Can Trump’s peace initiative stop the 30-year war in Congo?
“What kind of power?” I asked.
“All kinds of power,” he said and smiled.
In June, when Trump announced that he had succeeded in bringing peace to eastern Congo, he described it as a “glorious victory.” But the March 23 Movement did not agree to dissolve itself. A militia spokesman told the Associated Press: “We are in Goma with the residents, and we will not leave.”
One Western diplomat in the region told me that the M23 appeared to be trying to establish permanent roots in North Kivu. They have overturned the traditional justice system, administered by tribal leaders. After registers of title deeds were burned during the fighting, the M23 simply distributed land to people it favored.
The diplomat said the capture of Goma gave the M23 movement control of a massive arsenal left behind by the defeated Congolese army, equivalent to a third of the country’s military equipment. The militia also gained an estimated twelve thousand new soldiers, many of whom were captured government soldiers who had been lured or forced into service. “The M23 movement has never had this level of control before,” the diplomat said. “The danger for them is that they have now fallen into the same trap as the DRC government, having to administer the territory they control.”
If the M23’s management of North Kivu represents a test for the country’s management, it is not encouraging. Patrick Muyaya, the DRC’s Minister of Communications, told me that electricity and banking services had stopped in Goma, while “ethnic cleansing of Hutus” continued. In July, according to the United Nations, M23 fighters massacred more than three hundred civilians in a cluster of front-line villages forty miles from the city. “Every day there is killing,” Muyaya said. “The people who run that part of the country, the only thing they know about is crime.”
An hour’s drive northwest of Goma, across a vast landscape of black lava on the moon’s surface, lies an anarchic roadside community called Saki. For several years before the fall of Goma, the city remained on the front line of fighting between the M23 movement and government forces. Displaced people’s tents, made of plastic sheeting provided by NGOs, stand next to abandoned homes, many of them burned to their foundations. The settlement was excavated into the jagged rocks around the Catholic church, Miséricorde Divine.
The priest, a burly man with wary eyes, explained that he was appointed to the position of sake in 2023, when he was appointed to the position of sake. Wasalindo was established there. He added that when the M23 moved in, they arrested several hundred Hutu refugees and forcibly transported them in trucks. He added that the church was looted and burned, and the town became “like a jungle,” with almost no residents left. “We had to start from scratch again.”
People gradually returned, but they struggled to support themselves, and the attacks continued. Some aid agency drivers were kidnapped during a visit to the priests’ compound, so no one stays overnight in the church anymore. When I asked him if he slept there, he replied: “How can I leave? I am the priest.” But many civilians were packing up and heading to Goma. “They think it’s an oasis of peace,” he said sarcastically. Along with the threat of violence in Goma, there were food shortages, because the farmers who supplied the city had fled their lands. The priest said that he was forty years old and had known nothing but struggle in his life. “I am very tired of the fighting, and I call on the commanders to end it,” he said with a look of disgust.
The presidents of Congo and Rwanda have spent much of the past year exchanging insults. Tshisekedi compared Kagame to Hitler and declared that “there is only one thing responsible for this situation, and that is Rwandan aggression.” Kagame tends toward cutting, not bluntness. When Tshisekedi threatened to send his air force to strike Rwanda, Kagame responded, saying: “Tshisekedi is capable of everything except measuring the consequences of what he says.”
Kagame, the son of a Tutsi exiled to Uganda, served as an intelligence officer in the Ugandan army before returning to lead the Rwandan Patriotic Front. As president, he was praised and condemned abroad. He is a ruthless strategist, capable of waging bloody wars, but he has also succeeded in promoting a remarkable program to reintegrate tens of thousands of former genocide perpetrators into Rwandan society. He was accused of numerous tyrannical acts, including the assassination of political opponents, but he transformed his country into a regional power, with a disciplined army deployed to aid the beleaguered Allies. “Rwanda has made itself an amazingly efficient place to work and do business — as long as you stay in your lane,” a former State Department official told me. “You want to support them. But, on the other hand, they have been responsible for several decades of horrific acts inside the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”