France is seeking western support for a UN security council resolution that names Rwanda as being behind the M23 rebel group attacks inside the Democratic Republic of the Congo, including the surprise weekend seizure of parts of Goma, the largest city in eastern DRC.
UN officials said as many as 4,000 Rwandan troops were escorting the M23 rebels. The UN secretary-general, António Guterres, on Sunday called on “the Rwandan defence forces to stop supporting the M23 and to withdraw from the territory of the DRC”. It was his clearest statement of Rwandan responsibility for much of the violence.
But practical steps to isolate the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, are not yet being openly canvassed. Similar sanctions in the past, notably in 2012, forced Rwanda to pull back when aid was slashed.
The UN statement drawn up at the end of an emergency security council meeting on Sunday called for the withdrawal of “external forces” without explicitly naming Rwanda. However, it did reference a report by UN experts that highlighted the systematic presence of Rwandan forces in the DRC.
The French ambassador at the UN, Nicolas de Rivière, urged the UN security council to say Rwanda’s actions were a grave threat to regional peace and security. He said “it was time to call a cat a cat,” a reference to the way in which the international community for different reasons had skirted around the issue of Rwanda’s role in arming the M23. Britain and the US in their interventions at the UN on Sunday also named Rwanda and urged Kagame to pull back.
Britain, France and the US have all been reluctant to impose sanctions on Kagame.
The UK became dependent on Rwandan goodwill when it signed an agreement for Rwanda to accept asylum seekers, but the scheme collapsed in the face of legal and political objections. France has been grateful to Rwanda for policing the Central African Republic and Mali, both former French colonies. The EU in 2023 signed a mineral pact with Rwanda. The US has rarely seen Africa as a diplomatic priority, and one of the first steps of its new president, Donald Trump, was to freeze all aid to the continent.
Yet Rwanda would be vulnerable to a coordinated aid withdrawal, since a third of Rwanda’s budget is dependent on overseas aid.
William Ruto, the president of Kenya, is seeking to fill the diplomatic vacuum by calling an extraordinary summit of the East African Community, which he chairs, within 48 hours on Monday. He insisted that the DRC president, Félix Tshisekedi, and Kagame would attend, but there has been no confirmation of this.
Some nations, notably Russia and China, as well as the African nations holding rotating seats on the security council, are content to issue generalised calls for restraint. Russia says the dispute is rooted in colonialism, a comprehensive critique it provides to analyse most western actions in Africa.
In speaking to the security council, the DRC foreign minister, Thérèse Kayikwamba Wagner, rejected any history lessons, instead favouring the UN imposing sweeping economic and political sanctions on Kagame, including on all Rwandan-labelled minerals. She accused Rwanda of a “declaration of war, and no longer hiding behind diplomatic manoeuvres”, adding that it was “clear that this crisis is directly linked to the economic plunder of our country by Rwanda”.
DRC diplomats are frustrated since successive UN expert reports have said that Rwanda is plundering DRC mineral wealth. Rwandan diplomats deny this, saying repeatedly that if it has a presence in the DRC, it is because it has a legitimate right to protect the Congolese Tutsi community against rebelforces.
The ambassadors of Uruguay and South Africa, whose peacekeepers were recently killed by M23 forces, appealed to the security council to protect UN troops.
