Civilians in Congo Suffer as Elites at Home and Abroad Jockey for Profits

During the past few weeks in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, a lengthy conflict has been condensed into a series of violent episodes that will determine the country’s future. On January 27, a rebel movement known as the March 23 Movement, or M23, wrested Goma, a city of 2 million people, from Congolese government control.

In the subsequent days, the M23 and a connected rebel group, the Congo River Alliance (Alliance Fleuve Congo or AFC), solidified their grip on the mineral-rich province of North Kivu and began to push into the sister province of South Kivu, capturing Bukavu, a lake port of 1.3 million, with barely a fight. Congo is one of Africa’s largest countries, and resource-wise it is one of the richest on the continent. The Kivu region is flush with valuable raw materials like gold and coltan (an ore of tantalum that is widely used in consumer electronics), but centuries of extractive colonialism, exploitation and conflict have meant that the area remains one of the poorest parts of the world.

The insurgency has complex roots, but neighboring states like Rwanda and Uganda are deeply implicated. The M23 draws its fighters from members of the Banyamulenge, an ethnic group that Rwanda claims is persecuted by the Congolese army. The AFC draws from a broader base: Its adherents come from different ethnic groups but are united in their opposition to Congo’s president, Félix Antoine Tshisekedi Tshilombo. More than any other party, the Rwandan government seems to be calling the shots: United Nations experts have said Rwanda’s army maintains “de facto control” of the rebels. The rebels have been recorded using sophisticated weaponry, some of it thought to be Israeli, raising questions about whether powerful foreign backers are supporting the Rwandans.

Civilians Suffer in the Crossfire

Civilians caught in the middle of this conflict suffer immensely. Women and children are not spared during the vicious fighting. According to Human Rights Watch, an NGO that monitors abuses in conflict zones, the M23 has shelled civilian camps and executed children who donned army uniforms left by fleeing soldiers, and the Congolese army has burned villages and looted civilian zones: All sides have been complicit in abuses.

For its part, the Congolese government has, according to the UN, “continued to systematically rely on” unaccountable militias, including one that finds its roots in the Rwandan genocide, destabilizing a planned peace process. That group, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, or FDLR, is the descendant of the Hutu militiamen who fled Rwanda after instigating the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi ethnic group. Though their numbers have diminished from their peak in the early 2000s to some 1,500 fighters today, they have continued to wreak havoc in eastern Congo.

It is not only the FDLR and other militias instigating violence in the Kivus. Although the Congolese government has made some effort to prosecute rape in the army’s ranks, civilians on the ground told Truthout over the phone during the recent conflict that they feel unsafe with armed men of any stripe. Tensions between the central government, which draws from the Luba-Kasaï ethnicity, and Swahili-speaking populations are at an all-time high.

“Socially speaking, there has been a tear in the fabric of Congolese society,” one Goma resident, who requested anonymity because he was speaking from rebel-held territory, told Truthout. “In the capital, Kinshasa, they are blaming the people of the east for this conflict, and they want to have their revenge. They don’t understand what is going on 1,500 kilometers away. And there is no way to explain what the problem is.”

Congolese authorities initiated legal proceedings against Apple last year for what it called “systematic wrongdoing”: using minerals that it said were stolen by rebel groups.

The recent murder of Delphin Katembo Vinywasiki, or Delcat Idinco, a popular musician who often criticized Tshisekedi’s government, underlined the bind that Congolese people find themselves in: stuck between a government that uses oppressive force for political control and a militia that has little compunction about using violence.

Idinco was arrested by Tshisekedi’s forces in 2021 for songs that insulted the military, according to court documents provided by his lawyer. Since then, Idinco bounced in and out of jail. When rebel troops seized Goma, Idinco escaped prison, but on February 13, he was shot to death while recording a music video for a song criticizing the M23’s occupation of Congo. Although his lawyer says it still is not clear who shot Idinco, videos of his body have been circulated, and blame has been widely attributed to the rebels.

And it’s not just the violence that is crushing civilians. Sources in Goma told Truthout that a humanitarian crisis is in the offing as people can’t access basic supplies. Even if they can, cash is in short supply. The banks have been blocked. In Goma, it has become impossible to send or withdraw funds without going through money changers who charge extortionate rates to withdraw money.

Motives Animating the M23 and the AFC

Part of the motive for the rebellion is financial. The rebels, and presumably their Rwandan handlers, have profited enormously from the chaos. In the strategic mining and transportation town of Rubaya alone, the M23 and the AFC have, according to a UN report from December, made at least $800,000 a month from seizing minerals, which they have exported along roads created using forced labor. Congolese authorities initiated legal proceedings against Apple last year for what it called “systematic wrongdoing”: using minerals that it said were stolen by rebel groups in cases. (Apple has denied wrongdoing, but has halted the use of all Congolese minerals in its devices.)

Rwanda has also exploited the vacuums left by President Tshisekedi’s weak government, which is ripe to bursting with corrupt deals that have disenfranchised the Congolese people and squandered the national budget. Weapons have been sold to rebels by politicians looking to line their pockets, who have also sold mines to exploitative foreign actors who pay what businessmen describe as “the big bucks” to ensure their claims to Congo’s rich reserves of minerals.

In Kinshasa, the Congolese capital, anything goes if you are well-enough connected — those who are caught red-handed defrauding the public are often allowed to walk free and vast fortunes are made and sent abroad. Political appointments are run on an old-fashioned court system: The government has increasingly become run by people from the president’s ethnic group. Others have been increasingly alienated: Politicians like Corneille Nangaa, a former head of Congo’s electoral commission, have joined the rebel AFC, and a former president, Joseph Kabila Kabange, is gathering his own support, ostensibly for a return to power.

