Since the end of 2021, the Tshisekedi regime has been engaged in a deadly confrontation with the M23 rebels. Meanwhile, relations between the DRC and Rwanda have broken down. Kinshasa accuses Rwanda of supporting the rebels, while Kigali points to the integration of a genocidal outfit – the FDLR – into the Congolese army (FARDC) as an existential threat that must be neutralised. Ironically, before the current conflict, Tshisekedi considered the M23 and Rwanda his main allies in his personal quest to conquer and consolidate power – until he began to perceive them as political liabilities. Here, beyond the stated grievances of each party, is the tragic story of how Tshisekedi took advantage of Kabila’s scheming, but then squandered the opportunity to become one of Congo’s greatest leaders since Lumumba, and plunged the country into unnecessary conflict, all in the pursuit of political power.
Kabila’s almost perfect plan
When Joseph Kabila rigged the 2018 elections to install Tshisekedi in power, his plan seemed perfect. Previously under pressure from the Western powers to organise elections but unable to channel popular support to his preferred successor, Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, Kabila had managed to impose results that gave his party, the FCC, control of parliament, kept his loyal generals and judges in place, and ensured his protection and that of his assets. In the process, he had outmaneuvred the African Union (AU) – which had urged him to postpone the announcement of the final results, citing “serious doubts” about their credibility – by having the SADC join South Africa’s President and Kabila ally Cyril Ramaphosa in congratulating Tshisekedi. SADC’s gesture endorsed the rigging and thwarted the AU’s efforts to resolve the matter through negotiation. Worried about making a bad situation worse, the AU backed down.
A shrewd politician, Kabila moved his chess pieces perfectly to keep as many influential countries, including Rwanda, as happy as possible. A few weeks before the elections, on 17 December 2018, news broke that his security services had arrested two top FDLR officials, the group’s spokesman Ignace Nkaka (aka LaForge Fils Bazeye) and its intelligence chief, Lt. Col. Jean Pierre Nsekanabo, who were later transferred to Rwanda. Moreover, a few days earlier Kinshasa had also handed over to Rwanda 291 militia members of Paul Rusesabagina’s FLN terrorist group.
At a time most convenient to his succession plan, Kabila seemed finally willing to address Rwanda’s security concerns, which he had often ignored during his two terms in office. He knew that in the context of tensions between Rwanda, on the one hand, and Burundi and Uganda, on the other, Kigali would view favourably his moves against Rwandan terrorist groups operating in eastern DRC. While Kabila’s plan was almost perfect, his big mistake was to underestimate Tshisekedi.
Tshisekedi’s coup
In January 2019, Tshisekedi knew what he was signing up for when, having survived what was probably a guilty conscience-induced panic attack during the swearing-in ceremony, he seemingly accepted to be a pawn in Kabila’s intrigues and became a president with no real executive power. From the perspective of the pro-Kabila camp, he would ideally be a figurehead whose inability to bring about change would be synonymous with incompetence that would make the Congolese people want to return to the lesser of two evils: Kabila.
But Tshisekedi had other plans. About a year and a half after taking office, he launched a multi-pronged operation to isolate Kabila and seize real power. In July 2020, Tshisekedi appointed three new judges to the Constitutional Court, without consulting his FCC (Kabila’s party) colleagues. In protest, Kabila’s camp refused to attend the swearing-in of the new judges. Later, in early December that year, Tshisekedi announced the end of the coalition government he had formed with Kabila’s camp and threatened to dissolve the FCC-controlled parliament. Fearing for their jobs, which they owed to electoral fraud rather than popular support, many FCC MPs joined the new presidential coalition, dubbed l’Union Sacrée (Sacred Union), allowing Tshisekedi to form a majority and operate with relative freedom.
Tshisekedi’s courtship of Rwanda and the M23
Worried about the potentially deadly consequences of his moves against Kabila, Tshisekedi reached out to the leaders of the M23 around mid-2020. He had known them since 2013, when he served as an envoy for his father, the then leader of Congo’s main opposition party, the UPDS. The rebels had left Uganda in 2017 and returned to Congo, where they remained dormant, waiting for Kinshasa to honour the 2013 agreement that formally ended the rebellion. According to M23 leaders, Tshisekedi’s envoys asked them to create four military brigades. Two would be deployed in North and South Kivu to disarm the hundreds of armed groups operating there and pacify the two regions; the other two brigades would be deployed in Kinshasa to mix with Tshisekedi loyalists in the army and dissuade Kabila from any desperate action to reverse the new power dynamics.
According to General Makenga, the M23 overall military Commander, a budget was drafted and submitted to the then Minister of the Interior, Gilbert Kankonde, detailing the financial resources needed to set up the four brigades. Obviously, Tshisekedi’s plan was risky. So, knowing how unpopular a formal alliance with the M23 would be with the Congolese political establishment, especially his newly formed coalition, Tshisekedi’s envoys dragged out negotiations with the rebels for months, keeping their options open and the M23 as an option to turn to depending on Kabila’s moves; on its part, the government continued to pay the hotel bills of M23 leaders in Kinshasa.
In a parallel process, Tshisekedi was actively courting Congo’s neighbours – Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda – in order to bolster his legitimacy nationally and regionally. In the course of two months, between May and July 2021, Tshisekedi signed bilateral trade agreements with Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda. Of particular importance was a memorandum of cooperation on gold mining signed by Congo and Rwanda, a fact conveniently ignored by those who continue to perpetuate the myth that the current conflict is fuelled by Rwanda’s greed for Congo’s minerals.
