Rwanda's army and its rebel group ally have killed dozens and abducted thousands, Congo says
Congolese authorities have accused Rwanda 's army and the M23 rebel group it backs of murdering dozens, kidnapping thousands more and committing rape, torture and looting in the war-torn country's east.
The alleged crimes were committed between May 10 and 13 against civilians accused by the rebels of belonging to the Congolese army and its allied militias, Congo's interior ministry said in a statement Wednesday.
'The toll includes 107 murders, more than 4,000 men and boys abducted and forcibly loaded onto trucks to an unknown destination, hundreds of cases of summary executions, rape, torture, looting, restrictions on freedom of movement, as well as incursions into health facilities,' the statement read.
The Associated Press has not been able to independently verify the reports. Spokespersons for Rwanda's military and the M23 rebels did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The decades-long conflict in eastern Congo escalated in January, when the Rwanda-backed M23 rebels seized the strategic city of Goma, followed by the takeover of the city of Bukavu in February. The fighting has killed some 3,000 people and raised fears of a wider regional war.
Congo's accusation comes days after M23 presented hundreds of captured men at a stadium in Goma. The group said the captives were Congolese army or members of its allied militias whom Congo armed to foment conflict in order to blame it on M23.
M23 rebels are supported by about 4,000 troops from neighboring Rwanda, according to U.N. experts, and at times have vowed to march as far as Congo's capital, Kinshasa, about 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) to the west.
The fighting in Congo is linked to Rwanda's decadeslong ethnic conflict. M23 says it is defending ethnic Tutsis in Congo. Rwanda has claimed the Tutsis are being persecuted by Hutus and former militias responsible for the 1994 genocide of 800,000 Tutsis and others in Rwanda.
Many Hutus fled to Congo after the genocide and founded the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda militia group. Rwanda says the militia group is 'fully integrated' into the Congolese military, which denies it.
————-
Banchereau reported from Dakar
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
NBC News
an hour ago
- NBC News
Hidden invasion: Rwanda's covert war in the Congo
Open secret From the start, Rwanda has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal its intervention in the Kivu provinces in eastern Congo, which went from a couple of hundred soldiers in 2021 to an estimated 5,000 today. But there have been lapses in Rwanda's secrecy. In May 2022, Congolese forces announced they had captured two Rwandan soldiers who had entered the country. Rwanda denied this, claiming the soldiers were kidnapped across the border. NBC News obtained a Rwandan military report that admitted that these soldiers were captured while taking part in an M23 attack on barracks at Rumangabo military base. The internal report says members of the Rwanda Defence Force crossing the border were supposed to leave cellphones behind and strip identifying insignia from their uniforms. It recommends punishment for the soldiers' commander for failing to ensure the captured soldiers did so. In a bid to remove witnesses, Rwandan soldiers forced Congolese villagers to evacuate areas they occupied, according to a contractor hired to provide intelligence for the Congolese military. Operations like this drove hundreds of thousands from their homes. 'This is not business as usual in the DRC,' Antoine Sagot-Priez, DRC country director for the aid agency Concern Worldwide, said in March, commenting on the mass displacement. 'We need people to know what is happening here.' These villagers ended up living in 17 camps around the city of Goma, the capital of Congo's North Kivu province, that would eventually swell to hold 400,000 to 500,000 people. Reports drawn up by the same contractor state that Rwandan forces were moving their mortars in and out of Congo — sometimes each day — apparently to avoid detection. Rwandan soldiers also often don outfits usually worn by the M23 rebels. Much of the information used in this report was compiled by Western military experts, who included former French army officers, Romanians, Poles and Bulgarians, hired by Congo's President Felix Tshisekedi in 2022 when he realized his army was disastrously losing ground. They were assigned the task of protecting cities in the east and providing Congo's artillery with key information — thanks to a small fleet of Chinese drones. In March 2023, these new hires helped turn the tables on the Rwandans attacking the town of Sake, west of Goma, by hitting their mortar positions with Sukhoi fighter jets. The entire Rwandan force