and double taxation and another promoting safe investment, and comes after Kinshasa banned Rwanda’s flag carrier airline RwandAir from landing in its territory earlier this month.
Kigali has denied that it supports M23, a Tutsi group in North Kivu that has fought for years against Hutu Power groups connected to the 1994 genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda, the most recent of which is the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR). Rwanda was previously granted permission to enter Kivu in 2009 to hunt down the FDLR, which was ultimately unsuccessful.
According to the Project on Violent Conflict, a US Department of Homeland Security-funded project, “The relationship between the FARDC [The Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo] and the FDLR oscillates between open conflict and covert cooperation.”
For years, M23 had been pacified by a peace deal with Kinshasa, but the group rebelled late last year, claiming agreements underpinning its demobilization had not been honored. Last month, tensions began rising after a series of incidents in North Kivu, including several rockets fired by a Congolese BM-21 system that landed in Rwanda, injuring several people, and the kidnapping of two Rwandan soldiers patrolling the border by the FDLR. Their release was negotiated by Angolan President Joao Lourenco.
“Rwanda does not like us. We are not afraid of it and we will fight it,” Congolese Gen. Sylvain Ekenge, spokesman for the military governor of North Kivu province, said on Tuesday, following M23’s seizure of Bunagana.
“If it wants war, it will have war,” he said of Rwanda, adding, “No one will occupy a single centimeter of our territory.”
Most recently, an FARDC soldier on Friday crossed the border and reportedly began firing indiscriminately at Rwandans nearby, injuring two police officers. The soldier was shot dead about 25 meters inside Rwandan territory and his body returned to the Congo later that day, according to local media.
Lourenco, along with Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, have tried to ease tensions between their neighbors, wary of a return to the violence of the late 1990s, when much of the continent was sucked into a catastrophic conflict widely referred to as “Africa’s World War.” That war, too, was born out of Hutu Power militias in the eastern DR Congo, which Rwanda invaded to destroy in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide. The war brought down the government of then-Zaire before seeing the newly born DR Congo fracture into tribal fighting as different groups, backed by foreign powers, vied for control over valuable mineral resources. Some 5.4 million people died between 1996 and 2008, most of whom died due to disease or hunger.
On Thursday, Kenyatta, who chairs the regional East African Community (EAC), called for the EAC’s peacekeeping force to be deployed to Ituri, North Kivu and South Kivu provinces “to stabilize the zone and enforce peace in support of the DRC security forces and in close coordination with MONUSCO,” the 14,000-strong United Nations peacekeeping force in the eastern Congo.
Meanwhile, Tshisekedi has tried to outflank Rwandan President Paul Kagame, urging UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson to “leverage his influence” over Kagame in the wake of them signing a deal for London to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda earlier this year.