When I visited the king of Bukumu, Mwami Butsitsi Kahembe IV Isaac, he was dressed in a crisp white caftan, with the skin of a leopard killed by his great-grandfather slung over his shoulders. A crown of matching fur sat on his head, and an ivory-tipped scepter announced his rank. The surroundings were less elegant. The king told me ruefully that his ancestral palace had been destroyed thirty years ago by combatants from the Hutu tribe, and that he had not yet found the resources to rebuild it. We met instead at his office in a compound at the edge of the city of Goma, in the eastern Congo. Mwami Isaac, as he is known, arrived in a chauffeur-driven Land Cruiser, escorted by three bodyguards carrying assault rifles.
It was a bright fall morning, but the sky was hazy with smoke from Mt. Nyiragongo, the volcano that loomed thousands of feet above. The Bukumu kingdom occupies about a hundred and thirty square miles in the province of North Kivu, and large portions of it are covered by black lava scree. Nyiragongo has erupted several times in recent decades. In 2021, lava consumed an entire neighborhood, killing dozens of the king’s subjects and forcing thousands more to flee.
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At the time of the eruption, Mwami Isaac was twenty-six, but already several years into his reign; he had taken the throne after studying political science at a university in Goma. “I rule over every aspect of my people’s lives,” he said. “They see me as the keeper of their traditions and as a symbol of unity, as well as the bridge between tradition and modernity.” There were some traditions that Isaac had been unable to uphold. “The people believe that when the volcano erupts, the king is upset,” he explained. His forebears had offered sacrifices, “including cows and sometimes virgin girls.” With a cheeky smile, he said that modern human-rights laws forbade sacrificing virgins, so the volcano did what it wished.
In a waiting room outside the office, petitioners sat on benches, facing a wall decorated with photographs of Bukumu monarchs. The earliest shows Mwami Isaac’s great-grandfather, wearing a belted military uniform enlivened with heavy gold medallions. In the most recent portrait, Isaac sits on an intricately carved throne with a distant look, as if surveying his domain.
The Bukumu kingdom is a small part of a vast country that has been riven for centuries by tribal disputes and colonial violence. As Isaac told it, his kingdom’s history is rife with treachery, usurpation, and murder. His great-grandfather came to power during King Leopold II of Belgium’s bloody occupation of Congo, and ruled for five decades. His succession was contested, though; Isaac’s grandfather and father both inherited the throne as children and were forced to vie for power with a relative who was twice appointed as regent. According to Isaac, the regent was a cruel and greedy man who killed his subjects, took their land, and allied himself with Congo’s dictator, Joseph Mobutu. After the regent died, his son ruled unlawfully for twenty years before dying in an explosion. Isaac’s father reclaimed the throne, but died when Isaac was two—shot by a rival in the office where we were sitting.
In January, there was another tumultuous transfer of power in North Kivu. After years of fighting with Congolese government forces, a rebel army known as the M23 seized control of Goma and a large swath of surrounding territory. A framed photograph on Mwami Isaac’s desk showed him posed with the M23’s military chief, General Sultani Makenga. With a laugh, Isaac told me, “I also have a photo of myself with President Tshisekedi”—the current leader of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “But I’ve put that photo away.” Tshisekedi lives in the capital, Kinshasa, which sits nearly a thousand miles away, toward the Atlantic coast. The M23 fighters were heavily armed and close at hand; they were also backed by the neighboring state of Rwanda, whose border runs along the edge of Goma. “As king, I must obey the decisions of the state,” Mwami Isaac said. “Now I must obey the M23, because here it is the government.”
The fighting over Goma had been fierce; several thousand people died, including hundreds of civilians and government troops. But it was only the latest manifestation of a decades-long fight between the D.R.C. and Rwanda, which has grown to involve several other countries and scores of ethnic militias in the forests of eastern Congo. The governments involved have stoked the fighting with Romanian mercenaries, Russian fighter jets, and Chinese drones. “The only way to survive in this minefield is to stay neutral,” Mwami Isaac said. But he acknowledged, “It’s difficult to rule over seven hundred thousand people and stay apolitical. We try and maintain a balance.”
The fighting in eastern Congo seldom makes the international news, except during extraordinary spasms of violence. This summer, though, there was a moment of renewed interest, when President Donald Trump announced that he had “stopped” the war—one of eight (or perhaps nine) conflicts that he claims to have resolved in his quest for a Nobel Peace Prize. Emissaries from Rwanda and the D.R.C. dutifully appeared in Washington, to be photographed shaking hands, making optimistic speeches, and signing agreements. In a parallel effort, the government of Qatar oversaw negotiations between the M23 rebels and the Congolese government. For months, the two initiatives plodded along, with photo ops and declarations of good will. Meanwhile, the fighting kept up, and military leaders talked about more aggressive campaigns. In two visits that I made to Rwanda and eastern Congo this fall, the war seemed far too entrenched to be easily stopped. Many observers feared that it would grow until it stretched across the country to the capital.
In Goma, it’s easy to see signs of conflict, but difficult to tell whether they were caused by recent battles or by earlier ones. The M23 incursion in January left buildings pocked with bullet holes; it also left hundreds of victims buried in an unmarked cemetery next to the city’s airport. Their graves are set among older ones on acres of weeds and rocks.
The airport, surrounded by a security wall festooned with razor wire, was partly destroyed in the fighting, despite being guarded by one of the largest U.N. peacekeeping forces in the world. Intended as a regional “stabilization mission,” the force includes ten thousand troops, spread between Goma and a few other locales. It is estimated to have cost twenty-seven billion dollars since its inception, in 1999—but, because it lacks an effective mandate to intervene to halt violence, it is considered all but irrelevant.
