- For some time now, there has been escalating war in the Democratic Republic of Congo
- M23 is said to have been backed by Rwanda, an accusation denied by the Rwandan government
- ISIL has infiltrated into the conflict, leading to the killing of thousands of citizens and displacement of millions
For several weeks now, clashes between local rebels and pro-government militias in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has continued to worsen, leading to the killing of several persons in the area.
Last week, the escalating violence in the area claimed the life of 16 villagers on Thursday, a government official said, stressing that this is the latest violation of a ceasefire announced to help millions of displaced people in the region.
WITHIN NIGERIA gathered that the villagers were killed in Rutshuru territory, North Kivu province , during fighting between the M23 rebel group, which is believed to be backed by neighboring Rwanda , and local Wazalendo fighters , who often fight alongside Congolese security forces, according to Isaac Kibira, an administrative official in Rutshuru.
“The M23 rebel position was attacked by the Wazalendo youth (and) unfortunately, seven civilians died,” Mr. Kibira said. A second clash in Rutshuru resulted in a vehicle being set on fire, killing nine of the passengers on board, he added.
None of the dead villagers were involved in the fighting, authorities said.
The fighting has raised new concerns about the sustainability of a ceasefire that came into effect on August 4 to end fighting in the region and provide aid to millions of people in need. Several other ceasefires announced in the past between the government and rebels have also been violated.
Eastern DRC has long been overrun by more than 120 armed groups seeking a share of the region’s gold and other resources while committing massacres . The result is one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises, with more than 7 million people displaced, many beyond the reach of aid.
The most active rebel group in the region is the M23, which rose to prominence more than a decade ago when its fighters seized Goma , the largest city in eastern DRC on the border with Rwanda . It takes its name from a peace deal reached on March 23, 2009, which it accuses the Congolese government of failing to implement.
Separately, Governor Jean-Jacques Purusi Sadiki of South Kivu province in eastern DRC on Thursday lifted the suspension of all mining activities, nearly a month after announcing the ban to “restore order” in the mineral-rich region.
The lifting of the ban follows meetings with mining companies and a directive to them to file tax returns and sign a pledge of transparency in the mining sector, according to a statement from the governor’s office.
Many Chinese companies mine gold and other minerals in eastern DRC, where attacks on quarries and mining cooperatives are common. Last month, a militia attacked a gold mine in Ituri province, killing six Chinese miners and two Congolese soldiers.
The origin of the decades-long conflict in DR Congo
For over three decades now, the oil-rich Democratic Republic of Congo has been enmeshed in bloody conflict, resulting to the death of thousands of people and even as millions of them have been displaced.
Escalating tensions in the country have once again drawn global attention to the security crisis in the African country’s mineral-rich eastern region.
However, in the latest conflict, heavy fighting between the Congolese armed forces (FARDC) and the M23 rebel group in the country’s troubled North Kivu province has forced thousands of civilians to flee their homes in the past two weeks, taking what little they can. Dozens have been killed and hundreds of thousands displaced since January.
There are fears that the regional capital, Goma – home to some two million people and about half a million displaced people seeking refuge there – could soon fall to an advancing M23, a potentially devastating blow to the Congolese government’s control of the region.
The UN Security Council voiced concern at the “escalating violence” after M23 shelled Goma airport, damaging Congolese military aircraft.
Racked by conflict for more than 30 years, the DRC’s insecurity is caused by complex and deep-seated factors, as well as a multitude of actors. Apart from the M23, numerous other armed groups, Congolese and foreign forces are battling for control, mostly in the eastern part of the country. Some of Kinshasa’s neighbours are also implicated in the crisis.
Approximately six million people have been killed since 1996 and more than six million people remain internally displaced in eastern DRC.
Here’s a guide to the decades-old conflict in the country in 1994, DRC conflict began as a major spillover of ethnic wars in neighbouring Rwanda. Millions of people flee into DRC, including armed fighters. From 1996-2003, Uganda, Rwanda and angola invaded the DRC to target Hutu fighters from Rwanda. Namibia, Zimbabwe, Eritrea and Sudan later get pulled into the war.
CNDP(later M23), ADF and CODECO rebels groups emerge as neighbouring countries arm and counter-arm fighters. They are active in ongoing conflicts in Ituri and North Kivu provinces. UN deploys MONUSCO peace forces in 1999. The unit is now phasing out.
