Members of the M23 armed group sit on a pickup truck in Bukavu, Congo, on Feb. 18, during a patrol as women carrying fruits walk past a market, after the takeover of the city by the M23 movement.LUIS TATO/AFP/Getty Images
With the world distracted by other crises, two foreign armies are seizing the moment to expand their control of eastern Congo, carving up a weakened country whose military has come close to collapse.
The Rwandan-backed M23 militia, which has already captured the Congolese cities of Goma and Bukavu, is expanding its offensive in a new push southward to the Burundi border this week. At the northern end of the region, Uganda is sending tanks and soldiers across the Congolese border to bolster its own sphere of influence.
Congo’s military, plagued by corruption and poor discipline, has barely put up a fight. It lost the battle for Goma within days. It pulled out of Bukavu without any resistance. It says it is co-operating with the Ugandan troops who rolled into the city of Bunia this week, but it had little choice in the matter after Uganda unilaterally announced the deployment.
The government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been pleading for international sanctions against Rwanda, but Western governments – focused on Ukraine and other crises – have done almost nothing so far, aside from condemning Rwanda’s role in the M23 assault.
In an earlier conflict in 2012, when M23 briefly occupied Goma, a combination of Western pressure and United Nations military operations was able to force the rebel militia to withdraw from the city and temporarily disband. As recently as last year, U.S. pressure helped force Rwanda to the negotiating table, where a Congo ceasefire was announced.
But today the global situation is much different. The world’s spotlight is focused elsewhere. The new administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has shown little interest in African crises, with many of its top Africa-related posts still vacant. Perhaps not coincidentally, M23 launched its assault on Goma and Bukavu immediately after Mr. Trump took office.
The European Parliament, meanwhile, has called for a freeze in European aid to Rwanda, but the European Union has failed to act. Several European countries are reluctant to take action against Rwanda, seeing it as a useful military ally and key supplier of critical minerals, even if many of those minerals have been smuggled from Congo itself.
With no real pressure against it, M23 continues to expand southward, now controlling both North Kivu and South Kivu provinces, while Uganda boosts its military presence in Ituri province to the north. Many analysts have compared the situation to earlier wars in Congo, from 1996 to 2003, in which Rwanda and Uganda supported rebels who toppled Congo’s government. Millions of people died in those wars.
In the latest fighting, M23 has claimed to be protecting Congo’s ethnic Tutsi minority. But in a statement on Monday, the group adopted a new goal: a “revolutionary struggle” to liberate the entire country from “bad governance.” Its leaders have threatened to march on the national capital, Kinshasa.
Rwanda’s military wields effective control of M23’s operations in Congo and has dispatched thousands of Rwandan troops to help the rebels, according to several reports by UN experts. By widening M23’s territorial control, Rwanda is bolstering its own power in the region and increasing its access to Congo’s strategic minerals, including coltan, an important element in the supply chain for computers and cellphones.
Congo’s impoverished civilians are continuing to pay the price for the M23 offensive. Millions were forced to flee from their homes after the offensive began in 2022, and UN reports documented massacres in which M23 killed hundreds of civilians. In the latest fighting in South Kivu, a further 150,000 people have been forced to flee, according to the UN refugee agency, UNHCR.
“At least 85,000 of these individuals are living in newly created spontaneous sites for internally displaced people, where basic services such as water, shelter and access to health services are in short supply,” UNHCR said in a report on Tuesday.
A civil-society group, LUCHA, and a political party, the Union for Democracy and Social Progress, both accused M23 of targeting and killing their members in newly captured areas of South Kivu and North Kivu.
The UN’s human-rights office, in a separate report, said M23 had killed children in Bukavu after capturing the city. “Our office has confirmed cases of summary execution of children by M23,” it said on Tuesday.
“We have received information about arbitrary arrests and detentions, degrading treatment and alleged forced returns of young Congolese men fleeing violence in neighbouring countries.”
In addition, the conflict has led to the closing of more than 2,500 schools in the two provinces, leaving nearly 800,000 children deprived of education, according to the UN children’s agency, UNICEF.
Earlier in the month, the M23 offensive led to the destruction of about 70 per cent of the makeshift camps for displaced people around Goma, leaving 350,000 people homeless, UNHCR said this week.