Since the re-emergence of the M23 rebellion in November 2021, a narrative has continued to permeate African conversations about Rwanda’s role in Congo’s decades-long turmoil. In some quarters, there is a deeply entrenched belief that Rwanda is a Western proxy, currently tasked with looting Congolese minerals for the benefit of Western powers. Ironically, while some Africans lump Rwanda in with the West, Western powers, on the other hand, place the blame for the looting squarely on Rwanda, hammering away at a convenient scapegoat while they themselves carry out the plunder on an industrial scale. What is also striking is how readily many Africans embrace this narrative, despite the fact that the evidence behind it is flimsy at best, and often veers into the realm of conspiracy theory.
Yet, for keen observers of the region’s politics, it is undeniable that various Western powers, whether acting independently or in concert, have repeatedly sought to isolate, contain, and even destabilise Rwanda. That Rwanda’s resilience, skillful diplomacy, and ingenious countermeasures have often forced these powers to retreat should not blind us to their original intent.
The RPF: anti-Western colonialism from the outset
The creation of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in December 1987 was, in itself, an act of rebellion against the neocolonial order imposed on Rwanda by the West. The RPF’s founding members rejected Belgium’s projection of its own tribal divisions between Flemish and Walloons onto Rwanda’s centuries-old nationhood. They also abhorred the idea that Rwanda should remain a pawn in France’s wider Francophone empire in Africa. In that light, it is no coincidence that, following the RPF’s victory, many of the disgraced Rwandan elite responsible for orchestrating the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi found refuge in France and Belgium, where some of their offspring now operate as fervent enemies of the post-genocide political order and constitute the bulk of the so-called “opposition in exile”.
Suffice it to say that from the outset of the RPF’s liberation struggle in October 1990, Paris portrayed the movement as an Anglo-Saxon proxy encroaching on France’s spheres of influence. Ironically, France’s baseless claim has become the foundation of a pervasive view of Rwanda within self-proclaimed Pan-African circles — a lie repeated so often it has taken on the weight of truth.
Yet the lie was easy enough to debunk at the time, provided one applied even minimal critical thinking. For one thing, Rwanda was not the kind of resource-rich country that Western powers typicaly scramble over. For another, even as the RPF made territorial gains, neither the US nor Britain gave it the kind of moral or material support typically reserved for true proxies.
Instead, both countries played a key role in enabling the genocidal government to execute its plan of extermination. They ignored warnings about the impending genocide. In the midst of the genocide, they opposed attempts by the UN mission (UNAMIR) to intervene, instead voting to reduce its troops. The US even refused to jam the hate radio RTLM that called for the killing of Tutsi, despite having the means to do so. Both countries resisted efforts to label the crime as genocide and continued to invite the genocidal government to attend UN Security Council meetings, where each of their resolutions reinforced its sense of impunity and emboldened its killing spree. Most notably, nearly three months into the genocide, on 22 June 1994, they backed France’s deployment of additional troops through UN Resolution 929, authorising Operation Turquoise. Though billed as a humanitarian intervention, the operation’s true purpose was to salvage the genocidal regime in its death throes.
At the time, the RPF’s military wing, the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), was led by Major General Paul Kagame, who, by force of circumstance, spent a few months at a US military school in 1990. Yet this fact, often used to fuel conspiracy theories portraying Kagame as an American agent, had little bearing on US or British decision-making. Intelligence agencies in both countries likely saw him as a disciple of Nyerere’s liberation philosophy, probably harbouring a quiet admiration for Cuba’s stance against imperialism—a country where he also received military training. As such, he was not openly hostile to the West, but neither could he be relied upon to jump when ordered.
So, though unfounded, France’s portrayal of the RPF as an anglo-saxon proxy served a clear purpose: to rally bipartisan support at home for the callous foreign policy pursued in the Great Lakes by President Mitterrand, at a time when his Socialist party had lost parliamentary majority and he was forced to govern alongside a centre-right government. In the name of protecting France’s interests in Africa, both political camps worked tirelessly to defeat the RPF. To them, the genocide was either a matter of little importance or, worse, a necessary evil for strategic dominance.
France’s playbook and Anglo-Saxon complicity
Having failed to save the genocidal regime, France doubled down on its losing course. The stakes were high as the country’s influence and economic predation in Africa largely depended on its ability to protect client regimes. This ability was now being called into question. Paris reverted to what has now become a familiar strategy: using puppet regimes within its Francophone empire to destabilise any government threatening its geopolitical position on the continent.
