The United States and the United Kingdom responded to the outbreak of war in eastern Congo late last month by slapping sanctions on Rwanda‘s defense minister and the spokesman for Congo’s M23 insurgent group. The State Department’s move was counterproductive and morally inverse, the equivalent of blaming a beaten wife for fighting back against her abusive husband.
Congo’s M23 insurgency erupted because of the failure of the Congolese government to uphold previous peace agreements. The current fighting is the result of a conscious decision by Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi to incite ethnic violence and to shelter and support those groups that perpetrated the 1994 Rwanda genocide. Make no mistake: M23 is Congolese. Its members may share ethnicity with some Rwandans, but the M23 alliance is broader-based and representative of the ethnic mosaic that characterizes Congo’s North and South Kivu provinces.
While Secretary of State Marco Rubio, like his predecessor Antony Blinken, defers blindly to the diplomats of the State Department’s Africa Bureau, many of whom lack moral clarity and prioritize their own personal politics, the facts increasingly show how bad Rubio’s handling of the Congo crisis has been.
After Rwandan forces entered Goma, they found huge armories with tanks, armored vehicles, rockets, and other ammunition stockpiled in support of an apparent looming Congolese invasion of Rwanda, an ambition about which many of the government’s proxy groups in eastern Congo spoke openly. Rwandan forces are not in Congo en masse, though Rwandan officials acknowledge they have conducted limited special forces preemptive raids to neutralize specific targets.
In effect, Rubio has confused victim and aggressor. In Africa, he has done the equivalent of siding with Hamas against Israel or Russia against Ukraine. After all, if Israel or Ukraine preemptively struck at missile launchers, terrorist cells, or bomb factories prior to their invasion, the U.S. would have celebrated it. Now, the U.S. has blood on its hands as the Tshisekedi regime resorts to bombing crowds of civilians in the M23-held city of Bukavu.
The calumny about Rwanda looting eastern Congo is the result of both diplomats and United Nations officials stationed more than 1,000 miles away repeating gossip and having no understanding of regional trade. I spent part of last August in M23 territory in North Kivu and spoke, absent any restrictions, with local businessmen. What the State Department sees as looting, the locals see as normal business. Whether the product is minerals, produce, or hardwood, customs duties on the Ugandan and Rwandan borders are an order of magnitude less than the internal taxes the Tshisekedi regime demands. Nor has Congo, due to decades of dysfunctional corruption, ever bothered to create the second processing industry that its neighbors have set up. Regional integration is a good thing.
WHY IS WAR BREAKING OUT IN THE CONGO?
If sanctions could have stopped Congo’s dysfunction and slaughter, seven million Congolese would still be alive today, rather than victims of iterations of war. But with Rubio siding with Congo’s kleptocracy and its Communist Chinese allies and supporting the legitimacy of the former Belgian pizza delivery boy-turned-president-for-life in Kinshasa, M23 and its allied forces really have no choice. To accept a return to the status quo ante would pose an existential threat to Rwanda. Instead, with Washington and London going down the sanctions route, the only real way forward for human rights and Congolese security would be leapfrogging from airport to airport and then a march on Kinshasa. Tshisekedi can return to Brussels or, more likely, Beijing.
The State Department might keep alive a show of sanctions to avoid acknowledging its errors, but ultimately, a new regime in Kinshasa and a constitutional convention will be necessary to ensure history does not repeat. North and South Kivu might enjoy a status similar to Iraqi Kurdistan. The U.N. should disarm its camps, and its failed peacekeepers should return home. Rubio should designate Burundi to be a state sponsor of terrorism and apply Magnitsky sanctions to Congo’s current leadership. Only then will peace come to Africa’s Great Lakes region.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.