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EXPERT Q&A — The Rwanda-backed M23 rebels, who stunned the world with their seizure of the major city of Goma in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, declared a unilateral ceasefire in fighting with Congolese forces on Monday. The rebels said the move was made on humanitarian grounds; they announced the ceasefire after the World Health Organization (WHO) said fighting in Goma, a city of 2 million people, had killed at least 900. The M23 rebels added that they did not intend to capture other areas, including the nearby provincial capital of Bukavu, which they were reportedly advancing towards.
The Cipher Brief turned to former Senior CIA Executive Darell Blocker, who served as Chief of the CIA’s Africa Division, to better understand this conflict. Blocker explained that the fighting is steeped in history; M23’s claimed goal of protecting ethnic Tutsis in Congo draws on long-standing Hutu-Tutsi tensions that led to the 1994 genocide of 800,000 Tutsis and others in Rwanda.
Blocker also said that Congo’s standing as “the most resource-rich country on the planet” is a critical factor. “At the end of the day, it’s really about money,” he said. “I guarantee you every Western power out there is vying for it, and the Russians and the Chinese, for that same mineral resource.”
Blocker spoke with Cipher Brief CEO Suzanne Kelly. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Kelly: Why is what’s happening in Congo so important?
Blocker: What’s happening there is really important right now because of what happened in the mid-90s. That entire region, I don’t think people have a concept of how large it is. If you were to take Ohio and draw a line down to Alabama, everything east of that, so about one quarter of continental United States, is the size of this one country (Congo). If you take the corridor where this is going on, Goma down to Katanga, down towards the Mozambique border, that’s roughly Maine to Florida. So, when people are looking at this, I need them to understand the scope and scale of what they’re dealing with.
M23 in of itself has only been around for about 10 or 11 years, but it goes back to the start of the ruling party that now controls Rwanda, and that’s [the Rwandan Patriotic Front of] President [Paul] Kagame.
The Tutsis are the minority in Rwanda. When the Germans first did a census in 1933, it was roughly 14% Tutsi and 85 % Hutu. What they did, which is what most of the colonizers did, is they put the minority in charge of the majority. The Tutsis were able to rule for a long time until independence, when the numbers just weren’t able to sustain control of a 14-15% minority.
There was an assertion from the Hutu extremists that the Tutsis really came in from somewhere else, that they came in from the Horn of Africa. And if you look at the Tutsis, very tall, angular, look very much like the people of Eritrea and Ethiopia today, just in physical appearance – so there was that belief that these guys were outsiders. And the fact that the Catholic Church really didn’t help at all, because they allowed that type of thought that these are outsiders, it’s OK to refer to them as not even people, subhuman.
Then the most vile genocide between the Hutus and the Tutsis happened. April of 1994, the president of Rwanda and the president of Tanzania were killed in a plane crash. That sparked a reaction that led to an average of 1,500 people per day being killed for about a two-month period. That is five times what the extermination rate was in the extermination camps during World War II. It’s horrific. The United States has since recognized their refusal to accept that genocide was happening, their refusal to step in when they could; they were still smarting a little bit from [the U.S. involvement in] Mogadishu and having to pull out of Somalia. Estimates are as low as 800,000, but the numbers are certainly in the millions. And the displaced people in that region are the folks who are still being displaced today.
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Kelly: Fast forwarding now to 2025, what does M23 want there?
Blocker: Their stated goals are much along the lines of the [Germans in the] Sudetenland just before World War II: our peoples are being mistreated by folks in other countries. We are going to speak for all Tutsis, whether they live in the Eastern Congo, whether they live in Rwanda, whether they live in Kigali, or whether they live in Uganda, or wherever they happen to live, we are going to be their umbrella.
At the end of the day, it’s really about money. If you look at the Democratic Republic of Congo, it’s the most resource-rich country on the planet, bar none; 65-70 % of all cobalt in the entire planet is in that region in which the M23 is fighting. That’s significant because cobalt is used in renewable energy, in everything that we require for defense purposes, for us to have this chat over phones, laptops, you name it. Cobalt is important. Magnesium, gold, diamonds, you name it. They are just one of the most resource-rich countries in the world, which is why it’s important that you don’t allow this group of rebels, who are inflicting atrocities as we speak, who are using rape as a tool of war, we can’t allow M23 and the people behind them to be a part of this.
Kelly: Is it fair to say that because Congo is a resource-rich country that there’s a lot of international interest in this area, that it’s not just the locals and it’s not just M23?
Blocker: Absolutely. I guarantee you every Western power out there is vying for it, and the Russians and the Chinese, for that same mineral resource. The United Nations has had an assistance presence there all the way from, I believe, the mid-1970s up to right now. I believe that there are currently 47 different countries who have either invested or said that they’re going to provide troops, personnel, and nurses. Africa, Asia, Europe, you name it, they are there.
Kelly: What do you think the risks are of a wider regional war breaking out over this?
Blocker: I think the regional war never really stopped.
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