Goma: Understanding the M23 and RDF attack

Since the end of those wars in 2003, Rwanda has never officially intervened, only backing proxy groups.  In October 2008, the CNDP, also led by Congolese Tutsi, fought its way to the doorstep of Goma, sending the army fleeing. In November 2012, the M23––which emerged from the remnants of the CNDP and had much stronger Rwandan backing––took and held Goma for a week. 

But the times were different. Both of those attacks on Goma spelled the beginning of the end for the Rwandan-backed rebellions as donors pressured Rwanda to pull the plug. In 2008, it took two months before Rwanda decapitated the CNDP, arresting its leader Laurent Nkunda and striking a deal to integrate the rebels into the Congolese army. In 2012, it took around 10 months before the M23 was defeated.

Since then, the world has changed. Western powers seem less willing to use their considerable leverage over Rwanda to force a compromise. While Rwanda used to have the sympathy of Western leaders due to the genocide, now they have been able to cater to the financial and strategic interests of those countries, as well as those of African countries, and have used their considerable diplomatic heft to build relations across the globe. 

All of this suggests that absent a rapid, radical change in donors’ pressure on Rwanda, the M23 and its Rwandan backers are in Goma to stay, that their occupation could last months and even years. 

How did we get here?

Rwanda: making themselves useful

In contrast with past rounds of escalation, Rwanda’s intervention has not been met with donor pushback, at least until now. 

While Rwanda’s dependence on donors has decreased in recent years, foreign grants still contribute 13% to their budget; the World Bank estimates that total aid in recent years was the equivalent of between 25% and 40% of its revenue (much of that does not go through the national budget, hence the discrepancy). Currently, it receives around $1.3 billion in aid; its total budget is just over $4 billion.

More importantly, Rwanda depends enormously on its reputation as a stable, peaceful place––it was projected to earn $660 million from tourism in 2024 and it has positioned itself as a major conference hub, hosting over 150 conferences in 2023 that earned them $91 million in revenues. Sports business has also boosted earnings––the NBA is partnering with Rwanda in its Basketball Africa League (BAL), is hosting a prestigious world cycling event this year, and has put in a bid for a Formula 1 race.

In the past, donors have used this leverage. In 2012, the US, Germans, Swedes, UK, the European Union, the Dutch and even the typically apolitical World Bank suspended $240 million in aid. Most of these suspensions happened within months of the creation of the M23, well before they took Goma in November 2012. 

This time around, however, donors have been reluctant to use this leverage, even though Rwandan support to the M23 is much more significant than in 2012––six different UN Group of Expert reports between 2022 and 2024 detail this support: over 4,000 troops, armoured vehicles, drones, surface-to-air missiles, and equipment. And yet, no country has suspended aid this time. In 2022, budgetary aid grants to Rwanda increased by 48% from the previous year. In 2023, the European Union announced €900 million ($939 million) of investments in Rwanda through the Global Gateway, which is supposed to be premised on the principles of democratic values, good governance and security, among others. Perhaps most controversially, in the midst of RDF support to the M23––and while the US had suspended military aid to Rwanda due to the M23––the EU made two grants totalling $43 million to the Rwandan Defense Forces (RDF) for their operations in Mozambique. Some of that money was supposed to fund the purchase of equipment for RDF troops; it is not clear if there were any attempts to prevent that equipment from being used in the DRC. 

The other strong backer of Kigali, at least until the Labour government came to power in July 2024, was the UK. It helped organize the Commonwealth Summit in Kigali in June 2022 and refrained from mentioning Rwandan support to the M23. While there have been longstanding ties between both Labour and Conservative parties and the Rwandan government, the UK was particularly dependent on Rwanda due to a policy announced in April 2022 to send UK asylum seekers to Rwanda for processing and, if their claims were successful, for permanent relocation. As part of this deal the UK government paid £290 million ($360 million) to Rwanda’s Economic Transformation and Integration Fund (ETIF), which is designed to support economic growth in Rwanda, between 2022 and 2024. 

