Rwanda invaded the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) on January 26, 2025. The Rwandan Defense Force (RDA) crossed sectors 12 and 13 of the Congolese border adjacent to Goma, a city of two million and the capital of North Kivu Province in eastern Congo.
The DRC Minister of International Co-Operation and Foreign Affairs, Thérèse Kayikwamba Wagner, made a powerful speech at the UN Security Council in which she denounced Rwanda’s invasion. She stated that the international community had permitted Rwanda to “wreak havoc in the DRC, in particular in North Kivu, even in the presence of UN peace keeping troops.”
Wagner noted that, shamefully, Rwanda was one of the UN’s largest troop-contributing countries. Its repeated invasions of the DRC have in turn completely delegitimized the UN, whose removal from DRC President Félix Tshisekedi has sought.
Wagner stated: “How is it permissible that a contributing country, one of the largest troop-contributing countries, gets away with killing peacekeepers as peacekeepers from South Africa, from Malawi, from Uruguay were killed in less than 24 hours. This is unacceptable. It is a violation of all the principles of the United Nations.”
Rwanda and its criminal leader Paul Kagame have been allowed to get away with murder for decades with support from the U.S. and UK.
The chief reason is that Rwanda is the proxy army of the international supply chains of cobalt and coltan that have a vested interest in maintaining a state of destabilization in DRC.
The DRC government maintains utopian-level deregulation for the corporations which are using M23 to extract Congolese minerals and transport them to international markets via Rwanda from where they are illicitly traded or traded through the Rwandan economy.
Those same vested interests are those who organized the genocide in Rwanda in 1994.
Maurice Carney, co-founder and executive director of Friends of the Congo, told Democracy Now that “Rwanda’s actions in the DRC will continue unless Western countries stop rewarding President Paul Kagame with development aid, trade deals and military funding. This lack of accountability, this rampant impunity, lack of justice has enabled this to continue to this day,” says Carney, calling Rwanda’s involvement in the DRC a “war of plunder” aimed at securing the country’s mineral wealth.”
The New York Times reported on January 29 that, after invading Congolese territory, Rwanda was looking to permanently occupy the DRC for the long-term by setting up an administrative state that would collect taxes on residents in Goma.
UN Experts were quoted in the same article stating that at least 150 tons of coltan were illegally exported to Rwanda from the DRC’s Eastern Kivu province last year. Rwanda has no deposits of coltan, cobalt or gold but is in top 10 of global exporters.
Last month, the DRC government filed a criminal complaint in France and Belgium against subsidiaries of Apple, accusing it of using conflict minerals sourced in the DRC.[1]
Rwanda has occupied eastern Congo since 1997 when, under Laurent Kabila, the joint forces of Rwanda and Uganda invaded the DRC under the Alliance of Democratic Forces (AFDL).
The Clinton administration provided significant military and intelligence support for this latter invasion, which resulted in thousands of deaths. At the same time, some of Clinton’s donors profited from Kabila, and his successor Hyppolite Kanambe, opening up the DRC to greater foreign corporate exploitation.[2]
A key emissary for Clinton’s foreign policy in Central Africa was Maurice Tempelsman, a CIA-connected diamond trader and Jackie Kennedy’s lover. He had been extremely close with Congolese dictator Joseph Mobutu, who first helped American mining corporations gain a foothold in the DRC when he overthrew Patrice Lumumba in a CIA-backed coup.[3]
Since the late 1990s, Rwanda has trained, supplied and re-enforced the destabilizing terrorist movement known by its current acronym of M23. Prior to M23 it was called CNDP. It is now rebranding itself as AFC which is based in Kenya.
Rwandan (official) forces that are now in North Kivu are accompanied by Kenyan military forces, Ugandan military forces and Somalian mercenaries.
In Goma, the local resistance group, called the Wazalendo (patriot army), and FARDC (Forces Armee de Repubique du Congo—the national armed forces of DRC)—are fighting a losing battle against these forces and those of M23. FARDC has surrendered/lost in parts of the region; however, Goma has large numbers of Wazalendo fighters who cannot lay down their arms because, if they do so, they will be tortured, incinerated and murdered by M23 and Rwanda. In Minova last week M23 tortured and burned alive at least 86 fighters who were protecting Kalehe and Minova districts.
The Wazalendo are citizen forces comprised of villagers who will no longer accept the deliberate ineptitude of MONUSCO (UN force) or the inability of FARDC to protect its vast territory. The Wazalendo are men, women and young people. They operate in North Kivu as the Wazalendo. In South Kivu they are known as Mai-Mai.
Rwandan intelligence is expert at psychological warfare (Paul Kagame was trained in psychological warfare at the U.S. army training center at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, prior to the 1994 Rwandan genocide).
When M23 members commit the extreme acts of brutality that they are known by 110 million Congolese to be responsible for, they make sure that the images of their massacres and torture circulate on social media. The following images are recent photos of civilians who were hacked to death while trying to flee with their belongings.
AFC, Alliance Fleuve du Congo, which is the latest acronym for M23, issued a press statement today stating that it had taken Goma and secured Goma airport. Members present themselves (for the sake of the international community) as saviors of the Congolese from their government. They say they exist to protect Kinyarwandan-speaking people.
At the time these statements were issued, this was not fact but fake news. The video is from Rwandan media and shows live coverage of the bombing and gunfire on Goma from the Rwandan border indicating that neither Goma nor Goma airport was secured by Rwanda-M23 at the time.
The AFC, like the Kagame regime, is the epitome of the word “specious.” It is the same as the Western-backed Islamic extremist terrorist groups that plague the civilized Muslim world and who the Western media present as the “good guys.”
The BBC published this article today which is both psychologically pre-emptive and fake news as of the time of its publication.
The DRC government closed Goma airport as a safety measure because of the amount of shelling it was receiving from the Rwandan side of the border and because Rwanda has been distorting GPS signals from the satellite which covers the area.
The object of the current exercise is not for Rwanda to gain control of Goma for any length of time but to facilitate enough human suffering, death and mutilation as to warrant an international humanitarian, R2P-style, humanitarian intervention which will call for further mediation and result in land allocation to Rwanda.
Ruth Maclean, “Minimal Resistance From West as Rwanda Makes Land Grab,” The New York Times, January 29, 2025, A1, A8. ↑
See Jeremy Kuzmarov, Warmonger: How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the US Trajectory from Bush II to Biden (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2024). ↑
Ibid. ↑
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About the Author
PD Lawton was born in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa.
She is an independent writer, researcher and editor and founder of africanagenda.net.
Because of her belief in the need for the industrialization of all African economies, she writes about hard infrastructure such as the African Continental High Speed railway network and energy generation including nuclear, all needed to address Africa`s chronic energy deficit.
She has a degree from the University of Life and is the co-author of the recently published book `Fathers of Pan-Africanism`
Ms. Lawton can be reached at pdlawton0@gmail.com.
