Can Trump’s Peace Initiative Stop the Congo’s Thirty-Year War?
“What kind of power?” I asked.
“All kinds of power,” he said, smiling.
In June, when Trump announced that he had brought peace to eastern Congo, he described it as “a glorious triumph.” But the M23 did not agree to dissolve. A militia spokesperson told the Associated Press: “We are in Goma with the population and we are not going to leave. »
A Western diplomat in the region told me that the M23 appeared to be trying to gain a lasting foothold in North Kivu. They had disrupted the traditional justice system, administered by tribal leaders. After land title records were burned during the fighting, the M23 simply distributed land to those it favored.
The capture of Goma gave the M23 control of a vast arsenal left by the defeated Congolese army, up to a third of the country’s military equipment, the diplomat said. The militia had also acquired approximately twelve thousand new soldiers, many of whom were captured government soldiers who were either induced or forced to serve. “The M23 has never enjoyed this level of control before,” the diplomat said. “The risk for them is that they have now fallen into the same trap as the DRC government: having to administer the territory they control. »
If the management of North Kivu by the M23 constitutes a test for the management of the country, it is not encouraging. Patrick Muyaya, the DRC’s communications minister, told me that electricity and banking services had ceased in Goma, while the “ethnic cleansing of Hutus” continued. In July, according to the UN, M23 fighters massacred more than three hundred civilians in a group of villages on the front line, about forty kilometers from the city. “Every day there are killings,” Muyaya said. “The people who run this part of the country, the only thing they know about is crime.”
An hour’s drive northwest of Goma, through a vast moonscape of black lava, lies a chaotic roadside community called Sake. For several years before the fall of Goma, it was a front-line city in the fighting between the M23 and government forces. The displaced people’s tents, made from plastic sheeting provided by NGOs, are pitched next to abandoned housing sites, many of which have been burned to their foundations. The village is carved into the jagged rock around a Catholic church, Divine Mercy.
The priest, a burly man with a wary look, explained that he had been appointed to Sake in 2023, when the Wazalendo was entrenched there. As the M23 advanced, he explained, it captured several hundred Hutu refugees and forcibly took them away by truck. The church was looted and burned, and the town became “like a bush,” he said, with almost no inhabitants left. “We had to start from scratch. »
Gradually, people returned, but they struggled to support themselves and the attacks continued. Some drivers from a humanitarian agency had been kidnapped during a visit to the priest’s property, so no one spent the night at the church anymore. When I asked him if he was sleeping there, he replied: “How could I leave? I am the priest.” But many civilians were packing up and heading to Goma. “They think it’s an oasis of peace,” he says wryly. Added to the threat of violence in Goma was a shortage of food, as the farmers who supplied the city had fled their land. The priest said he was forty years old and had known nothing but conflict in his life. With a look of disgust, he said: “I am very tired of the fighting and I call on the leaders to put an end to it. »
The presidents of Congo and Rwanda have spent much of the past year trading insults. Tshisekedi compared Kagame to Hitler and said: “One thing is responsible for this situation, and that is Rwandan aggression. » Kagame tends to be sharp rather than brutal. When Tshisekedi threatened to send his air forces to strike Rwanda, Kagame responded: “Tshisekedi is capable of anything except measuring the consequences of what he says. »
The son of Tutsis exiled in Uganda, Kagame served as an intelligence officer in the Ugandan army before returning to lead the Rwandan Patriotic Front. As president, he was the subject of both praise and condemnation abroad. He is a ruthless strategist capable of waging bloody wars, but he has also fostered a remarkable program aimed at reintegrating tens of thousands of former genocidaires into Rwandan society. He has been accused of numerous authoritarian acts, including the assassination of political opponents, but he has made his country a regional power, with a disciplined army deployed to help his embattled allies. “Rwanda has become an incredibly efficient place to work and do business, as long as you stay in your lane,” a former State Department official told me. “You want to support them. But, on the other hand, they are responsible for several decades of horrible actions in the DRC.”
