DR CONGO | Major Escalation in Decades-Old Conflict

On 27 January, the March 23 Movement, backed by the Rwandan government, announced the capture of the Congolese city of Goma and on 17 February of Bukavu. These cities, both provincial capitals, sit on the Rwandan border. Their capture marks a dramatic escalation in the decades-old conflict. Life is again being turned upside down for the war-weary people of the region. Millions have already been displaced since the new phase of the conflict began in 2021. Thousands were killed in the fighting to take Goma, including in brutal massacres as M23 advanced, and many more wounded. Interruption of water, electricity and health supplies is causing outbreaks of disease – more death, and more suffering.

Formed in 2012, M23 is named after the date on which a peace agreement between the Congolese government and M23’s predecessor was signed – March 23, 2009. The failure to implement the terms of this agreement is one reason given for the resumption of the conflict. The other is that M23 is defending the Congolese-Tutsi minority in eastern DRC. The M23’s roots stretch back to the 1990s, with key founding leaders having served in the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). The RPF seized power in Rwanda in 1994, led by Paul Kagame, who is today president of the country. In both the First Congo War (1996-97), and again in the Second (1998-2003), the Rwandan-RPF regime invaded the DRC, fighting alongside Congolese predecessors of M23 and others. In the First Congo War the RPF and its allies overthrew longstanding Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko and installed its then-Congolese ally, Laurent Kabila, as president. The M23’s threat to march on Kinshasa and oust the current government of Félix Tshisekedi will be taken very seriously by the Congolese elites.

Tshisekedi himself, president since 2019, shares responsibility for the escalation in fighting.  In an attempt to rally support and bolster his domestic position he has leaned more and more on anti-Rwanda nationalist rhetoric and from 2023 began encouraging the formation of new militias in eastern DRC to fight M23 alongside the Congolese army.

Colonial and Capitalist Roots of Conflict

The brutal legacy of colonialism is decisive for understanding the conflict. In the DRC and Rwanda, seventy-five years of direct and bloody colonial rule was followed by imperialist interventions. This has profoundly affected the development of society. The decades of conflict reflects the weakness of the ruling elites in the region. They have been unable to develop into more united ruling classes capable of building unified nation states on the borders bequeathed to them by colonialism. These borders do not neatly coincide with the different population groups that the elites of the region attempt to stand upon as a social base. Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, for example, is just 100 kilometres east of Goma, whereas Kinshasa, the capital of the DRC, is 1,500 kilometres to the west.

The elites of the region are split into myriad factions, divided along ethic, tribal, clan, linguistic and religious lines, intentionally sharpened into antagonisms by past colonial policies. Locked into a subordinate position in the world capitalist economy and unable to develop society on the basis of capitalism, the elites fall back on different forms of nationalism to legitimise their rule, or aspiration to rule. In the context of underdeveloped African capitalism this frequently means an ethnic-nationalism and tribalism. The imperialist powers play a crucial role in reinforcing this in their search for local allies to advance their geopolitical and economic interests. However, this alone is not usually sufficient to stabilise their rule which must be reinforced by severe repression, restrictions on democratic rights and dictatorship.

Hutu-Tutsi Relationship

The relationship between the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups is a particularly important feature of the conflict in the region. Pre-colonial migrations, Belgian colonial policy, and more recent movements of refugees fleeing ethnic violence, especially the early-1990s Rwandan civil war and genocide, in which government-backed extreme-right ‘Hutu Power’ militias slaughtered Tutsis and Hutu political opponents, has resulted in a complex patchwork of Hutu and Tutsi populations straddling the borders.

Coming to power at the barrel of the gun in 1994, the Tutsi-led RPF rules Rwanda, whose population is 85% Hutu, as a dictatorship, albeit one that maintains a pantomime of democracy. The RPF’s defeated ‘Hutu Power’ political opponents – including the militias responsible for perpetrating the genocide – re-organised as the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) and operate from across the border in the DRC, living alongside hundreds of thousands of Rwandan-Tutsi and Rwandan-Hutu refugees displaced in the civil war and genocide.

