The country of Central Africa fails to control the regions of its eastern flank, in the basement rich in mineral resources. An instability widely instrumentalized by the Rwandan neighbor in a relative impunity.
by Christophe Châtelot
Analysis. Never, for thirty years, in the wake of the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda in 1994, the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) -the administrative regions of South Kivu and North Kivu as well as Ituri – did not experience lasting peace. The fighting thus resumed in November 2021, with the return of a rebellion that many believed extinguished: the movement of March 23, or M23, created in the 2010s officially to protect the Tutsi of Congo. As ten years ago, Rwanda is accused of instrumentalizing this rebellion. Kigali’s responsibility in the last violence which, in a few months, have already thrown on the roads 450,000 people and killed dozens of others cannot however obscure other reasons: the chronic weakness of the Congolese State and the ambitions regional of another neighbor of the DRC, Uganda.
In a few offensives, the M23 has indeed dislodged the Congolese army from several of its bases under the passive gaze of the peacekeepers of the mission of the United Nations for stabilization in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Monusco) , a contingent of some 15,000 men deployed in the DRC since 2002 for a little convincing result. The rebels took control of a large area north of the city of Goma, bordered to the east by the Ugandan border. Uganda, where many “historic” M23 fighters had found refuge after their 2012 military defeat.
Rwanda is clearly designated by Kinshasa and by the UN group of experts in charge of this crisis as the M23 logistics and ideological godfather. The United States and France also called on its Rwandan partner to stop their interference. On January 19, by telephone, the American secretary of state, Antony Blinken, again expressed his concern with the Angolan president, Joao Lourenço, under the auspices of which a cease-fire and cantonment plan of the M23 was drawn in December 2022.
Congolese helplessness
Since then, the implementation of this patina agreement. The Congolese therefore calls on the international community to exert more pressure on Rwanda. In vain. This Congolese helplessness is the expression of an unfavorable balance of power. The ex-Zaire is however 90 times more extensive than its neighbor, eight times more populated. It has considerable unexploited mineral resources, where the main wealth of Rwanda, agriculture, is saturated by the record density of its population (511 inhabitants per square kilometer).
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