There was some limited criticism. The United States, in particular, clearly denounced Rwandan support to the M23, beginning in mid-2022. Other governments followed suit, and both the US (General Andrew Nyavumba) and the EU (Captain Jean-Pierre Niragire) have sanctioned individual Rwandan army officers, although the EU did not express any concern about General Alex Kagame leading RDF operations in Mozambique, despite reports by the UN that he oversaw backing to the M23 in the Congo. This criticism did not have material consequences on Rwanda. The U.S. National Basketball Association (NBA), the International Cycling Union (UCI), the Mastercard Foundation all announced major new initiatives in Rwanda during this period, and tourism continued to boom. Celebrities who have visited Rwanda during this period, doing photo-ops with President Kagame include Kevin Hart, Idris Elba, David Luiz, Naomi Campbell, Maria Sharapova, Ellen DeGeneres (who is building a conservation center there), Danai Gurira, Didier Drogba, (then) Prince Charles, Sauti Sol, Patoranking, and Youssou Ndour.

Why were donors so reluctant to put pressure on Rwanda? 

Rwanda has leveraged its army and diplomatic prowess to become useful. The Rwandan Defense Forces is now the second largest contributor to United Nations peacekeeping missions in the world, with 5,879 police and army personnel deployed. This brings in foreign exchange––the UN paid $150 million in 2024 for these deployments, almost the equivalent of the country’s military budget––as well as leverage. It is striking that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, as well as his Special Representative in the DRC, almost never mentioned Rwanda explicitly as backing the M23 (the statement after the fall of Goma, where 17 peacekeepers died, is an exception). 

Rwanda has also deployed troops in bilateral missions to the Central African Republic (CAR) and to Mozambique, where altogether they have around 6,000 troops. In CAR, the U.S. and France have seen these troops as a welcome counterweight to Wagner (now called Africa Corps) troops deployed there. In Mozambique, they have been very efficient in pushing back Islamist militants in Cabo Delgado province, where TotalEnergies (the largest French company by revenues) has a $20 billion gas project. 

Despite its small size, Rwanda also punches above its weight diplomatically; the deal they struck with the UK over asylum seekers is an example of this. Rwandans are currently the head of the UN Economic Commission for Africa, the Secretary-General of the Organisation internationale de la francophonie, the Deputy Chairperson of the African Union Commission, the head of the UN peacekeeping mission in  CAR, the vice-president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development, to name just a few. They are active and well-organized at the UN Security Council, as well as at the African Union. For example, for a long time they had been able sway the so-called A3+––the three African countries in the Security Council: Sierra Leone, Algeria, Somalia, as well as Guyana––to oppose any explicit mention of Rwanda in UNSC statements and resolutions. The African Union's declaration on the fall of Goma makes no mention of Rwanda either, and positions supported by the East African Community also often point in this direction.

Finally, the world has changed since 2012. The war in Ukraine, COVID, the conflict in Gaza, and the rise of right-wing populism have led to a fraying of multilateralism as many countries look inwards or focus on crises they deem more important. For countries like France, which is withdrawing its military deployments in Africa, it is useful to have allies like Rwanda that they can rely on; the United States is not very different. Meanwhile, other actors are on the rise in Africa––the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, in addition to China. Diplomacy and pressure seem to be having little impact on other, similar crises: Sudan, Myanmar, Gaza, and Ukraine––in part because of a lack of will, in part because peace diplomacy seems to be more difficult in a multipolar, inward-turned world. 

The DRC: Playing with fire

The Rwandan government has said that the root cause of the M23 problem is the persistence of the FDLR in the eastern DRC and the discrimination against Congolese Tutsi. As we have argued elsewhere, there is little evidence of an imminent threat from the FDLR to Rwanda in the run-up to the re-emergence of the M23 in November 2021. And while there is a long record of hate speech and violence against the Congolese Tutsi community, there was no uptick in those trends ahead of the M23 rebellion, nor is it clear how a violent rebellion will solve communal tensions; in the past it has just exacerbated them. 

But the DRC government has made mistakes and missteps in its handling of the crisis. Following the defeat of the M23 in 2013 at the hands of the Congolese army and MONUSCO, the M23 fled and was hosted mostly in army camps in Uganda and Rwanda. The DRC signed a statement in December 2013 granting the M23 amnesty for acts of war and insurrection, and committing to facilitate the return of the some 80,000 Tutsi refugees from Rwanda––one of the M23’s main demands––where many of them had spent over a decade. They never followed through on this promise. 