In Goma, the dominoes began to fall in January, when Tshisekedi refused to undertake a peace process that involved him talking directly with the M23. On January 24, Maj. Gen. Peter Cirimwami Nkuba, the Congolese governor of North Kivu and a former rebel himself, was killed amid suspicious circumstances. His death near the front lines was blamed by the Congolese government on the M23. “He died on the field of honor,” a Congolese army spokesperson said. But a security official in Kinshasa and an attendee of National Security Council meetings on the crisis in Washington both independently told Truthout that he was killed by his own men after a debate over corrupt networks of arms trafficking.

In the next few days, Congolese regulars attacked Romanian-led mercenaries who had been contracted by the Congolese government to fight the rebels. Since the formal end of Belgian colonialism in 1960, the Congolese government has used European mercenaries and loaned troops to address systemic weaknesses in its armed forces, which were inadequately trained by the country’s colonizers. The army was kept weak by dictator Mobutu Sese Seko during the Cold War to stave off the chance of a coup d’état, and the tradition of doing so never really ended. With foreign military support came foreign meddling, and Mobutu was rescued over and over again, even as his rule became more despotic.

On January 27, 2025 — three days after the death of Cirimwami — the rebels declared that the city of Goma had fallen under their control. Security sources told Truthout few units put up a fight. (“Look at the Congolese army, they barely have proper boots,” a mining company employee said. “All the money that is being spent is going somewhere, but it isn’t going to the front line.”) There were reports of widespread looting and thousands of deaths; Congolese troops looted the city and then shed their uniforms. The country’s government reeled and banned people from even mentioning that Goma had been lost. “Why do we have to sit there and say the opposite of the truth?” a senior Congolese political analyst asked. “Just to stroke the president’s ego?”

Tshisekedi’s regime has often reacted harshly to criticism. Journalists who are seen as insufficiently aligned with the government’s messaging are targeted. (I was detained in Congo in 2022 by the secret police for six days after reporting on the links between the militias and mining — and the senior political analyst I interviewed for this article asked to remain anonymous due to the culture of reprisals in Congo these days.) In this fraught environment, people are accused of being Rwandan spies, and the Kinshasa power elite reportedly use allegations of espionage to get rid of their opponents.

“As a Congolese, I have always felt that there were multiple hands on our country, but in the end, nobody would stand up for us.”

Foreign Powers Jockey Over Minerals in Congo

The Congo crisis is one of the incoming Trump administration’s first major foreign policy challenges, but the escalation in death and destruction seems to have been met with a shrug from Washington. The government’s decision to cut back on USAID programs has begun to cut deep in Congo — the United States is Congo’s largest foreign donor.

Trump has previously said his preference is to mine more minerals in the U.S., and he has shown little willingness to engage with Africa in general, although Secretary of State Marco Rubio is reportedly keen on securing sources of critical minerals on the continent, and that might explain why some Washington power brokers are reportedly considering offering Tshisekedi what was described by the senior political analyst as an “off-ramp”: a two-year transition period with immunity.

But other powerful actors in Congo, such as China and South Africa, might intervene to support Tshisekedi, who has cultivated close relationships with Beijing and reportedly promised mining concessions in return for South African military aid. (Chinese companies in particular hold huge stakes in Congo’s mines.) The Ugandan military has moved to occupy the city of Bunia, to the north of Goma, where long-simmering ethnic violence has also spiked under Tshisekedi’s rule.

“As a Congolese, I have always felt that there were multiple hands on our country, but in the end, nobody would stand up for us,” Maliyamungu Muhande, a Congolese artist and filmmaker, told Truthout. Muhande’s family has evacuated the east and her cousin was killed in an M23 attack earlier this month.

As M23 forces seized Bukavu, South Kivu’s capital, the rebels have said that their target is now the river port of Kisangani. Tshisekedi is digging in his heels even as, in the town of Uvira, this week his troops and once loyal militias engaged in shootouts and vied to commandeer boats. (Uvira finally fell to the M23 on Friday.) Since the intensification of the conflict, the president has refused to attend a regional peace conference and has vowed to fight. Soon after the fall of Goma, his defence minister said the Congolese army would continue to combat “monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime” in a rousing speech. (His words did lose some of their force when online commentators realized they were lifted directly from the Churchill biopic The Darkest Hour.) At last week’s Munich Security Conference, Tshisekedi asked for foreign support: The United Kingdom summoned Rwanda’s ambassador and Belgium cut development cooperation with Rwanda.

For his part, Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame has pleaded ignorance, implausibly stating that he doesn’t know if his troops are in Congo. In 1997, he sponsored a similar rebellion, which toppled Congo’s Cold War dictator, Mobutu. Perhaps he is hoping to do the same thing again. But he would do well to remember a failed second invasion of Congo in 1998, which killed some 5 million people.

One thing is clear amid all the destruction and power games: Congolese civilians caught in the middle have continued to suffer the machinations of greedy elites at home and abroad. Grassroots efforts at peacebuilding and empowering women have been ripped apart. The Kivus are suffering their most profound humanitarian crisis in decades. The M23 and the AFC are struggling to govern (residents of Goma say they have been given contradictory instructions on returning home and that looting is rife), and the country looks set to plunge further into chaos. The only hope now for a durable peace is negotiations, but they seem further away than ever.