Kagame, the RPF and the Rwandan elite that has developed under their protection see an existential threat in this situation. The RPF itself emerged from Rwandan-Tutsi refugees displaced to Uganda in the 1960s and 1970s. With the backing of the Ugandan regime, armed by it and operating from its territory, the RPF was able to overthrow the Rwandan ‘Hutu Power’ government and install itself in power. The RPF sees control over the DRC provinces on its border, where the potential social forces for its own overthrow exist, as crucial to its survival. This goes hand in hand with the need for a friendly regime in Kinshasa unwilling to back these forces in the way that Uganda once backed the RPF. The different regimes in Kinshasa have episodically blocked with the FDLR fuelling suspicions, although there has been no major FDLR incursion into Rwanda since 2001.

Proliferation

The Congolese-Tutsi and Congolese-Hutu populations in eastern DRC have repeatedly faced official discrimination from the elites in Kinshasa, including the incitement of ethnic violence against them. Combined with the refugee populations, the raw material is present for the elites in both Kinshasa and Kigali to organise proxy groups and militias. However, none of the major Rwandan-backed Congolese forces have been simple puppets of the Rwandan-RPF regime. The different regimes in Kinshasa have variously succeeded in buying-off sections of the elites that lead them. This has led to a cycle of ‘death’ and ‘rebirth’, with the M23 the fifth incarnation (at least) arising from this process of partial co-option and subsequent fragmentation.

In response to the fighting other population groups in eastern DRC have armed to defend themselves over the years. Some, linked to tribal institutions, have been formalized, acting as auxiliaries to the Congolese army in different phases of the fighting. Others, emerging from ordinary young people, peasants and villagers, initially enjoyed popular support, even holding elections for their commanders. But the extremely localised character of these groups, based on rural communities and lacking any political program, has left them vulnerable to degenerating into inter-communal ethically-based conflict, especially when mixed with issues such as access to land, jobs and resources. From these layers, new opportunistic aspirant elites can also emerge, for whom the social position and wealth that can be accumulated by force leads to banditry becoming a permanent way of life.

The armies in the region further complicate the situation. These are not genuinely ‘national’ armies, tasked with defending the general interests of an established ruling class, but the fiefdoms of different elite cliques. One commentator on the region, for example, describes the Rwandan Defence Force (RDF) and the RPF that commands it as “an army with a state” rather than the other way around. The Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (FARDC), because of the vast size of the country, operates as an umbrella of overlapping elite networks, sometimes cooperating and sometimes competing, leading to endemic mutinies and defections to rebel groups. Today, M23 is raising the failure of the Congolese government to honour promises of ‘integration’ into the FARDC as a reason for resuming its armed struggle – ‘integration’ amounting to a ‘license to loot’. This matters far more to the M23 commanders than their claimed defence of the Congolese-Tutsi population.

The DRC has enormous mineral wealth. The vast majority is extracted by modern capital-intensive methods, usually in a collaboration between Congolese state-owned – but elite controlled – companies and multinationals based in imperialist countries. However, in war-torn eastern DRC few capitalists are willing to make major investments. This has led to the proliferation of so-called ‘artisanal mining’, an NGO-coined term adopted by the World Bank for small-scale, non-mechanised, dangerous and labour intensive ‘pick and shovel’ mining. Around 3,000 of these mines exist in the eastern DRC, the control and ‘taxation’ of which is enormous fuel to the fires of conflict.

The result of all of these process is that today there are around 120 different armed groups active in the eastern DRC. All have committed abuses against the local populations. However, the eastern DRC is far from being in a state of ‘total war’ between armed and mobilised civilian populations. The small size of the different armed groups and militias is striking compared to the approximately twenty million population of the three DRC provinces impacted by the conflict. The M23, by far the strongest armed group, is thought to number just 6,000 fighters. Many armed groups number only in the hundreds. This reflects the weak social support for the fighting and the extent to which the conflict is recognised by the local population as the armed political manoeuvring of different elites, exploiting under-development, unemployment, poverty and stoking ethnic and tribal divisions to recruit fighters. This points to the enormous latent potential of the population to intervene and call a halt to the elite-driven fighting that blights the region, especially if organised on a non-tribal multiethnic basis under democratic control.