The presence of peacekeepers in eastern Congo can seem like the U.N.’s way of apologizing for failing to halt the Rwandan genocide, a singularly brutal conflict that is the wellspring of the current violence in the region. For three months in 1994, Hutu extremists, who represented the ethnic majority in Rwanda, conducted a monstrous slaughter of ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus. At least eight hundred thousand people died, many of them executed by drunk men who had been urged by the Hutu-led government to exterminate their neighbors. Victims were murdered with machetes, garden hoes, and clubs; their bodies were tossed into rivers, dumped in ditches, and hurled into wells and pit latrines. Churches offered sanctuary, until men arrived to murder the families inside. The killers referred to what they were doing as “work” and to their victims as “cockroaches.” By the time it was over, Rwanda’s Tutsi population had been reduced by eighty-five per cent.
Throughout the violence, the U.N. resisted calls to intervene, and refused to describe what was happening as a genocide. So did the U.S. State Department. The task of halting the slaughter was left largely to the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a Tutsi guerrilla army led by an enigmatic thirty-six-year-old named Paul Kagame.
The R.P.F. eventually seized the capital, Kigali, and Kagame took control of the government. The killing wound down, but ethnic tensions remained. The same people who had organized the genocide led an exodus of Hutus across the border into the D.R.C., and as many as a million settled in camps around Goma. When a cholera epidemic broke out there, killing some fifty thousand people, the international relief community hastened to provide the Hutu refugees with food, shelter, and medical care. As Philip Gourevitch wrote in “We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families,” his haunting book about the genocide, the outside world had largely ignored the extermination of the Tutsis, but it “responded to the mass flight of Hutus . . . with passionate intensity.”
It was perhaps inevitable that the war that had begun in Rwanda would continue in Congo. Though the Hutus in the camps were largely civilians, there were thousands among them who had participated in the mass killing, and their leaders quickly became a Hutu government in exile. They remained armed, and continued to conduct raids against the Tutsis across the border.
In 1996, Rwanda’s new government sent troops into the camps to root out the génocidaires. In a short and vicious campaign that became known as the First Congo War, Kagame’s army pursued the Hutu forces across the country, all the way to Kinshasa. In the capital, the Rwandans overthrew President Joseph Mobutu. In his place, they installed a local ally, Laurent-Désiré Kabila—a gold entrepreneur and a former Maoist rebel leader.
At first, Kabila ruled the D.R.C. in concert with the Rwandans. But before long he turned against his patrons, and they launched a new incursion to force him out. The Second Congo War, as it became known, divided the region: several African nations took sides with Kabila, while Uganda joined forces with Rwanda. The fighting dragged on for five years, until a peace agreement was signed in 2003. By then, Kabila had been shot dead by one of his soldiers, and his son Joseph had been handed control of the country.
While a succession of treaties and opaque power-sharing deals have determined who rules in Kinshasa, the violence in the eastern hinterlands has never stopped. Armed groups have proliferated in a complex web of alliances, defections, and betrayals. An estimated hundred and twenty militias are now active, propped up variously by governments around the region and by political factions within the D.R.C. Among the most prominent forces are the M23, aligned with Rwanda, and the Wazalendo and the F.D.L.R., aligned with the Congolese government. Massacres are commonplace, and huge numbers of people have been killed by fighters, or by displacement, starvation, and disease. The estimated over-all death toll since the First Congo War broke out is between four and six million.
In Goma, three decades of humanitarian crisis have had a curious effect: a population boom. The city has grown from about a hundred and sixty thousand inhabitants to as many as two million, primarily owing to displacement by war from the surrounding countryside. The residents, victims and perpetrators alike, are generally busy trying to survive. The city sits alongside Lake Kivu, and men spend their days on the shoreline, waiting with sponges and water buckets for cars to wash. Others line up to serve as day laborers, filling sacks with sand transported by barge and then carrying them on their backs to delivery trucks. From the docks, ferries run to the city of Bukavu, a hundred and twenty miles down the shore. Bukavu, like Goma, fell to the M23 early this year.
Most of Goma is a warren of improvised housing, with tin shacks for the poorest and cinder-block huts for those a little better off. But the market streets are jammed with people buying and selling. Women in elegant African-print dresses carry burdens on their heads; men in cast-off Western clothes push wooden carts laden with potatoes and carrots. The atmosphere is noisy and sociable, a hubbub of music and conversation. Occasionally, jeeps full of M23 fighters push past, while the civilians pretend to ignore them. Like the king of Bukumu, the city’s residents have largely adjusted to the M23, but they know that it’s safer not to engage.
Along the lakeshore are the headquarters of relief agencies: U.N.H.C.R., I.C.R.C., War Child, Tearfund. Around town, you see plastic sheets and grain sacks stamped with the joined-hands emblem of U.S.A.I.D.—the world’s largest aid agency, before it was decimated by the Trump Administration. U.S.A.I.D.’s demise has removed the main source of rape kits, H.I.V. medications, and nutritional supplements for malnourished children, essential support for millions of people in eastern Congo.
At a hospital in Goma, the director, a jovial man in a doctor’s coat and blue Crocs, told me that he and his staff were handling about five rape cases every day. He believed that many more women were being attacked, but that not all of them had the means, or the courage, to come seek treatment. Rape is routinely used as a weapon of war in eastern Congo; U.N. investigators say that the incidence of sexual violence is among the worst in the world. The director said that most of the assaults took place on the outskirts of Goma and in the countryside beyond. Armed men invaded houses and raped women, often in front of their husbands, who were then killed. Other women were assaulted while they worked in the fields or fetched firewood. Sometimes they were gang-raped, or violated with foreign objects. The director said that the most difficult case he had dealt with recently was a woman who had a tree branch jammed into her vagina. She had survived, thanks to intensive surgery.