in Congo withdrew the following day. Military contractors believe this was the moment Rwanda — one of Africa's poorest states and heavily dependent on foreign aid — went on an international military shopping spree, placing orders in Poland and Turkey for sophisticated anti-missile systems, drones and signal-jamming equipment. Then in late 2023, Rwandan forces began returning to Congo. This time the numbers were 10 times higher than before — 3,000 to 5,000 men, according to the same military contractor. The Congolese army put its new drones to devastating use. Satellite imagery shows a sudden, dramatic increase in the number of graves at Kanombe Military Cemetery, Rwanda's main military burial ground in the capital, Kigali. It expanded by some 350 graves between mid-2023 and early 2024, according to a manual count carried out by NBC News. The images also show that from late 2021 to today, the cemetery has added 900 graves, even though the country says it is not engaged in any military conflict in Congo. Rwanda's government spokesperson declined to comment on the fresh graves, saying: 'Speculation about a military cemetery in Kigali has no basis in reality.' The DRC's air superiority did not last long. According to senior Congolese army officers, Rwanda used the opportunity presented by a U.S.-negotiated truce to install Chinese-made Yitian anti-missile systems in Congo. The addition in early 2024 of GPS-jamming equipment turned the war's tide, making it nearly impossible for the DRC's hired contractors to deploy their drone fleet. 'The new equipment changed everything,' said Gen. Sylvain Ekenge, a Congolese army spokesman. 'When we were asked by the Americans for a ceasefire to calm things down, the Rwandans used it as a chance to bring in these systems.'
The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
Death, violence and endless delay: Inside Africa's most troubled energy project
Campaigners have demanded the UK government pull its funding for a natural gas mega project in Mozambique – alleging that it breaches Britain's human rights and environmental obligations. The project in question is a $20 billion (£15bn) liquified natural gas (LNG) development located in the Cabo Delgado region of Mozambique. The project, called Mozambique LNG, has been halted since 2021 after violence from an Isis-backed group led to 183 contractors being trapped in a hotel for two days, with 10 people killed when apparently trying to escape, including British national Philip Mawer. In all, the ongoing insurgency in the area has resulted in an estimated 6,000 deaths since the conflict began in 2017, with some 600,000 people displaced. In a letter seen by The Independent, campaign group Oil Change International (OCI) argues that the violence and other issues over the protection of the project makes a potential $1.15bn investment by UK Export Finance, a department of the UK government untenable. Continuing to finance the project is also not compatible with environmental commitments made in 2021 to no longer finance fossil fuels abroad, OCI argues. A tale of violence, delay and legal action was never meant to be the story of Mozambique's foray into natural gas, after some 180 trillion cubic feet of gas was discovered off the country's coast in 2010. In 2016, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) projected 34 per cent GDP growth for Mozambique by 2021. However, actual economic growth was around 2.5 per cent. TotalEnergies, the French energy firm, is currently in the process of trying to re-start the project by the middle of this year. 'The security situation has improved," CEO Patrick Pouyanne told Reuters on the sidelines of the World Gas conference earlier this month. Pouyanne's ambitions received a big boost in March when the US Export-Import Bank re-approved financial support worth $4.7bn for the project, boosting TotalEnergies' hopes of restarting the project. But the future of Mozambique LNG remains up in the air, with the British export credit agency still considering whether to recommit to its $1.15bn pledge – having joining with 33 countries, including the US, to sign a pledge to end public finance for fossil fuel projects abroad while hosting the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in 2021. According to OCI campaigner Adam McGibbon, if the UK pulls out of the deal then the entire financial arrangement is expected to collapse. 'We know of at least one major bank involved in the deal that has said they will also pull out if the UK does,' he says. The legal letter sent by OCI argues that the funding of the LNG project in Mozambique goes against the UK's obligations under international law to promote human rights in business both domestically and abroad. The letter highlights the UN's Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which state that companies and nations must ensure that human rights are respected in relation to business operations. A UK Export Finance spokesperson said: 'UK Export Finance is currently in talks with project sponsors and other lenders regarding the latest status of the LNG production project in Mozambique. 