Tshisekedi also allowed Burundi and Uganda to deploy their troops and to conduct military operations against their respective foes, namely the Red Tabara and the ADF; Kinshasa also seemed more willing to conduct military operations against the FDLR based on intelligence provided by Rwanda.
As is often the case in matters of good neighbourliness, Kigali went out of its way to reciprocate Tshisekedi’s apparent willingness to distance himself from the perennial hostility of Kinshasa’s political elite towards Rwanda. Among other gestures of good faith and confidence-building, Kigali proposed to build a model village in Goma to provide housing for Congolese who lost everything after the eruption of the Nyirangongo volcano.
It all seemed too good to be true. And it was. The whole project, which was supposed to once and for all restore regional peace (dismantling the FDLR, reintegrating M23 fighters into the Congolese army, and repatriating Congolese refugees) was based on the assumption that Tshisekedi, unlike his predecessors, would honour previously negotiated peace agreements and the promises he had made to his Rwandan counterpart.
But none of this mattered when Tshisekedi realised that sidelining his most powerful opponent, Kabila, was not enough to keep him in power; he had to actually win an election – this time. In the absence of tangible results on the socio-economic front, winning an election required something more radical.
Embracing extremists
Tshisekedi’s brief romance with Rwanda was ridiculed by Martin Fayulu’s camp, which described him as a Rwandan puppet. Tshisekedi initially stayed the course despite the ridicule, not because he believed it was in Congo’s interest, but because his legitimacy was questionable to begin with and Kabila posed a greater threat to his rule than the political damage of being ridiculed by his opponents in Fayulu’s camp. With Kabila’s influence and ability to disrupt Tshisekedi’s coalition neutralised, Tshisekedi was now free to renege on any promises he had made to Rwanda and the M23, a move aimed at appeasing the anti-Rwandan voices in his coalition, l’Union Sacrée, and neutralising Fayulu’s camp. In practice, Tshisekedi’s two-pronged strategy was:
1) To adopt (read: plagiarise) the anti-Rwanda and anti-Tutsi political discourse of the winner of the 2018 elections, Fayulu, who ran on a platform of building a wall between Rwanda and Congo and hunting down what he called “Rwandan Tutsi infiltrators in the Congolese army”.
2) To impose peace in eastern Congo, with a resounding military victory over the M23, which he would later describe as a Rwandan proxy, as the icing on the cake.
In early May 2021, even as talks with the M23 delegation in Kinshasa continued, Tshisekedi declared a state of siege and imposed martial law in North Kivu and Ituri, with the stated aim of neutralising the hundreds of armed groups operating there.
However, the writing was on the wall when, at the end of 2021, the FARDC and the FDLR launched a joint attack on M23 positions, a group that had been inactive since its return to Congo in 2017 and that bore no responsibility for the insecurity that had prompted the declaration of a state of siege. According to M23 leaders, this happened just days after the M23 delegation had left Kinshasa with promises from Tshisekedi’s envoys that the plan they had been working on for 14 months would be implemented. Tshisekedi had just betrayed both his partners, the M23 and Rwanda, in a single move. First, by attacking a group willing to work with him to restore peace; second, by recruiting the only force he thought could defeat the M23 rebels. The use of the FDLR, which meant arming and financing the genocidal outfit, would incur the wrath of Kigali.
The alliance between Kinshasa and the FDLR and their common goal of destabilising Rwanda became even clearer when the FARDC shelled Rwandan territory in the Kinigi and Nyange sectors of Musanze District, injuring several civilians. A few weeks later, the Rwandan Ministry of Defence reported that the FARDC “fired rockets into Rwanda from the Bunagana area on 10 June 2022″. Both incidents of aggression, which are never mentioned in the UN experts’ reports, were perceived in Rwanda as attempts to disrupt the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, which was then scheduled to take place a few days later in Kigali from 20-25 June 2022.
Suffice it to say that Tshisekedi’s plan has backfired. While he managed to secure another term in a sham election marred by violence and ballot-stuffing, his political position is now weaker than ever, for obvious reasons. First, he has failed to restore peace and has made a bad situation worse. Second, while the M23 rebels controlled no significant territory at the start of the joint FARDC-FDLR attacks, they now control large swathes of territory in North Kivu and are threatening to expand their operations in South Kivu and Ituri. They are also attracting other political interests dissatisfied with Tshisekedi to join their cause. Third, he is under pressure from his African counterparts to end cooperation with the FDLR and neutralise the genocidal group. In short, nothing has gone exactly to plan and Tshisekedi now faces the prospect of making the same concessions he willingly made when he was courting the M23 and Rwanda in 2020-2021 – the only difference being that he would appear humiliated if he made such concessions now, which explains his continued belligerence.
Meanwhile, in the areas controlled by the M23, peace seems to be the order of the day, according to those who visit. In these areas, all the other armed groups have been neutralised. People are going about their business. The displaced are returning in their thousands, according to Monusco-funded radio Okapi and they will continue to do so provided the FARDC and their allies do not stand in their way. This peace dividend could have been Tshisekedi’s legacy. He could have taken credit for the M23’s battlefield successes against violent armed groups. He could have become the first Congolese leader to end a three-decade standoff with Rwanda by neutralising the FDLR once and for all. Instead, he armed the FDLR and local militias who are now busy hunting down Congolese Tutsis. Their human rights abuses have reached such a level of violence that some residents of Goma, the capital of North Kivu, are calling on the M23 rebels to conquer their city and impose peace. Tshisekedi has put his personal ambitions above all else. But when he leaves power, he won’t be missed by the people he tried to sway with his populist politics of hate, or by those he betrayed.
