Congo’s ‘forgotten’ war becomes a fight for survival

The girl’s dress is shiny and emerald green, and she carefully peels an orange, but little else is normal for the 14-year-old sitting on a hospital bed in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

“I was hit in battle,” she said when asked about the bandages that cover the stump of her right leg. “I joined the fight for my country . . . if I’m given the chance to return to the fight then I’ll do so to end the war against the M23.”

The girl, a minor who cannot be named, is one of about 28,000 wazalendo — which means patriots in Swahili — who have signed up to the assortment of militia fighting alongside the DRC armed forces around the city of Goma. They are pitted against a rebel group called M23 that is slowly encircling the provincial capital as part of a brutal and complex war that the outside world has largely ignored.

The fighting has sucked in, on one side, Congolese forces armed with Chinese-made drones, UN peacekeepers, troops from Burundi, Malawi, South Africa and Tanzania, and European security contractors, including former fighters from the French Foreign Legion. M23 on the other is backed by neighbouring Rwanda, although Kigali has never acknowledged that its soldiers are on the ground.

The fighting has intensified in recent weeks, stoking panic and alarm in Goma, a city of 2mn people swelled by the arrival of hundreds of thousands of internal refugees, many of then living in squalid camps.

“We’re on a knife edge,” said a senior western diplomat. “The Congolese should be engaging in talks with M23 [while] the Rwandans say it’s not for them to take the blame. It’s catastrophic.”

M23 — which Kinshasa, the UN, US, EU and the powerful Catholic Church all say is supported by Rwanda — has fought its way to within 20km of Goma, and has bedded down in the hills above the city. European security contractors say the rebels are aided by sophisticated weapons, including anti-aircraft missiles and GPS-guided mortars fired by Rwanda’s military.

“M23 and Kigali are joined at the hip,” said a senior foreign official involved in diplomatic attempts to end the fighting.

The rebel group, accused by the UN of sowing “terror” and forcibly recruiting children, controls almost all supply routes into Goma, capital of the wider North-Kivu province that is now home to 2.7mn displaced people.

“The security situation is worrying and unpredictable because the Rwandans are either advancing or strengthening their front line,” said Maj Gen Peter Cirimwami, the province’s interim military governor.

Brig Gen Ronald Rwivanga, spokesman of the Rwanda Defence Force, rejected the accusation. “This is an internal Congolese matter,” he said. “Why would Rwanda be involved?”

For now, DRC’s government will not negotiate with M23, which is dominated by Congolese Tutsis. Analysts estimate that the group has 5,000 fighters, making it the main threat among the 120 armed outfits operating in eastern DRC, a mineral-rich region beset by conflict for decades.

M23 first emerged more than a decade ago in a rebellion also backed by Rwanda, say Congelese officials, and the group briefly occupied Goma in 2012. After a period in abeyance, it resurfaced three years ago after accusing Kinshasa of flouting an earlier peace agreement.

This war has its roots in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, when Hutus killed more than 800,000 Tutsis and moderates from their own ethnic group during 100 days of frenzied bloodshed. More than 1mn Hutus, including the defeated army, fled to DRC.

In the years that followed, the Rwandans twice invaded eastern Congo, ostensibly to hunt down the genocidaires, spurring a string of conflicts that sucked in other countries, deposed Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko and spawned myriad armed groups in what became known as “Africa’s world war”.

The fear now is that the spiralling violence risks exploding into a new and even more dangerous regional conflagration. “I just lost a man — it’s war,” Gen Ngowa Lwanda, commander of a wazalendo unit, told the Financial Times in Mugunga, located not far from the front line, over the din of heavy artillery and gunfire.

Agnes Kanyere, a 40-year-old Congolese Hutu who survived the previous wars and is living in the nearby Lushagala camp, said her husband and sons were killed by M23 after the family fled their village. Later she was raped by unidentified armed men. “There’s been a lot of deaths,” she added.

Many blame Rwanda and its president, Paul Kagame, for the upsurge. “Rwanda’s primary interest [in the war] is to continue to have its say in this geopolitical battlefield,” said Onesphore Sematumba, a Goma-based analyst with Crisis Group. “This is a dispute over the control of [an] area rich in economic influence.”

The view was backed by Ngowa, the pro-government general who as a young man fought for a different Kigali-backed militia. “The M23 and Rwanda agreed to reactivate this rebellion with the aim of taking the east of the country to exploit minerals for Rwanda’s profit.”

The DRC said it was losing an annual $1bn in minerals siphoned out of its territory, which the UN said was “smuggled towards Rwanda”. M23 recently took control of the area around one of the world’s largest deposits of coltan, a vital component in smartphones and electric vehicles.

Rwanda denies stealing minerals and Kagame continues to enjoy cosy relations with countries, including the UK, following a deal to host asylum seekers deported from Britain. Rwanda also makes a counteraccusation against the DRC, claiming that the Hutu fighters from the rebel Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda that are “fully integrated” into the Congolese army, something Kinshasa denies, pose “a serious threat to Rwanda’s national security”.

Kagame has also defended M23, saying at a recent commemoration of the Rwandan genocide that the group was fighting because the Congolese Tutsi “have been denied their rights”, with at least 100,000 of them seeking shelter in Rwanda after fleeing attacks in eastern DRC.

Underscoring the indiscriminate nature of the fighting, Congolese Tutsis have found themselves in the crossfire. Esperance Mahoro, a mother of six who fled to one of the Goma camps, said she faced discrimination because of her ethnicity, with some locals blaming her for their predicament. “I’m a Tutsi and I’m also suffering,” she said. “I want the M23 to stop and the war to end.”

President Félix Tshisekedi of the DRC compared the pro-government wazalendo to the Ukrainians resisting Russia’s invasion and demanded western sanctions against Rwanda. “The international community stood up and mobilised support for Ukraine after the Russian aggression. We’re also being attacked by Rwanda, but there are no sanctions,” Tshisekedi said.

But some of the wazalendo are in turn accused by locals and humanitarian officials, including UN rights chief Volker Türk, of human rights violations as they wreak havoc in Goma and the surrounding camps. Türk said on a visit to the city last month that he feared for “what could happen to civilians should there be a rushed withdrawal” of the 13,500-strong UN peacekeeping force that has been in the country for 25 years.

For those in Goma and the tent cities, where cholera is rampant, life has become a fight for survival. The sprawling Lushagala was a scene of misery even before a recent mortar attack killed at least 18 people. Two children also died in a grenade blast, while one of the wazalendo accused of murder was burnt alive by vengeful residents in another incident.

Surgeons at a local hospital run by the International Committee of the Red Cross have treated babies injured by shrapnel. Sexual violence is rife, with the UN registering more than 4,000 cases a month since the year began. Women are often attacked while searching for food or firewood. 

The US has blamed Rwanda and M23 for the camp attack, saying it was “gravely concerned” by the escalating violence. Yolande Makolo, a Kagame aid, dismissed the claim of involvement as “ridiculous” and “absurd”.

Myriam Favier, the ICRC’s chief in Goma, said the crisis in eastern Congo was not gaining the attention it deserved, with the focus instead on the Middle East and Ukraine. “This conflict is all but forgotten. And yet the magnitude of the human suffering it has created is hard to grasp.”

Kanyere, the Congolese Hutu, feared an even worse fate if and when the advancing rebels marched on Goma. “M23 kills everyone: Tutsis and Hutus,” she said, pointing to their positions only a few kilometres away. “If they come here, it will be horror.”

Cartography and data visualisation by Steven Bernard