In 2012, M23 seizes Goma. A special UN force intervenes and successfully pushes back the rebels.
In 2022, M23 resurfaces, seizes territory in North Kivu and starts to press on Goma, a city of two million.
EAC’s November 2022 deployment of troops failed to stop M23 advance. EAC and UN troops start withdrawals after violent protests. Regional SAMIDRC were deployed in December.
However, since 2024, the M23 rebels have continued to advance in Goma.
The origin of M23 and its deadly operations
Findings by WITHIN NIGERIA revealed that M23 rebels took their name from the March 23 Movement.
The movement often abbreviated as M23 and also known as the Congolese Revolutionary Army has its base in eastern areas of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
The rebel operates mainly in the province of North Kivu, which borders both Uganda and Rwanda. The M23 rebellion of 2012 to 2013 against the DRC government led to the displacement of large numbers of people.
On 20 November 2012, M23 took control of Goma, a provincial capital with a population of a million people, but it was requested to evacuate it by the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region because the DRC government had finally agreed to negotiate.
Nevertheless, in late 2012, Congolese troops, along with UN troops, retook control of Goma, and M23 announced a ceasefire and said that it wanted to resume peace talks.
Several accusations have been leveled against the rebel including the report by UN that Rwanda created and commanded the M23 rebel group. Rwanda ceased its support because of international pressure and the military defeat by the DRC and the UN in 2013.
In 2017, M23 elements resumed their insurgency in the DRC, but the operations of this splinter faction had little local impact. In 2022, a larger portion of M23 started an offensive, which eventually resulted in the capture of the Congolese border town of Bunagana by the rebels.
In November 2022, M23 rebels got close to the city of Goma and forced about 180,000 people to leave their homes after the Congolese Army had withdrawn from the region near the village of Kibumba.
In June 2023, Human Rights Watch reported human rights abuses by M23 rebels in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, including unlawful killings, rapes and other war crimes. Allegations implicate Rwandan support for these actions, bringing concerns about war crimes and making the humanitarian situation worse in the region. The United Nations Security Council encouraged sanctions against the M23 leaders and implicated Rwandan officials. As of February 2023, the group occupies various major towns in eastern North Kivu including Bunagana, Kiwanja, Kitchanga, Rubaya, Rutshuru, and controls vital roads leading to Goma.
How the 1994 Rwandan genocide influenced the DRC conflict
The DRC crisis originally began as a result of a series of post-colonial battles for power after independence from Belgium in 1960, which culminated in the assassination of popular leader Patrice Lumumba and the three-decade military rule under dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.
Ethnic tensions in Rwanda forced more than 300,000 people from the Tutsi minority group to flee to neighbouring countries in the 1960s, particularly to the DRC. Some of those refugees regrouped and sought to seize power in Rwanda after the country gained independence from Belgium in 1962.
In the early 1990s, the DRC saw a spillover of civil war and subsequent genocide in neighbouring Rwanda. In October 1990, a civil war broke out after the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi rebel group led by current Rwandan President Paul Kagame, invaded the country from its Ugandan base. In April 1994, extremist Hutu militias attacked Tutsis and moderate Hutus, killing 800,000 to a million people over 100 days in what is now known as the Rwandan genocide. Hutus form some 80 percent of Rwanda’s population.
Kagame’s RPF seized the capital, Kigali, on July 4 as Hutu genocidaires, troops, and former regime leaders fled to the DRC. An estimated two million Hutu civilians fearing revenge and reprisal attacks also poured into the country.
What led to the First Congo War of 1996-1997?
Tensions rose between local Congolese tribes, Rwandan emigrants from the colonial and pre-1960 independence periods, and those who fled the 1994 war. Often, local tribes battled Tutsis, but conflicts also existed with the Hutus, as locals feared they would be outnumbered. Earlier emigrants had rights to Congolese citizenship, but later emigrants were regarded as refugees and many were housed in camps.
Hutu militias who fled Kagame’s rule to refugee camps in eastern DRC began to regroup to restore a Hutu government in Kigali. They launched attacks on Rwanda and also killed Tutsis inside the Congo. In response, Rwanda started to arm Tutsi militias inside the DRC.
Across the DRC, many Congolese were resentful of Mobutu’s corrupt rule. Rebel groups seeking to overthrow him emerged, including the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (AFDL), led by Laurent-Desire Kabila.
Rwanda, which accused Mobutu of harbouring Hutu perpetrators of genocide, armed the rebels and sent in Rwandan troops in 1996.