I asked who was committing this violence. Was it the F.D.L.R. militia, which is led by the remnants of the Hutu génocidaires? Or was it the M23? The director shrugged. The rapists attacked at night, and usually did not announce which group they belonged to. All he could say, as a doctor, was that there were more rapes now than before. At the hospital, he and his colleagues tested victims for H.I.V. and gave them clothes and “dignity kits,” containing soap, menstrual pads, and other essentials. In cases of severe trauma, they offered psychotherapy. But, since U.S.A.I.D. ended its support, they had been unable to supply rape kits to collect evidence. There were also no courts handling rape cases in Goma, so he and his team were the only outlet for any testimony that victims dared to provide.
One afternoon, I saw an elderly woman hoeing the ground in the unmarked cemetery across from Goma’s airport. She introduced herself as Zabandora, and told me that she was planting soybeans. It was open land, and she lived nearby, she explained, waving toward a row of shacks. Two harvests a year gave her just enough to live on. During the recent fighting, she had stayed away and prayed, returning to her crops only when it was all over. At the graveyard, she found people burying relatives and told them that she usually planted there, between the headstones. They said that they would understand if she continued.
Goma has a few wealthier residents. On the lakeshore is a smattering of luxury hotels and opulent villas; the current style favors complex curving façades, wrought-iron verandas, and mirrored glass rising above the street. The M23 occupies several handsome buildings, including a well-guarded compound with landscaped gardens for its political leaders.
Despite Congo’s widespread poverty, it is extraordinarily rich in natural resources. Near Goma, there are lucrative mines for gold and for coltan, which is crucial to manufacturing batteries and cellphones. Farther west is an enormous copper belt, much of which is in Chinese hands. In the D.R.C., who profits from the sale of resources has long depended on who holds political power, or who controls the territory.
In an earlier era, the area around Goma, a region of vast lakes and forests, was the ivory belt of equatorial Africa, and the target of slaving expeditions from the Arab world. Tippu Tip, a notorious trader in the nineteenth century, amassed some ten thousand slaves and a fortune in ivory, growing rich enough to once make a serious attempt to secure his own autonomous state in eastern Congo.
During the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, European colonial powers carved up Africa for their own use. Germany secured the lands that are now Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanzania; the sprawling wilderness of Congo went to King Leopold II of Belgium. The colonists took up where Tippu Tip left off, plundering the forests for ivory and other resources. Although slavery was formally outlawed, the practice persisted with unusual brutality. Before the Belgians withdrew, in 1960, they extracted billions of dollars’ worth of rubber and precious metals, at the cost of millions of Congolese lives. Like other colonists, they left only because a U.N. mandate forced them out, and they did not go quietly. Congo’s first elected Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, who showed sympathies for Moscow, was executed in 1961, in an operation orchestrated by Belgium and the C.I.A.
The battle for control of land and resources in Congo fuels the current conflict, too. The militias at work in the east compete for money and influence, much of which comes through links to mining interests. They live off whatever can be extracted from the land—gold and coltan, cacao, charcoal made by burning down forests.
Nearly all the militias are based around ethnicity. The F.D.L.R. is avowedly Hutu. The M23, founded in 2012, styles itself as a protector of the Tutsis. Congo’s Tutsi population, estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands, is a small minority in a country with more than a hundred million citizens, but a significant presence in North and South Kivu, where they are concentrated. The Tutsis are traditionally herders and tend to be richer than the Hutus, who are farmers; their relative wealth is a source of resentment. In Congo, Tutsis face widespread discrimination and bigoted invective. As a result of the 1994 genocide and the subsequent fighting, tensions between the tribes intensified—and so did Rwanda’s interest in protecting Tutsis across the border. Although the Rwandan government denies being involved with the M23, it has persistently supplied direction, money, and manpower, along with drones and other technology; several thousand Rwandan soldiers participated in the siege of Goma.
The M23’s most prominent representative in Goma is Bertrand Bisimwa, who leads its political wing. When I met him, he blithely dismissed the idea that the M23 was an occupying force. “We are Congolese citizens,” he said. “We cannot be invaders of our own country.” He denied accusations of war crimes, as well as reports that miners and farmers had been forced to bribe soldiers to use their own land. The money was merely a “security tax,” he said. “We play the role of the state.”
He lost his composure only when speaking about his enemies, whom he accused of being drug addicts and cannibals. “They are given a specific face as their enemy—the face of a Tutsi,” he said. “The war we are waging is an existential war.”
Around Goma, there are persistent rumors that the M23 is actually commanded by Rwanda’s President, or perhaps its former defense secretary. During my visit, people seemed to defer to another leader: an ebullient figure named Corneille Nangaa. I met Nangaa one morning at a friend’s villa on Lake Kivu. He was wearing a sharply tailored dark suit, a Tesla baseball cap, and a blue shirt with a metal Hugo Boss insignia. He carried a walking stick carved from pale wood. As security men fanned out, Nangaa led me to a table on a fastidiously clipped lawn, where waiters brought an extravagant breakfast. More guards stood on a nearby dock, staring out to Lake Kivu.