'We take reports of alleged human rights infringement extremely seriously and are looking further into the matters.' 'The Qatar of Africa' Observers at the time the gas was discovered off the coast of Mozambique suggested that the country – one of the world's poorest – could transform into the 'Qatar of Africa'. A number of massive projects aiming to ship the gas around the world in the form of LNG were soon proposed. TotalEnergies' Mozambique LNG project stands out for its sheer size, with the $20bn in financing a figure roughly the same size as Mozambique's entire GDP. The 65 trillion cubic feet of gas it was expected to deliver is the equivalent of six years of current EU gas demand. But in March 2021, the 'force majeure' declaration was made, which enables parties to renege on an agreement due to unforeseen external circumstances. It came after Islamist insurgents captured swathes of territory in the Cabo Delgado region, and at least 1,400 people were left killed or missing presumed dead. Earlier this year French authorities began investigating TotalEnergies over potential corporate manslaughter, after survivors and relatives of victims of the event accused the energy giant of failing to protect its workers. In a statement shared with The Independent, a spokesperson for TotalEnergies said that they will ' cooperate with this investigation', but that 'the company categorically rejects' the accusations. 'Mozambique LNG's teams provided emergency assistance and mobilised their resources to evacuate more than 2,500 people (civilians, employees, contractors, and subcontractors) from the site where the Mozambique LNG project is located at the time of the attacks,' the spokesperson said. But some say the need to resettle people so that the land can used for the project has aided recruitment for the insurgents. 'The local population is being deprived of jobs, in a scenario where pressure on land is increasing, where people are losing access to land, losing access to natural resources,' wrote local analyst Joao Feijo earlier this year. 'The discontent that is created here is very great and this kind of discontent is capitalised on by these violent groups. Many individuals joined this group because they had no other alternative,' he added. Signs of discontent can be found in villagers claiming that they have not been sufficiently compensated for giving up land that most rely on for subsistence farming, according to evidence collected by local NGO Justica Ambiental, after Mozambique LNG was given rights to 6,625 hectares of land to build its liquefaction terminal. 'We agreed that the company would take our areas, but when they took our areas – the forests and fields – and they didn't want to pay us, they denied it,' said Neto Agostino Paulo resident of Macala Village, in footage captured by Justica Ambiental in summer 2024. Fellow Macala villager Adija Momade Sumail Nkabwi said: 'The company came here to lie to us that they were going to compensate us for our property that they had occupied, leaving us with false expectations'. The spokesperson for TotalEnergies told The Independent that prior to the force majeure announcement, 89 per cent of compensation payments had been paid within six months of the signing of compensation agreements, and 66 per cent were paid within 90 days. 'The Force Majeure situation has prevented the full implementation of the relocation and compensation process and has slowed down the exercise,' they said. 'Drill baby, drill' For OCI's Adam McGibbon, the violence and displacement witnessed in Cabo Delgado is a 'classic example of the resource curse': The phenomenon where resource-rich countries with abundant natural resources ironically end up with a multitude of problems. Nigeria and Angola – both oil-rich countries plagued by corruption and inequality – are oft-cited examples of countries to have suffered this fate in Africa. At the same time, it has also been said that given the low living standards of countries like Mozambique, any opportunity to bring in billions of dollars of foreign investment is a good thing. Some, like former Irish President Mary Robinson, have argued that African nations should be allowed to extract natural gas to develop. But there are growing concerns that the economic benefits originally conceived in Mozambique LNG might not ever materialise, even if the project goes ahead as planned. For all the talk of ' Drill baby, drill ' coming from Donald Trump in the White House right now, the prospects of a major new LNG production terminal are much weaker than in 2020. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, and subsequently shut off pipeline gas flows to Europe, planned new LNG facilities in the US and Qatar have driven up projections of global LNG capacity. An increase of nearly 50 per cent is currently on the horizon, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). This ' LNG glut ', as the IEA describes it, is exacerbated by renewables continually beating targets in Europe and Asia, as well as a global push for 'energy security' that did not exist in 2020, and which is making governments less inclined to rely on expensive liquefied gas imports for energy. 'If and when TotalEnergies' Mozambique LNG project gets off the ground, it will be adding further supply into a market characterised by oversupply and lacklustre demand,' says Simon Nicholas, from IEEFA, a think tank. 'This can hardly be a surprise: There is a long history in Sub-Saharan Africa of fossil fuel projects doing nothing to boost development in the host country.' If global gas markets are oversupplied, there is a risk that Mozambique LNG will become a 'stranded asset', which will plummet in value – or even become a liability for Mozambique. Even a 'moderate-paced transition' away from fossil fuels globally would lead to Mozambique seeing gas revenues of just 20 per cent of what they would be in a slow-paced transition, a report from the think tank Carbon Tracker has found. The authors described countries looking to exploit oil and gas assets for the first time as making a 'significant gamble'. 'Huge economic costs' TotalEnergies has also structured its LNG deals in a way that activists have warned is disadvantageous to Mozambique, with revenues Mozambique set to come in the mid-2030s and 2040s, think tank IISD has said. This means that if the project does not see out its lifespan, TotalEnergies and other partners will have seen an outsize share of profits so far, with Mozambique losing out. Mozambique also faces 'substantial economic risks' related to investor-state dispute settlements (ISDS), a separate report from Columbia University found last year. ISDS are lawsuits where foreign investors sue countries where they have invested if they believe the government has violated the terms of the agreement. Mozambique's international investment agreements allow foreign investors to bypass the national judicial system in such disputes, the report found, while 'stabilisation clauses' protect investments from unexpected regulatory changes or new fiscal rules, potentially preventing Mozambique enacting new legislation to transition away from fossil fuels. 'What they have basically done is said Mozambique cannot invest in climate action without paying huge economic costs,' says Daniel Ribeiro, a Mozambican activist with Justica Ambiental. Such an arrangement is likely to 'only amplify social tensions in Cabo Delgado,' if little money is seen to reach local people while a Western company makes large profits, warns Ribeiro. Given the insurgency, delays, and economic concerns, it might seem the simplest thing for Mozambique to do would be to try and pull out of the deal. However, the country has racked up government debts since gas was discovered, using expected future gas revenues as collateral for borrowing. But expectations have not matched reality. The year 2016 also saw a corruption scandal rock the country after it was found that members of the Mozambican Government had secretly taken out loans for themselves from London-based banks, using assurances of future LNG gas revenues to do so. A 2023 report from Debt Justice found that the Mozambican government has been paying back some of those loans. Mozambique's external national debt more than doubled between 2010 and 2018, according to CEICC data, while Friends of the Earth has warned that potential corruption arising from the 'mere promises of LNG development' may have already cost the country more than any actual profit the project could generate for the country over its lifetime. For Ribeiro, who lives in the Mozambican capital of Maputo, the priority for the country should be investing in renewables and climate change adaptation. 'My main message is that the cost of climate change is going to be far greater than any profits from Mozambique LNG, and that should be the priority,' he says. The country is considered one of the most climate-vulnerable on the continent, exposed to extreme weather concerns including cyclones, droughts and floods. Cyclone Kenneth, which hit Cabo Delgado in 2019, caused damage estimated at $300m. But the Trump administration has a different idea about what is good for the country. Weeks before confirming its $4.7bn loan for Mozambique LNG, the US government shut down the USAID-backed Power Africa programme's operations in the country – with an emphasis on renewable energy – which has been leading efforts to boost energy access, in a country where only 40 per cent of the country's population has access to electricity. 