On October 24, 1996, the Tutsi-dominated AFDL in Kivu and troops of the Rwandan army launched offensives in eastern DRC, sparking the First Congo War. Uganda, Eritrea, Angola, and Burundi – all Rwandan allies – joined the war.
The AFDL seized power on May 17, 1997, ending the fighting, and Kabila declared himself president of the DRC. But the Rwandan troops allegedly massacred Hutu populations, forcefully repatriated Tutsis, and took control of lucrative diamond and coltan mines in the resource-rich eastern region bordering Rwanda.
People carry some of their belongings as they flee the Masisi territory following clashes between M23 rebels and government forces at a road near Sake on February 7, 2024 [Aubin Mukoni/AFP]
What caused the 1998-2003 Second Congo War?
After his climb to power, Kabila fell out with Kagame and started to unceremoniously force out Rwandan and other foreign troops still in the DRC. This alarmed ethnic Tutsis living in Congo and reignited tensions with local tribes.
In response, Rwanda backed a new rebel group, the Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD) which launched a revolt in August 1998 and started the Second Congo War. A parallel group, the Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC) formed to fight alongside the RCD, also seeking to overthrow Kabila.
The DRC and rights groups claim MLC was backed by Uganda, which had also fallen out with the Kabila regime. Jean-Pierre Bemba, the present Congolese minister of defence, led the armed group that has now morphed into an opposition political party.
Kabila’s government armed Hutu refugees in the east to fight back against Rwanda and RCD. Government officials publicly incited Congolese people to attack Tutsis, leading to several public lynchings. The South African Development Community (SADC) of which the DRC is a member, deployed troops from Zimbabwe, Namibia, and Angola to fight RCD and Rwandan troops.
In 1999, the DRC, Uganda and Rwanda signed a set of ceasefire agreements, including the Lusaka Ceasefire Agreement (1999) and the Luanda Agreement (2002) which were to see all sides stop military operations. The agreements also triggered the UN to deploy MONUSCO (United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo) troops to monitor the peace process.
However fighting persisted in many areas like gold-rich Ituri, where ethnic tensions, worsened by the war, erupted into the continuing Ituri conflict.
A peacekeeper of the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo looks on at the force’s base during a field training exercise in Sake, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo on November 06, 2023.
Security implications of the conflict on the sub-region
The security implications of the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC is so much enormous.
In a country that is still grappling with the frequent terrorists attacks, it goes without saying that the conflict has become a catalyst for the terrorists activities in the region.
For instance on June 8, 2024,rebel fighters affiliated with ISIL (ISIS) killed at least 38 people in an overnight attack on a village in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), officials and a civil society leader in the region said.
WITHIN NIGERIA gathered that the armed men used guns and machetes to attack residents of villages in Beni territory, in North Kivu province, overnight on Friday, local official Fabien Kakule said.
District official Leon Kakule Siviwe said that the recent surge in violence was due to the attackers taking advantage of a small security presence.
Local civil society leader Justin Kavalami blamed members of the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) for the attack.
The ADF, which is also accused of being behind another village assault that killed at least 16 people earlier this week, was originally based in neighbouring Uganda. After spreading to the eastern DRC, it pledged allegiance to ISIL in 2018 and has mounted frequent attacks, further destabilising a region where many armed groups are active.
The ADF has killed more than 50 people in the war-torn region of the DRC, local officials said.
Since the end of 2021, the Congolese and Ugandan armies have conducted joint operations against the ADF in North Kivu and neighbouring Ituri, but have so far failed to stop the deadly attacks on civilians.
The eastern DRC has been plagued by violence by armed groups for decades, with both the government and foreign actors providing belligerents with weapons. The Rwandan-backed M23 resumed its armed campaign in the region at the end of 2021, seizing swaths of territory in North Kivu, as intensified fighting continues to displace tens of thousands of people.
It was reported that about 6.9 million people across the DRC were displaced by the end of last year, mostly in the eastern provinces.
Since an escalation of hostilities in March 2022, more than 1.6 million people have been driven from their homes in North Kivu in the east of the country.
With the ongoing war in the DRC, the security situation of the neighbouring countries like Rwanda, Ugnada and others have continued to hang in the balance.
In any case, with the re-election of Felix Tshisekedi as the president, it is now hoped that the former SADC president will help in restoration of elusive peace and security in the beleaguered country.