Nangaa is the head of the Congo River Alliance, a large, ethnically mixed rebel group, but he spent much of his earlier career working for the Congolese government. In 2018, as the head of the national electoral commission, he oversaw one of the murkiest and most influential political deals in Congo’s recent history.
At the time, Joseph Kabila had been President of the D.R.C. for seventeen years, overseeing an administration known for its unfettered corruption. As the Presidential election approached, Kabila was increasingly unpopular, and a viable opponent was found: Félix Tshisekedi, a thickset, pugnacious man who was the son of a prominent opposition leader. Tshisekedi ended up winning, but the election was so dubious that many observers assumed he had done so by cutting a power-sharing deal with Kabila.
Nangaa handled the difficult negotiations around Kabila’s departure. It was Congo’s first peaceful transfer of power in decades, but it didn’t last. Within a few years, both Nangaa and Kabila had fallen out with Tshisekedi and fled across the country to Goma, where they allied themselves with the M23. Kabila has been visiting African capitals to build support for the militia, which he is rumored to be helping to fund with a huge fortune that he built while in power. This past September, Tshisekedi retaliated by having Kabila tried in absentia and sentenced to death for war crimes and treason.
From our breakfast table, Nangaa gestured at forested hills that rose above the lake. “That’s Rwanda, a country which has accomplished everything we have not,” he said. I had heard the same sentiment from many others in the region. The D.R.C. is vastly larger than Rwanda, with nearly ten times its population and far more abundant natural resources, but it has proved incapable of securing peace or prosperity for its citizens. Rwanda, by contrast, has made enviable social and economic progress in the past few decades. People who live on the Congolese side of the border often cross into Rwanda to get mail and to do their banking. The M23 established its compound in Goma conveniently close to the crossing.
Nangaa complained that the Congolese government had thwarted free enterprise. He told me that, at the Berlin Conference, the colonialists intended the D.R.C. to become the Congo Free State—which, in his eccentric interpretation, was a libertarian paradise. “Our vision is to go back to that original idea, so that everyone can come and do business here,” he said. “If Trump wants to come, he’ll come and do business.” Trump has said forthrightly that he expects the U.S. to get a portion of the D.R.C.’s mineral wealth in exchange for fostering talks; Gentry Beach, an American financier who is friends with Donald Trump, Jr., recently visited and reportedly spoke of taking over a major coltan mine.
Before the D.R.C. can become the Congo Free State, Nangaa said, “it first needs to create a state.” A country requires an effective army, police force, justice system, and administration—but, he said, “here it’s all corrupted.” With a solicitous look, he added, “Everyone can blame the West, but it values hard work. Here, the people don’t work.”
Nangaa argued that Tshisekedi had chronically mismanaged the country. In 2022, after a period of relative quiet, the M23 began clashing with the Congolese Army, a corrupt and largely ineffectual force. Tshisekedi invited troops from countries around the region to come fight for his regime, and hired mercenaries from Eastern Europe. In an arms-buying spree worth billions of dollars, he acquired Turkish attack drones and Russian warplanes. When that didn’t halt the M23, his government called up fighters throughout Congo to join the Wazalendo—a nationalist militia movement whose name means “the patriots.” Tshisekedi urged his supporters to fight “for our Congolese identity.” In a fit of paranoia, he also arrested dozens of generals he suspected of siding with the M23, along with influential Tutsis who were accused of espionage.
To fill out the ranks of the Wazalendo, Tshisekedi distributed weapons to ethnic militias and criminal gangs. Nangaa told me that, though the M23 controlled Goma, many Wazalendo remained active around the city. “Our boys are arresting them, even now, ten to twenty of them every night,” he said. (According to Human Rights Watch, the M23 is also killing them; scores of young men have been found shot dead.)
Nangaa assured me that the war would be won before long. “We have a project for the country,” he said. “We know what we want to do.” The D.R.C. had no roads through the countryside, he pointed out. “After creating the state, we must connect all the territories, to get the people together.” Once the various tribes were linked, it would “take away discrimination,” he said. “That is how we create a nation. I have a dream, just like Martin Luther King said.” Nangaa laughed, pleased with his formulation.
For the country to be reformed, Nangaa said, “Tshisekedi must be removed by force. He doesn’t have the capacity to understand what he has to do as head of state. What is important to him is to enjoy the red carpet.” Nangaa is unabashed about his own aspiration to be the D.R.C.’s next President. Over breakfast, I asked about his walking stick. “This?” he said, raising it aloft. “It gives me power.”
“What kind of power?” I asked.
“All kinds of power,” he said and smiled.
In June, when Trump announced that he had brought peace to eastern Congo, he described it as “a glorious triumph.” But the M23 had not agreed to disband. A militia spokesman told the Associated Press, “We are in Goma with the population, and we are not going to get out.”
A Western diplomat in the region told me that the M23 seemed to be attempting to set down permanent roots in North Kivu. They had upended the traditional system of justice, administered by tribal chiefs. After registries of property deeds were burned during the fighting, the M23 had simply handed out land to people it favored.
Taking Goma had given the M23 control of a vast arsenal left behind by the defeated Congolese Army—as much as a third of the country’s military equipment, the diplomat said. The militia had also acquired an estimated twelve thousand new troops, many of them captured government soldiers who were either enticed or forced to serve. “The M23 have never enjoyed this level of control before,” the diplomat said. “The risk for them is they now have fallen into the same trap as the D.R.C. government—having to administer the territory they control.”