Zairean President Mobutu had previously served this puppet role for the West by providing rear bases and support to UNITA, the Angolan rebel movement which fought the Soviet-backed MPLA government in Luanda. In so doing, Mobutu weakened the African coalition opposing the West-backed apartheid regime in South Africa. He again proved eager to serve in October 1990 when he deployed troops to Rwanda, alongside the French military operation Noroît, to halt the RPF’s first offensive. By 1994, in the new unipolar world order and under pressure to adopt multi-party democracy, he was desperate to prove his continued relevance, making the case for extending his grip on power. Fighting communism no longer bought him favour, but instigating conflict in the eastern part of the country provided the perfect pretext to postpone yet again the elections originally scheduled for 1992.
He laid the first stone of that cynical project in 1991 by revoking the citizenship of the Banyamulenge, effectively endorsing the discrimination and violence they faced in South Kivu province. In 1994, he went a step further, allowing Zaire’s territory to serve France’s regime-change ambitions against the new government in Kigali. As Mobutu sanctioned the use of refugee camps based in Goma and Bukavu as operational bases for genocidal forces to recruit, train, and launch attacks on Rwanda, France’s Operation Turquoise, headquartered in Goma, channelled arms deliveries and international humanitarian aid to those very camps. In January 1996, a UN inquiry into arms flows to genocidaires implicated Zairean military and government officials. But predictably, it fell short of pointing the finger at French and Zairean top leaders. No UN resolution ever condenmed either country. Barely 18 months after the genocide against the Tutsi, the US and the UK were once again shielding their ally, France, and their ‘bastard’ in Kinshasa from international condemnation, leaving their supposed proxy, Rwanda, to fend for itself.
For two years, Rwanda protested at the UN and in Western capitals, calling for the camps to be demilitarised and relocated at least 150 kilometres from its borders, but to no avail. Franklin Roosevelt’s famous words — “He may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard” — were, for all intents and purposes, the response given to Rwanda regarding Mobutu’s criminal entreprise.
Moral and logistical support for Rwanda’s first intervention in Congo came not from Washington or London, but from Mandela’s South Africa, Nyerere’s Tanzania, Dos Santos’s Angola, Afwerki’s Eritrea, and Meles’s Ethiopia. Some of these governments had scores to settle with Mobutu for his actions during the Cold War, but more importantly, none of them believed that the RPF-led government was acting as a Western proxy. Why would they have believed that in the first place? Under Mobutu’s corrupt rule, Western mining companies thrived. He supported insurgencies against Congo’s neighbours, not even to advance his own country’s interests but those of his masters. Obviously, Rwanda had little difficulty proving that Mobutu was a threat to Africa’s collective security. By securing broad African consensus on the need for a military intervention, Kigali ensured that Paris’s capacity for nuisance would be effectively restrained, while Washington and London would go along with it and sacrifice a pawn whose time was up. One time too many, Mobutu had played the useful idiot for the Western gallery. In the process, he set his country and the region on fire. And so, Africa’s First World War began in October 1996.
Rwanda, Africans and the West: Overlapping and clashing interests in Congo
From that point on, making sense of Rwanda’s interactions with the West and its African counterparts involved in Congo’s wars requires us to examine the events that followed through the prism of converging and conflicting interests. Viewed this way, a common pattern emerges: Rwanda’s efforts to eliminate a genocidal threat on its borders, an endeavour that ought to be supported by all, have repeatedly been resisted by key local, regional and international actors whenever such efforts conflicted with the interests they had secured or hoped to secure in the Congo.
Laurent-Désiré Kabila was the first in a long line of betrayals that Rwanda had to contend with. A year into his presidency, he broke his alliance with Rwanda, Uganda, and Congolese Tutsi rebels. And to replace the allies he was casting aside and replenish his army ranks , he rearmed the very genocidal forces Rwanda had come to neutralise. This betrayal led directly to the outbreak of the Second Congo War. Kabila survived both decisions only thanks to Angola’s military intervention.