'Cycle of death' The push to resume the Mozambique LNG project also comes despite the fact that the Islamist insurgency very much remains a threat. While insurgents no longer control full towns and villages, they have become more agile, and have stepped up the number of road blocks in recent weeks, according to local media. 'There are still believed to be several insurgency units of hundred or so people, and they still have the ability to make attacks and destabilise the area,' says Ribeiro. 'And every time they suffer losses, they continue to be able to recruit. Why? Because we are still not dealing with the economic and social drivers of the problem,' he adds. The EU is currently funding Rwandan troops to help protect the region - but this arrangement is also under threat due to accusations Rwanda has been supporting rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as allegations that the Mozambican government is using units trained by the EU for protest suppression. For Marisa Lourenço, an independent risk analyst in Southern Africa, the threat of violence is 'definitely still there' in Cabo Delgado. She believes that while TotalEnergies will be able to securely lock down its site on the coast, it remains unclear if doing so is worth the money. 'TotalEnergies can secure the site. But is the infrastructure cost worth it? Will it recoup its sunken costs? Probably not. TotalEnergies rushed into taking on this project, and I think it regrets it,' she believe. For Mozambique, meanwhile, it remains clear for Ribeiro that the best option is for the country to pull out of the project. 'Pulling out will cause a whole host of problems in the short term, but it will help us emerge from this cycle of death,' he says. So long as the project continues, the Western world can turn a blind eye to what is happening in Mozambique, by imagining that it is financially supporting the country, believes Ribeiro. But if the project fails, then the country can focus on other development pathways that actually benefit the people. 'It's like a chronic condition that keeps flaring up, for which there is no cure' he says. 'Sometimes you just need to take the bullet.'
The Independent
2 hours ago
- The Independent
Downing Street ‘welcomes' ECHR debate as Badenoch launches exit probe
Downing Street has welcomed discussion about changing how the European Convention on Human Rights operates. A Number 10 spokesman said on Friday it is 'important' there is discussion on how the system works, after Alain Berset, the secretary-general of the Council of Europe, said in a rare interview there should be 'no taboo' about changing the rules of the agreement. It comes as Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said the ECHR had become a 'sword used to attack democratic decisions' and launched a review into whether she would commit to leaving the agreement. Asked about Mr Berset's remarks, a Number 10 spokesman said on Friday: 'Border security is vital to national security, and we welcome efforts to ensure the European Convention on Human Rights is being applied correctly and allowing countries to protect their borders. 'It's important there is discussion on how the ECHR operates to ensure it can safeguard human rights while meeting the needs of democracies. The Prime Minister has been clear on this, it should be parliament that makes the rules on immigration and government that makes the policy.' On Friday, Mrs Badenoch announced a review to be spearheaded by her shadow attorney general Lord Wolfson, to look into whether the UK should withdraw from the treaty which underpins human rights law. 'The ECHR is now being used in ways never intended by its original authors,' she told a Westminster event. 'It should be a shield to protect, instead, it's become a sword, a sword used to attack democratic decisions and common sense. 'This use of litigation as a political weapon is what I am calling lawfare. It isn't just damaging our security, it's also damaging our prosperity.' She said she was tasking her shadow minister Lord Wolfson with examining 'what the unintended consequences might be' if the UK were to leave the ECHR. 'Because it is clear that the ECHR is a major issue, I'm not asking Lord Wolfson if we should leave, that's a political not a legal question,' she said. 'I'm asking him to set out how we would leave and to consider what the unintended consequences might be, not least in Northern Ireland, if we decide to go down this route, we must do so knowingly.' Shadow home secretary Chris Philp suggested earlier on Friday that the ECHR could not be reformed. He told the BBC: 'I don't really take that very seriously. There have been previous attempts to do it.'