If the M23’s stewardship of North Kivu is a test case for running the country, it is not encouraging. Patrick Muyaya, the D.R.C.’s minister of communication, told me that electricity and banking services had lapsed in Goma, while the “ethnic cleansing of Hutus” had continued. In July, according to the U.N., M23 fighters massacred more than three hundred civilians in a group of frontline villages about forty miles from town. “Every day, there is killing,” Muyaya said. “The people running that part of the country—the only thing they know is crime.”
An hour’s drive northwest of Goma, across a vast moonscape of black lava, is a shambolic roadside community called Sake. For several years before the fall of Goma, it was a frontline town in the fight between the M23 and government forces. Displaced people’s tents, made from plastic sheeting supplied by N.G.O.s, are pitched alongside abandoned homesites, many of them burned to their foundations. The settlement is dug into jagged rock around a Catholic church, the Miséricorde Divine.
The priest, a burly man with wary eyes, explained that he had been appointed to Sake in 2023, when the Wazalendo were entrenched there. As the M23 moved in, he said, it captured several hundred Hutu refugees and forcibly trucked them away. The church was looted and burned, and the town became “like bush,” he said, with almost no inhabitants remaining. “We had to start from zero again.”
Gradually, people had returned, but they struggled to sustain themselves, and attacks continued. Some drivers for a relief agency had been kidnapped during a visit to the priest’s compound, so no one stayed overnight at the church anymore. When I asked if he slept there, he retorted, “How could I leave? I’m the priest.” But many of the civilians were packing up and heading to Goma. “They think it’s an oasis of peace,” he said wryly. Along with the threat of violence in Goma, there was a shortage of food, because the farmers who supplied the city had fled their land. The priest said that he was forty years old and had known nothing but conflict in his life. With a disgusted look, he said, “I’m very tired of fighting, and I call upon the leaders to end it.”
The Presidents of Congo and Rwanda have spent much of the past year trading insults. Tshisekedi has likened Kagame to Hitler and declared, “One thing is responsible for this situation, and that is Rwandan aggression.” Kagame tends to be cutting, rather than blunt. When Tshisekedi threatened to send his air force to strike Rwanda, Kagame responded, “Tshisekedi is capable of everything except measuring the consequences of what he says.”
The son of Tutsi exiles to Uganda, Kagame served as an intelligence officer in the Ugandan Army before returning to lead the Rwandan Patriotic Front. As President, he has been the subject of both praise and condemnation abroad. He is a ruthless strategist capable of waging bloody wars, but he has also fostered a remarkable program to reintegrate tens of thousands of former génocidaires into Rwandan society. He has been accused of many authoritarian acts, including assassinating political opponents, but he has turned his country into a regional powerhouse, with a disciplined army that has been deployed to aid embattled allies. “Rwanda has made itself an amazingly efficient place to work and do business in—as long as you stay in your lane,” a former State Department official told me. “You want to root for them. But, on the other hand, they have been responsible for several decades of horrific actions inside D.R.C.”
I met Kagame in a boardroom at his Presidential office. Tall and rake-thin, he spoke with gnomic deliberation. When I asked about the peace process, he said, “It’s important to be optimistic. Otherwise, why would you get to work? But, realistically, the amount of pessimism is very significant.” He was dismissive of interventions from the “international community” in eastern Congo. “The U.N. has been involved in this problem for the last thirty years,” he said. “They have spent billions of dollars, on peacekeeping missions, N.G.O.s, all kinds of things. What has come out of this effort?”
Gradually, he worked his way toward blaming the Congolese for the conflict in the east. “It’s not Rwanda that is the most affected by the problem,” he said. “There are complex problems that originate from colonial times, when borders were being drawn, and then there are matters of tribes and ethnic groups. Most of these are to be found in any other place. But they have been overcome by governance internally, even if this is to be assisted by external actors.” Finally, he said, “After all these years, Congo can’t find a formula where the first responsibility goes to domestic leaders. You can’t just keep all this blame game going on.”
Some critics have argued that the remaining F.D.L.R. Hutu militias, which may have as few as two thousand soldiers, pose a minimal threat to Rwanda. When I raised the idea, Kagame replied evenly, “When a hurricane is building up, we should work from the assumption that it might come our way.” He added, “Our interpretation is, what happened here is enough. We’re not going back.” People who accused Rwanda of aggression, he said, were “silencing the victim and, in the end, turning the victim into the perpetrator.”
Kagame suggested that I speak to his longtime aide James Kabarebe, who was as gruff as his boss was elliptical. An ex-soldier in his mid-sixties, Kabarebe has led Rwandan forces in every significant conflict since the genocide. When Kabila was installed as President of the D.R.C., Kabarebe became the head of Congo’s Army; then, after the two fell out, he led the fight to depose him. He now holds the cumbersome title of Rwanda’s “minister of state for foreign affairs in charge of regional cooperation.” After the fall of Goma, the U.S. government sanctioned Kabarebe, accusing him of aiding the M23 and of facilitating the illegal export of minerals from Congo.
In his office, Kabarebe claimed that his government did not support the M23, saying, “We have put their leaders in prison.” (He was referring to the former M23 warlord Laurent Nkunda, who is supposed to be in a Rwandan jail but is rumored to be living freely under government protection.) Yet he also suggested that Rwanda would be justified in supporting anyone who protected Tutsis. After the conflict of 1994, he said, “the international community assisted the genocidal forces to move into the D.R.C.” Since then, he argued, the border had posed an existential threat to Rwanda. “Having a genocidal army next door is suicidal,” he said. “This is not understood well in the West.”