War Aims

It is not ruled-out that M23 will attempt to carry out its threat to advance on Kinshasa and topple Tshisekedi. However, its Rwandan-RPF backer has had its fingers burned attempting this before. After the end of the First Congo War Kabila quickly distanced himself from his former allies. This was necessary to consolidate his fragile Congolese base of support in distant Kinshasa which rejected any hint that he was a Rwandan ‘puppet’. Kabila’s ‘betrayal’ of the RPF contributed to provoking the Second Congo War. Amongst the vast majority of Congolese elites, Rwandan dominance remains anathema, an insoluble problem from the point of view of the RPF.

More likely is that M23 and the Rwandan-RPF regime attempt to carve out the Kivus, and possibly Ituri, as a permanent buffer zone, or ‘autonomous’ region, administered by Congolese-allies, under Rwandan-RPF protection, simultaneously providing a route to siphon-off the wealth of the region. The Economist magazine, in its latest coverage, declared “Rwanda does a Putin in Congo”, drawing a parallel with the tactics used by Russian imperialism in eastern Ukraine from 2014, combining support for proxy militias and armed intervention with the exploitation of national grievances to carve-out puppet statelets in the Donbas.

Regional Conflict

The danger of the fighting again escalating into a regional conflict, as the Second Congo War did, is very real. The wider regional dimensions of that war never disappeared from the DRC even after its conclusion, they only changed their form. Since 1999 the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission (MONUSCU) has had around 14,000 troops from a number of African countries serving in the DRC under its umbrella. During the capture of Goma the M23 laid siege to a South African military base. Fourteen South African soldiers were killed, escalating into a major diplomatic incident. The South African government has now sent reinforcements.

Reflecting the sharpening regional tensions, Tshisekedi has ordered troops from the East African Community Regional Force (EACRF), deployed in the DRC since November 2022, and made-up of troops from Burundi, Kenya, South Sudan and Uganda, to leave the country. The DRC only joined the East African Community (EAC) regional block, in which Rwanda is a longstanding member, in 2022. It is not automatic however that these troops leave as demanded. The individual governments could order them to remain and support one or other faction, even as their previous ‘multilateral’ flag is dissolved.

Troops from all of these multilateral forces have been responsible for abuses against the population, leading to them being viewed with suspicion, or outright hostility by Congolese civilians. Bowing to this mood, Tshesikedi had promised to order MONUSCU’s withdrawal. He has now reneged on this as his regime rebalances its regional orientation. MONUSCU’s mandate has instead been renewed whilst a 2,900 strong force from the Southern African Development Community (SADC) is prepared to replace them. The DRC is a longstanding member of this regional block, which, unlike the EAC, does not include Rwanda. The joint summits of the EAC and SADC convened after the capture of Goma, and two emergency meetings of the UN Security Council, have failed to resolve anything.

Multipolar World

It is no accident that M23 and the Rwandan-RPF regime chose the first weeks of the US Trump presidency for a major new offensive. Previous US administrations have been proactive in attempting to maintain stability in the region. Trump’s second administration is unlikely to assert US influence over the region in the same way, i.e. via multilateral institutions like the UN. In Ukraine, Trump has linked the continuation of aid to access to mineral resources. This gives an indication of the cruder basis on which US imperialism may approach the conflict in the DRC and the region this time – backing those governments, groups and factions willing to make deals more nakedly in the interests of US capitalists.

The second Trump administration is also more willing to accommodate US imperialism to the ‘spheres of influence’ of rival imperialisms, such as the Russian regime in Ukraine. It may give the same lee-way to the Rwandan-RPF regime in the DRC. Trump is accelerating processes that strengthen the multipolar character of world capitalism with disastrous consequences in the neocolonial world. In the civil war in Sudan between two rival counter-revolutions, which began in 2023, alongside the backing of different factions by the major imperialist powers, more assertive regional powers have been more proactive in backing different factions, fuelling and prolonging the conflict. The conflict in the DRC is already deeply marked by the interference of neighbouring regimes, this could get even worse in this new phase of the conflict.

