In February 2025, the British Labour government announced that it would pause some bilateral aid to Rwanda and impose other diplomatic sanctions on Kigali over the conflict in Congo. Among pro-Kinshasa circles in London, there was a sense that Britain was doing the right thing in standing up to what they portrayed as Rwanda’s aggression. At the time, there was a broad consensus in Western capitals that sanctions on Rwanda were the solution to the crisis.
Since then, however, the US administration has taken a different approach, choosing to prioritise diplomacy underlain by due regard to the root causes of the crisis in Eastern DRC, over the kind of hypocritical, slogan-driven and, it must be said, hysterical approach that has long characterized its handling by many European governments and the EU. One immediate result of Washington’s wiser and more pragmatic approach has been the marginalization of European actors who now find themselves on the periphery of the search for peace. And while some have shown a willingness to adjust, the UK has yet to abandon its ambition to secure a share of Congo’s mineral wealth by offering opportunistic and unquestioning diplomatic support to the Tshisekedi government. Among other manoeuvres, the UK has been waging an aggressive media campaign aimed at influencing the processes in Washington and Doha, attacking the view, central to both the Washington and Doha processes, that Rwanda has legitimate security concerns and that the AFC/M23 are a Congolese armed movement with a wide array of genuine grievances.
Britain’s media campaign began on 5 June. The Economist magazine led the charge through two back-to-back articles: Africa’s Most Admired Dictator Rolls the Dice and Africa’s Cynical Master of Power Politics. Both pieces took aim at Rwanda’s President, Paul Kagame, over his alleged aggressive role in the decades-long conflict. Though framed as analysis, their purpose was clear: to frame the history of the wars between Rwanda and the DRC. The Economist would like its readers to believe that the conflict is and had been driven primarily by Rwanda’s greed and expansionist ambitions. It dismisses the threat posed by the genocidal FDLR militia; reduces a complex and tragic conflict to a simplistic and infantilising narrative of competition for minerals; and depicts the AFC/M23 as merely a proxy force acting solely in Rwanda’s interests.
On June 6, the UK’s most notorious media asset on deployment in Africa, Michela Wrong, led the second wave of the dirty campaign on the New York-based NBC News network with the documentary “Hidden Invasion: Rwanda’s Covert War in the Congo”. Courtesy of satellite imagery, she purported to prove the presence of Rwandan troops on Congolese soil. However, she brushed aside her inability to provide conclusive evidence with the mendacious assertion: “It’s impossible to tell M23 and RDF soldiers apart.” She also failed to explain why the two Rwandan soldiers she alleges were captured on Congolese territory were promptly returned to Rwanda, which had formally protested their abduction to regional institutions. This incident was not the damning evidence against Kigali that she claimed. Rather, it was one of many violations by the DRC of Rwanda’s territorial integrity. The kind of violations that Western media deliberately omit from their routine hit pieces masquerading as conflict reporting and analysis.
On June 10, the UK struck again. This time it was through Reuters with a purported scoop delivered by French journalist Sonia Rolley. Ms Rolley is a known FDLR sympathiser who previously worked for France’s most rabidly relentless propaganda outlet on deployment in Africa, RFI. The supposed scoop whose headline screamed “US wants Rwandan troops out of Congo before peace deal signed”, was based entirely on information allegedly provided by anonymous sources. Sonia Rolley inflated the number of Rwandan troops allegedly deployed in Congo, raising it from the 4000 usually bandied about by UN experts to an eye-popping 12000. In the article, she inserted a conveniently timed line: “Analysts say the most commonly cited group, the FDLR, no longer poses much of a threat to Rwanda”. Adding to her list of anonymous sources, she concluded by quoting an unidentified rebel official who claimed “there had been little progress towards a final deal that would see M23 cede territory.” If she was not inclined to fabricate and had done the necessary research, however, Ms Rolley would have discovered that no self-respecting AFC/M23 official is contemplating such a concession, and that the notion that the movement is considering ceding territory reflects her own and her handlers’ mendacity than anything else.
As usual, this initial phase of the UK’s media campaign has been an utter failure. The peace deal they sought to influence turned out nothing like they wanted. Kinshasa’s diplomatic triumph did not materialise. There is no mention of withdrawal of Rwandan troops, as there is no evidence of their permanent presence. And the agreement’s use of Rwanda’s own terminology, “defensive measures”, suggests both parties regard any such deployments as ad hoc and directed at specific threats. Put simply, the agreement rightly recognises Rwanda’s security concerns. Which is why the lifting of its defensive measures is conditional upon the neutralisation of the FDLR, a group originally created with French support to destabilise Rwanda, and now exploited by a wide assortment of international and regional actors.
But Britain is not done scheming. It is already pre-empting the failure of Trump’s peace deal, while attempting to shape the Doha process just as it tried to do with Washington. With that in mind, The Economist’s latest article, “A peace agreement that will probably not bring peace”, offers someone to blame for the predicted collapse of the deal: “Rwanda has invested blood and treasure in its war effort and may be happy for M23 to continue occupying eastern Congo, with the help of its own troops … it is unlikely to make good on its part of the deal without either significant recompense or the threat of heavy sanctions.” Obviously, for The Economist, the culprit cannot be the Congolese government, which bombs its own population with drones and fighter jets, which has armed militias that terrorise whole communities, and which has embedded FDLR elements within its own army, and which Britain continues to prop up with whatever little diplomatic clout it still wields. Instead, blame is to be laid squarely on the supposedly intransigent Rwandans.
Yet the matter of who controls eastern Congo is one of the items on the negotiating table. Kinshasa is in no position to demand the withdrawal of AFC/M23 troops. At best, a deal in Doha might prevent the rebels from capturing more territory and, in that way, save the Tshisekedi regime. So, it is not Rwanda’s refusal to compromise that is at issue here. Rather, it is Kinshasa’s unwillingness to acknowledge the on-the-ground realities and power dynamics, and to make meaningful concessions to a Congolese movement. Kinshasa’s reliance on opportunistic and unprincipled Western diplomatic backing to secure what its army has failed to achieve risks undoing the progress made thus far.
That the UK is still suggesting sanctions against Rwanda reveals the kind of obstinacy and blinkered thinking that so often characterises Western approaches to these sorts of crises when events slip beyond their control and people they would like to treat as inferiour refuse to jump when they are told to do so. Perhaps, rather than resorting to blackmail and slander, the UK could summon the courage to rebuild relations with a functioning government, even as it continues to fawn over Kinshasa’s ineptitude, if it so chooses.