Kabarebe contended that the Hutu militia posed a commercial threat, too. “We have a soldier posted along every metre of the border,” he said. “We do this to protect the mountain gorillas, which are the basis for our tourism industry.” Tourism, much of it built around wildlife, accounts for roughly ten per cent of Rwanda’s economy. Kabarebe said that since 2018 the militias had staged dozens of attacks in the parks where the gorillas live. At one point, mortar shells crashed down near a gorilla-research center established by Ellen DeGeneres. (As a Rwandan aide told me, “We can’t have that.”)
Outside observers say that the main reason for Rwanda’s interest in D.R.C. is to control its mineral wealth. Among other things, the Rwandans have been said to secretly transport niobium from a mine near Goma across the border and then export it. Rwanda’s annual gold exports have increased sixfold in eight years, to $1.5 billion. Kabarebe vehemently disputed the accusations. “The mineral exploitation has nothing to do with the conflict with D.R.C.,” he insisted. “It’s about security. The minerals go as they go, but Rwanda has nothing to do with it.”
Kabarebe cited several cross-border attacks in 2022 as the impetus for the latest intervention. “President Kagame decided to take defensive measures to protect our border,” he said. “And then this narrative began that Rwanda was an invader wanting the minerals of the D.R.C.” Western countries had applied sanctions to Rwanda, and to Kabarebe personally, but he described them as a minor irritant. “I’m used to it,” he said. “I am happy and comfortable here.”
The frontline town of Mweso is only sixty-two miles from Goma, but the trip takes six hours by Land Cruiser, along a road that has devolved into a cratered gantlet of rocks and mud. Near the halfway mark begins a ragged, ill-defined war zone, where the M23 prevails in roadside villages, but much of the surrounding wilderness is held by the Wazalendo.
The few settlements I passed through were dismally poor. People gazed sullenly at my truck, though a few excited children ran alongside, begging for money or a “stylo”—a pen to do their schoolwork. There were almost no other vehicles on the road, aside from a handful of green Army jeeps carrying M23 fighters.
The landscape, full of mountainsides riven by forests and terrace farms, provided a visible index of contested territory. An immense valley led to a line of blue mountains in the distance: Virunga National Park, where the mountain gorillas coexisted uneasily with F.D.L.R. Hutu fighters. The valley was once deeply forested, but its trees had been burned for charcoal, to provide income for militants and their families.
For about three hours, the track wound through a seemingly endless range of green hills populated by grazing cows—a kind of Congolese Switzerland. It was a single enormous farm, owned by the former President Joseph Kabila, whose known land holdings are nearly twelve times the size of Manhattan. As I descended back into the forest, the road became rocky, and the crops turned to sugarcane and cassava. This was Hutu territory, where the M23 were interlopers.
Mweso was a bleak whistle-stop town, built around a main street—a mud wash, on the night I arrived—lined with ramshackle bars, phone-card kiosks, and car-repair shops. Mweso’s electricity came from a patchwork of noisy diesel generators, and the restaurants were dirt-floored places that sold plates of fatty goat meat and boiled cassava mash. In the hills above the town, the M23 and a local Hutu militia that called itself the C.M.C. had established positions, from which they traded gunfire. The M23 held Mweso, but the C.M.C. carried out frequent raids into town to supply its fighters.
A Médecins Sans Frontières outpost sat behind a security wall, and a hundred yards down the road was a hospital, which M.S.F. helped fund and oversee. With nearly three hundred beds and four hundred and fifty staff members, it was the largest medical facility around, and one of the busiest.
The acting director, Alain Ntsirie Kubuya, told me that the hospital operated on a permanent emergency footing; malaria and other diseases were rampant, as was malnutrition, because the war had prevented people from planting crops. The hospital also took in about fifteen wounded patients a week, from all sides. Kubuya said that his staff had established an agreement with the leaders of the fighting factions: “We inform the occupiers of the zone that we are going to retrieve a wounded person.” The militias generally respected the M.S.F. as a neutral body, he said, but occasionally there was trouble.
A middle-aged man in an orange T-shirt that read “Happy International Nurses Day” introduced himself as Sifumungu Byenda Bisgod, the head of surgical nursing. A few days earlier, he and his team had informed the M23 that they were retrieving a wounded Wazalendo fighter from the field, but, when they reached a roadblock, the soldiers there pulled everyone out of the vehicles and wanted to execute the man. The crew argued back, and finally the soldiers relented. “This kind of thing happens about twice a week,” he said.
Bisgod said that there had been some early difficulties with putting rivals in the same ward, so now they kept the factions apart. Only nurses and doctors were allowed access to Wazalendo patients. “We tell them to keep a low profile and, once they are feeling better, not to go wandering around, as they are in an M23 zone,” Bisgod said. Some patients had gone into town, been recognized as Wazalendo, and been murdered on the spot. After a patient recovered, the hospital crew informed the M23 that they had to “make a movement,” a euphemism for returning a fighter to his comrades. “We do this without going into too many details about who it is we are taking,” Bisgod said.
In the Wazalendo ward, seven or eight fighters lay in cots. The oldest was thirty-nine, the youngest seventeen. A few had lost limbs, and wore bloody bandages on the stumps. They looked wary, but, after Bisgod introduced me, a fighter named Tchayo agreed to talk. A stern young man in a blue T-shirt with his foot in a cast, he shared a bed with another man who had lost an arm. Tchayo and four others in the room had been wounded in a firefight with the M23 three weeks earlier. One comrade had been killed. Afterward, local farmers had helped the survivors reach a spot where there was phone reception, and they had called the hospital to come pick them up.
Tchayo had been a primary-school teacher before he became a fighter for the C.M.C., nine years ago. He said that he had joined because “Tutsi people have been aggressing us. We are Hutus. They were bringing their animals to eat our crops.”