Dos Santos had achieved his primary goal of removing Mobutu and was moving to further weaken UNITA’s fighting capabilities. So, although Rwanda’s famous Operation Kitona was initially approved by senior Angolan military and security officials, Dos Santos quickly reversed course. He never properly acknowledged that Kabila was doing to Rwanda what Mobutu had done to Angola. Yet Rwanda faced an even greater threat than mere rebellion: the completion of the genocide project.
Angola’s current stance towards Rwanda is less hostile. Luanda has even called for a negotiated solution to the AFC/M23 issue. However, narrow interests mean that Luanda has been reluctant to use its influence to bring about that outcome. Fears that the Tshisekedi administration might retaliate by sabotaging joint regional projects such as the Lobito Corridor, or by obstructing efforts to jointly exploit oil resources straddling their shared maritime border, have effectively paralysed the country and undermined its ability to mediate successfully.
Zimbabwe, a latecomer to the conflict, intervened with a confused understanding of the crisis. President Mugabe and his colleagues believed they were engaged in a struggle against Tutsi “settlers” in Bantu land, similar to their own fight against European settlers at home. The fact that Kabila offered Zimbabweans mineral deals he ought to have granted to his former allies, Rwanda and Uganda, only reinforced Mugabe’s wilful ignorance of the region’s sociological and political history. Decades later, Kigali and Harare appear to have mended fences, with Rwanda now advocating for the lifting of Western sanctions on Zimbabwe.
Uganda had its own terrorists to fight, namely the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). While Kampala did not take kindly to Laurent-Désiré Kabila’s U-turn and chose to back Jean-Pierre Bemba’s rebel group, the MLC, its position on Rwanda has often been ambivalent. Despite strong historical ties between the NRM and the RPF, Uganda has often treated the FDLR as a Rwandan problem rather than a regional one, and has at times provided the group with logistical support whenever political tensions with its southern neighbour flared up. Furthermore, since securing the right to deploy troops in Congo and with allies like Bemba in government, Uganda has adopted a posture of strategic ambiguity: restraining the AFC/M23 rebels from advancing when it perceives its own spheres of influence to be at stake, while also preventing the Congolese army from launching attacks on the rebels from areas where Ugandan troops are deployed.
South Africa and Tanzania present interesting similarities in their handling of Congo’s crises. Just as Nyerere and Mkapa supported Rwanda’s efforts to neutralise genocidal forces in Congo, Mandela and Mbeki offered similar backing. However, since the advent of Kikwete in Tanzania and Zuma in South Africa, the two countries’ policies towards Rwanda have shifted, becoming increasingly hostile while prioritising corporate and, often, personal economic interests in Congo over the region’s collective security.
As for Burundi, its actions in Congo reflect the ethnic tensions polarising the country itself rather than a principled stance against genocidal ideology or sound geopolitical thinking. In the 1990s, a Tutsi-dominated government backed Rwanda’s interventions in Congo. At the time, Burundi’s own Hutu rebels shared refugee camps and trained together with Rwandan genocidaires. Those same rebels, now in power, are lending support to their longtime allies within the FDLR, even as the country deploys more troops in South Kivu to fight the AFC/M23.
What of the Western actors?
With the RPF-led government proving more resilient and resourceful than anticipated, France added new layers to its destabilisation strategy. On March 1998, Paris launched a phoney judicial inquiry into the assassination of former Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana. In 2006, French judge Jean Louis Bruguière issued arrest warrants against senior RPF political and military leaders. That initiative collapsed when France’s own forensic inquiry pointed to the extremist Hutu camp as the likely perpetrators of the attack. In January 2007, French soldiers who had previously fought alongside genocidaires testified anonymously before the ICTR in defence of one of Rwanda’s most notorious genocide masterminds, Théoneste Bagosora. They also accused the RPF of war crimes. But their testimony ultimately led nowhere; it neither saved their accomplice, Bagosora, nor shook Kigali.
France’s destabilisation campaign ‘officially’ ended in 2021 with an acknowledgement of its overwhelming responsibility in enabling a foreseeable genocide.
Today, President Macron’s stance towards the DRC conflict could best be described as a policy of wanting to have his cake and eat it too. Under his tenure, France recognises Rwanda’s legitimate security concerns and calls for dialogue between Kinshasa and the M23, while also spearheading hostile UN resolutions and endorsing EU sanctions against both Rwanda and the Congolese rebels. At the same time, France, through the EU, supports Rwanda’s counter-terrorist operations in Mozambique for obvious reasons, yet yields to Belgian pressure by agreeing that the same EU should arm the Congolese army with funding worth 20 million euros. In brief, Paris’s lack of coherence is off the charts.