Alongside the US, the European Union and UK government give considerable aid and diplomatic support to the Rwandan-RPF regime, in part to lean on it as a counterweight to the growing influence of China in the region. Towards this end the RDF has been developed as a ‘local policeman’ on the continent, deployed in eight different African countries as part of multilateral ‘peace keeping’ forces. The Rwandan-RPF regime will leverage this for diplomatic support, or at least inaction. The South African government also relies on RDF deployments, with the SA Defence Forces fighting alongside the RDF in northern Mozambique against an Islamist insurgency. It is not excluded that the US, EU and UK could apply pressure to Kagame and the Rwandan-RPF regime, for example by cutting or reducing aid, but they will be in no rush to do so. Kagame and the RPF likely calculated that the combination of all these factors made now a good time to carve out an expanded sphere of influence in eastern DRC.

Breaking the Cycle

The imperialist powers and the various ‘peace processes’ they have sponsored over decades take it for granted that the predatory elites of the region need to be accommodated, and their interests protected, in any ‘solution’ to the cycle of wars and foreign interventions. This has only prepared the ground for the next wave of conflict and perpetuated the underdevelopment and poverty that blights the lives of the peoples of the region.

Rather, mass organisations and parties of workers, urban and rural poor people, small farmers and young people are the key to breaking the cycle. These need to be built on a non-tribal and multiethnic basis to undermine the weak social bases that the elites of the region attempt to balance upon, claiming that they alone defend a particular group. A program recognising the right of the different peoples of the region to democratically decide their own future, especially the Tutsi and Hutu populations in the Kivus, will be crucial.

In the DRC and Rwanda mass organisations and mass parties could unite the masses around the goal of replacing the governments in Kinshasa and Kigali with governments of workers and the poor. Such governments would need to be armed with socialist programs, including programs for the nationalisation of the vast mineral wealth in the region, under democratic worker and community control, and programs resolving the land question.

A renewed effort to build community self-defence groups will be important in this new phase of the conflict. Mass organisations in the towns and cities of the region will be crucial to link-up village self-defence groups on a democratic basis. This can help to fill the political vacuum, democratically organise fair access to land and resources, and overcome the isolation that can otherwise fuel tribalism. The rural population needs to be armed with a broader socialist political program that can solve the problems they face on a class basis in alliance with the working class and urban population.

The working class and its organisations in the imperialist countries need to campaign against the political and military support given by imperialist governments to the elites in the DRC, Rwanda and the region. Across Africa, the working class and its organisations, alongside movements of the poor, the rural population and the youth need to demand the withdrawal of all foreign troops.

The capitalist social relations of the region and its position in the world capitalist economy are the root cause of the conflict. The tasks faced by the peoples of the DRC, Rwanda, the region and the African continent as a whole, are fundamentally the same as the tasks facing the working class in the advanced capitalist countries – the overthrow of these social relation. Under very different circumstances each must find their way to the socialist ideas, socialist program, and the class methods, strategy and tactics needed to prepare the socialist revolution and forge the organisations necessary to carry it through. No matter how difficult the road to achieving this may appear, it is the responsibility of Marxists to assist this process.

The conflict in the eastern DRC – as in many other brutal and intractable conflicts in the neocolonial world – can at first sight appear to be a ‘collapse into barbarism’, a social breakdown and disintegration that defies rational explanation and excludes any hope. But even in the difficult circumstances of the DRC the class struggle remains the key to explaining the conflict and the only method by which it can be ended. The task of Marxists is to identity the class forces involved, however obscured, in order to point a way forward, confident that the millions of workers, urban and rural poor, small farmers and young people, not only yearn for peace, security and the transformation of their living standards, but will be prepared to organise and fight to achieve it.

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