Tchayo acknowledged that there had been a genocide in Rwanda, “but they have taken their war here,” he said. He mentioned that Tutsi militants had committed a large-scale massacre in his area. “They use the genocide as an excuse,” he said. When I asked what he planned to do when he got better, he replied, “My goal is to go back and do my job, because the enemy has not returned to Rwanda. So I will return to the fight.”
In a ward about a hundred feet away, a government soldier whom I’ll call Jean lay bandaged all over, breathing with the help of oxygen. Jean, thirty-nine, had been deployed in Sake when it fell to the M23. Along with hundreds of others, he had been taken prisoner and pressed into service for the militia. After two months of training, there was a graduation ceremony, in which more than seven thousand new fighters were paraded before senior leaders. “Makenga came,” Jean said between wheezes. “Nangaa came.” Afterward, the soldiers were deployed to the front lines. On the way, Jean’s vehicle crashed, and he broke some bones and punctured a lung.
He explained that he had a wife and two children back home: “I don’t know anything about them since January.” Tears gathered on his cheeks. I asked how he felt about fighting for the M23. “It drove me crazy,” he replied softly. “You can see me crying. My unit was also my family.”
The malnutrition ward was filled with crying babies and distraught-looking parents. An emaciated man sat by a child stretched out semiconscious on a cot, where two other small children were receiving oxygen. The man wore a dirty jacket and rubber boots, and had unkempt hair. With eyes glistening, he gazed attentively at his child, who looked nearly dead of starvation. The doctor explained that the man and his family had been hiding in the forest for two months, because fighters had taken over their village. They had been surviving on roots, yams, and whatever else they could find. He had five children, but he had left the other four with his wife, to seek medical attention for the weakest one. I asked the doctor if the child could be saved. He said that he hoped so. What would the father do afterward? “He will go back to the forest, because the rest of his family is still there,” the doctor said.
In a filthy schoolhouse across the street, several hundred displaced people were camped out. A wizened community leader told me that they were from a village a few miles outside Mweso. Months earlier, they had fled during fighting between the rival militias. The M23 had ultimately been forced out, but when the villagers returned they discovered that fighters had burned their homes. “When they lose, they take it out on the civilians, and we are Hutu,” the leader explained. For now, he and the other able-bodied men and women were working as day laborers on local farms, earning the equivalent of about fifty cents a day. Were they safe now? I asked. “Here in town it is safe, but outside, in the farms, if the armed men see you, they kill you, even if you don’t have a gun,” he said. In his village, many people had been killed. “They threw them into the toilets,” he said.
As I was leaving Mweso, a pickup truck raced up in front of the hospital. A group of tough-looking young men clambered out and half carried one of their comrades out from the back. He was unsteady on his feet and had burns all over his torso and face. It seemed as if he had come straight from the battlefield. A Congolese man who was travelling with me whispered, “Wazalendo,” and suggested that we move along.
President Kagame’s emissary to the peace talks in the U.S. is Mauro De Lorenzo, an affable forty-nine-year-old who is fluent in five languages and conversant in several more. De Lorenzo grew up in Delaware and started visiting Rwanda in 1998, to research a Ph.D. thesis. He now holds citizenship there. When he speaks about Rwandans, he says “we.”
A few weeks into the new Trump Administration, Kagame sent De Lorenzo to Washington, to promote Rwanda’s interests. He quickly faced competition. Tshisekedi had written Trump a letter, gushing that his election had “ushered in the golden age for America,” and offering access to Congolese minerals in exchange for a security pact. De Lorenzo said that, when he arrived, “I found at least seven different lobbyists hired by different parts of the Congolese government. They were all sending out these proposals. I’ll exaggerate a bit: ‘We will give you twenty-four trillion dollars in Congolese minerals, and we’ll throw in a military base, and in exchange you will conduct a tactical nuclear strike on Kigali.’ ”
The Trump Administration had its own peculiarities. “You basically have the government of the United States and the White House, which are like these reinforced fortresses,” De Lorenzo said. “And then you have Mar-a-Lago, around which oscillates all sorts of asteroids, and where it’s not difficult for even low-level lobbyist types to gain access if they’re noticed on the terrace.” In mid-March, he said, “one of these asteroids finally collides with President Trump, and I heard that Massad Boulos was going to be the African envoy.”
Boulos, a Lebanese American transportation entrepreneur based in Nigeria, had no diplomatic experience, but he had a family link to the White House: his son is married to Tiffany Trump. De Lorenzo recalled that his appointment sent officials scrambling. “Insiders in Washington had been planning different things, and all that disappears—we now have this guy, an in-law,” he said. “Nobody knows what it means. Does it mean he talks to Trump every day? They don’t know. But it does mean he can talk to Presidents and other principals, people you could do business with.”
The pitch that De Lorenzo formulated cast Rwanda as a crucial player in the trade of resources from eastern Congo: “Look, this whole narrative that the war is about minerals—O.K., let’s assume there is interest in minerals, and that we’d like them to come from and go through Rwanda. And there should be nothing wrong with that. The problem is there has never been a state authority in eastern Congo. So let’s us be the place where people will invest in capital-intensive processing activities, which has traditionally eluded Africa.”
De Lorenzo’s conception is echoed in a plan, the Regional Economic Integration Framework, which is now a central feature of Trump’s peace deal. The accord, not so different in spirit from the colonial Berlin Conference, suggests that, rather than fight over the resources of eastern Congo, the various partisans should simply share them.