Then, after a small group of M23 fighters installed themselves on the flanks of a volcano in the Virunga National park in 2016, the government engaged––very slowly––with talks again with the Rwandan government. In October 2019, the two sides agreed on a roadmap that would lift arrest warrants against M23 leaders, release their members arrested for insurgency, and reintegrate those eligible into the FARDC and the National Park Service. Again, this deal was never implemented. An M23 delegation visited Kinshasa in 2020, but waited for months without being seen. Finally, in February 2021, the interior minister asked for funds to accompany their demobilization process. Again, it appears that there was no follow-through.

Then, when the fighting began, the Congolese army suffered defeat after defeat. For decades, its army has suffered from a lack of training, equipment, and infrastructure. There has also been a history of the government fragmenting and undermining its own security services so as to better control them and to prevent a coup. Mobutu created overlapping and competing factions that he pitted against each other while allowing the officers to get rich from extortion and embezzlement. After Mobutu’s ouster and the war that ensued (1996-2003), the government of Joseph Kabila (2001-2018) repeated Mobutu’s logic of governance. Kabila was acutely aware of the threat posed to him by the army; his father had been assassinated by his own bodyguard. Moreover, he had to contend with the integration of his former enemies into a new national army during the 2003-2006 peace process. To insulate himself against a coup, it was easier to send the bulk of the troops to the restive East, pit commanders against each other while allowing them to get rich. 

Tshisekedi, feeling similarly vulnerable at the head of an officer corps that had been entirely named under his predecessor, continued to value loyalty over competence. While he denounced “the mafia” inside the army, he did little to root out corruption. Reports from the front suggest that some unit commanders inflate their troop numbers––sometimes two or threefold––in order to embezzle the additional salaries and funds for food and health care. It is often not clear who is in charge of operations, as different overlapping chains of command compete with each other. 

These weaknesses led Tshisekedi, despite an army ten times larger than his battlefield rivals (120,000 FARDC against around 8,000-10,000 RDF/M23) and a military budget that rose to over $1 billion, to seek allies. He obtained the support of Burundian troops, the Southern African Development Community (South Africa, Malawi, and Tanzania), and recruited private security contractors Agemira and Asociatia RALF to provide training and support. 

In addition, and perhaps most fatefully, he incorporated local militia groups, most of which recruit along ethnic lines and have little discipline or training, into the army. In 2022, parliament passed a law creating a Réserve armée de la défense (RAD), into which many “Wazalendo”––local militias, some of which had been operating for many years––could be merged and receive support. This had some impact, but exacerbated coordination problems and strengthened groups notorious for abusing the local population. The same logic applies to the FDLR, the Rwandan rebellion––much as when it faced other Rwandan-backed rebellions, the Congolese army once again began collaborating with the FDLR, allowing Rwanda to argue that this is the real reason for their intervention.

What will happen next

A few things are clear. The Luanda peace process is most likely dead. Before there can be new talks there will have to be a ceasefire; as I write this, the M23 and RDF continue their advance down the shore of Lake Kivu, toward Bukavu. 

The fall of Goma will be a milestone in Congolese history. It will be difficult for FARDC and its allies to launch a frontal attack against the M23 now that they occupy the town. They have lost a massive amount of weapons and equipment, along with thousands of troops who have died or have been captured. There will also be a reevaluation of the senior military leadership, in particular Defense Minister Guy Kabombo Mwadiamvita and the presidential military advisor Franck Ntumba. He had already replaced many of the commanders of the army in a December 2024 shuffle. 

Tshisekedi’s government will likely try to blame others for the fiasco––the Rwandans, of course, as well as international partners. The outrage could be seen in the streets of Kinshasa on January 28, when foreign embassies were attacked, sometimes violently, by demonstrators, likely encouraged by politicians. But this defeat is likely to cost him politically. He is already bracing for a battle to change the constitution, including potentially to allow him to serve another term after his current mandate ends in 2028. He will need all the popularity he can muster for that challenge; losing part of the country to a Rwandan-backed rebellion could destabilize his coalition. 

What happens next will depend largely on the international community. As I write this, the German and UK governments have suggested that they might re-evaluate their aid to Rwanda due to its involvement in the Congo––no firm suspensions of aid, but a reevaluation of their position nonetheless. These donors and foreign companies will have to decide whether they can continue to do business and give aid to a country that has created a massive humanitarian crisis in a neighboring country.