This attitude persists mainly because France has never fully accounted for its attempts to undermine the post-genocide Rwandan state, which triggered two Africa’s world wars and gave rise to the FDLR. Had it done so, it might tread more carefully in the region. Moreover, African perspectives on the root causes of this crisis would shift dramatically. Africans would understand why MONUSCO, a peacekeeping mission mostly funded by Western countries and overseen by the Department of Peace Operations — itself led only by French nationals from 1997 to today — never confronted the FDLR. They would also understand why MONUSCO’s Force Intervention Brigade, mainly made up of South African and Tanzanian troops, both countries that had become hostile to Rwanda, targeted the M23 movement but refused to go after the FDLR, a policy later replicated under the SADC banner.
From empire to errand boy: Britain’s role in the American show
The US and the UK played their part with unwavering consistency. They never denounced France’s schemes, but made sure their own interests were preserved. The US remained faithful to its “America First” approach, often cloaking its relentless pursuit of economic gain and geopolitical dominance in the rhetoric of democracy and human rights. The UK parroted the US at every turn.
Sacrificing Mobutu was business as usual, so long as it did not lead to the rise of a “death to America” firebrand. The US and Britain raised no objection to the ascent of Laurent-Désiré Kabila, who readily signed billion-dollar mineral deals with American and Canadian firms at the outset of the First Congo War. While Kabila’s gravest misstep after taking power was betraying his original African allies, an even more reckless decision was to renege on those very mineral deals at the same time. In doing so, he ensured that both the US and the UK maintained a conspicuous silence as he battled rebellions backed by Rwanda and Uganda, clinging to a position for which he was clearly unfit.
Joseph Kabila, proved to be a far more astute politician—surely a better tactician than his father, though not quite a strategist. He reinstated some of the mineral deals his father had revoked, with the Canadian-based company Banro regaining the gold concessions it had previously lost, while the American company Freeport-McMoRan retained the mineral rights awarded under Kabila Sr’s rule. Many other Western companies, most notably Glenchore, have since joined in the looting. Joseph Kabila also awarded mineral deals to South African companies, while simultaneously pursuing closer economic ties with China. His calculations paid off in 2012, when South Africa and Tanzania sent troops to his rescue, and Western powers turned their guns against Rwanda, despite the fact that it was Kabila’s own failure to implement the March 2009 peace agreement that sparked a mutiny within the Congolese army and led to the emergence of the M23 movement.
Kabila’s 2012 tactical victory is what Tshisekedi has sought to emulate. He has dangled minerals before anyone willing to support his belligerence. But neither Rwanda nor the M23 are the easily dismissible actors they were in 2012.
Rwanda has become a provider of practical solutions to African and global challenges in areas such as security, health, migration, economic integration, and the free movement of people. The M23, for its part, is a more coherent, better organised, well-armed, and ideologically grounded political and military movement. Both have returned with a vengeance, determined to neutralise a common existential threat once and for all. The AFC/M23 have a governance issue to resolve; Rwanda’s message is clear: its security concerns are as important as those of other neighbours of Congo—or any other country for that matter. AFC/M23 and Rwanda both know they have no true allies in the Western world. They are dealing with merchants. The Biden administration was willing to do business amid chaos and genocidal violence. So far, the Trump administration seems more reasonable. On a side note, removing the pretense of humanitarianism has become a point of contention between the master and the errand boy. The US is unapologetically open about its mercantile pursuits, while Britain continues to act, unconvincingly, as if guided by humanitarian principles. Its performance fools no one.
Reflecting on Rwanda’s difficult relationship with Western powers, President Kagame had this to say:
“Our history is so complex that those who were involved in the genocide, whom we now call our partners, give with one hand and take with the other. They want us trapped in this history: neither thriving nor dead. And truthfully, they would not mind if we disappeared altogether.”
At another time, and referring to the West’s attempts to control Rwanda, he remarked:
“We are not cows; we own the cows.”
Rwanda is neither a Western proxy nor a puppet. It seeks to ensure its long-term survival, but it also understands the rules of the game, which it plays almost to perfection—unyielding on core principles, compromising where possible, repositioning when necessary, but never breaking. In that small African country, dignity (Agaciro) still holds meaning.