The Rwandans balked, but Qatar urged them to sign. The Qataris, along with their role as mediators, had a financial interest: they were already partners in a multibillion-dollar deal to turn Rwanda into a regional financial and logistics hub, and the minerals would provide enormous revenue. Rwanda also had experience in transporting and processing Congolese ores, which could help sell the deal to the U.S. A humanitarian expert in the region told me, “The fact is, everyone just wants to keep extracting from the D.R.C., and now President Trump does, too.” He went on, “With Trump, there’s what I call an immunity blanket, meaning ‘You give me what I want, and I’ll give you a pass on human rights.’ ”
Last month, the negotiators gathered in Washington to endorse the framework, but at the last minute Tshisekedi ordered his envoy to withdraw, reportedly because Rwanda would not remove ninety per cent of its troops from eastern Congo. De Lorenzo suggested that some Republicans in D.C. were pleased by the hitch in Boulos’s plan. “There’s Schadenfreude there about him messing things up,” he said. Boulos, he added, was “the Rodney Dangerfield of the Trump Administration—just trying to get a little respect.” But Boulos was persistent, and De Lorenzo, like other observers I talked to, felt that he had no option but to place his faith in him. “I think the only way for the process to move forward is if the U.S. gets behind it,” he said.
In mid-November, Boulos made a series of hopeful announcements: representatives from Congo, Rwanda, and the M23 had initialled the Regional Economic Integration Framework, as part of an agreement that “charts a clear path toward a peace accord.”
The document was not in itself a peace deal; it was a set of eight protocols that an eventual deal should observe. First among them were a prisoner exchange and a mechanism to monitor a ceasefire. Even Boulos acknowledged that these steps would be difficult to implement. “This is not a light switch that you just switch on and off,” he told reporters.
Previous rounds of talks had also produced an agreement to exchange prisoners, but Tshisekedi had stalled. Corneille Nangaa, of the Congo River Alliance, told me that he believed many of the prisoners were already dead. Another agreement had called for militias to disarm, but, Nangaa predicted, “it will take decades to take away those guns.”
Patrick Muyaya, the D.R.C.’s minister of communication, spoke warily about the peace initiative. “We are making some progress, though not at the speed we would like,” he said. “For there to be real advances, we must insure that the M23 ceases to exist.” Like the Rwandan officials I spoke with, Muyaya insisted that his side was trapped in a fight for survival. “The people have the right to defend themselves if armed men are attacking your mother, your sister,” he said. “Of course, there are abuses. And the President is determined to bring those committing abuses to justice.” He brushed off the idea that the Hutu militias posed a threat: “This is just an excuse used by Rwanda to keep on looting resources.”
Outside observers say that the Wazalendo are growing more radical, and that anti-Tutsi sentiment is increasing. Yet they also note that the M23’s depredations have only made such sentiments worse. The Western diplomat said that Rwanda had an urgent interest in halting the war. “As long as there is conflict, you will have young men growing up in eastern D.R.C. with destabilization of the other as their imperative in life, and you will have opposition politicians in Kinshasa who will exploit that for political gain,” the diplomat said. But the incentives are complicated. Jason Stearns, an academic and a former U.N. investigator who has focussed on the conflict for decades, told me, “People want peace, but it’s not really in the M23’s interests. The same logic applies to Rwanda, but somewhat less so.” If Rwanda disbands the M23 and withdraws its troops from Congo, it loses its ability to project influence across the border. It may also lose a source of revenue. The peace deal offers Rwanda rights to refine and sell Congolese tin and tantalum, but it does not offer gold, the most valuable commodity. “A very large part of Rwanda’s economy relies on the D.R.C., and that could be a challenge in the future if they withdraw,” Stearns said.
It is possible that Washington will threaten targeted sanctions to compel Rwanda to make an agreement. But, the Western diplomat said, “they need to insure that the deal they sign is actually upheld.” The problem is that Tshisekedi is “incapable of upholding anything,” he went on. There is no guarantee that the Wazalendo will abide by an agreement with the M23. And Congo’s national army isn’t strong enough to hold the eastern territory alone, or to defeat the M23. After years of stoking outrage at Rwanda, Tshisekedi may find it politically difficult to make concessions—but he also seems unlikely to step aside. “You’d have to strangle Tshisekedi to get him to leave,” the diplomat said.
If the two sides can maintain a ceasefire, it will ease the crisis. But there will still be more than a hundred militias fighting for minerals and territory in eastern Congo. The diplomat mentioned one at work north of Goma: a vicious insurgent group whose leaders have sworn fealty to ISIS, and whose fighters had a gruesome habit of decapitating villagers. The militants were attracted by the gold mines in the area—and their presence provided Uganda with an excuse to intervene there with its own army. Uganda exports more than three billion dollars in gold a year, most of which comes from one mine in eastern Congo.
For the peace process to succeed, it will have to reverse a psychology of plunder that has afflicted the region for hundreds of years. Many of the people I talked with in Congo wished fervently for a new way of life but seemed barely able to conceive of one. In the hospital in Mweso, I met Irakunda, a twenty-nine-year-old mother of four, who was lying on a bed with children arrayed around her. She wore a bright print dress, and had one foot outstretched and wrapped in a bandage. The Wazalendo had appeared in her village the day before, and she had hidden inside the school. When the fighters began looting, the villagers shouted at them, so they opened fire, and one of the bullets struck her. She recounted all this as if she were describing a natural disaster. When I asked what she thought of the war, she laughed at the question; the war was just a fact of life. Finally, she said, “It’s the reason we are all poor. I am losing, because some people are making war.” ♦
