GOMA, Democratic Republic of Congo—The evidence of Rwanda’s clandestine war was scattered all over the ruins of Goma International Airport.

Outside of one hangar were piles of Congolese military helmets, jetsam of an army that lost its nerve and tried to slip away when Rwanda-backed M23 rebels attacked the airfield in January.

Along the runway sat burned-out military trucks and crippled armored vehicles. At first they appeared to be debris from the battle that left rebels controlling the largest city in eastern Congo. Looking closer, however, a pattern emerged. The insurgents staggered the metal carcasses on the airstrip to make it suicidal for the vanquished Congolese military to try to land planeloads of troops and retake Goma.

Off to one side were the ruins of the operations center once manned by blue-helmeted United Nations troops, whose mission here was to support the government and protect civilians. Hopelessly out-of-date U.N. battle maps littered the floor. The peacekeepers, unable to keep the peace, remained barricaded in their bases, while rebels ruled the streets.

The rebel uprising left uncounted thousands dead and wounded, and forced hundreds of thousands from their homes. The U.S., the U.N. and human-rights activists say M23 was sponsored by neighboring Rwanda, which supplied thousands of troops and advanced weaponry.

The Congo war marks an extraordinary turn of historical events for Rwanda, whose very name evokes bitter memories of the world’s failure to prevent genocide there 31 years ago. The tiny country has since evolved from an object of sympathy into a controversial and feared powerhouse in the region.

Its military, which since the genocide has trained with U.S. Special Forces, Chinese soldiers and other foreign armies, is now one of the most effective on the continent. 

Rwanda flexes its muscle in ways the West considers ambiguous. In Mozambique, Rwandan troops fight Islamic State insurgents and protect natural-gas supplies being tapped by Western countries. Rwandan peacekeepers wear U.N. blue in South Sudan and Central African Republic.Abandoned ammunition at Goma International Airport; barbed wire around the entrance to a U.N. mission center.KC CHENG FOR WSJ

But Rwandans have also become more aggressive in a scramble to profit from the vast mineral deposits buried across the border in Congo. Getting access to those minerals—some crucial to making smartphones and other technology—is a Trump administration priority.

Ultimately, Rwanda’s stunning battlefield successes with M23—which controls a swath of Congo’s territory, including mineral-rich lands—won it a favorable peace deal with Congo, signed in Washington on June 27. The deal opens the way for billions of dollars in mineral investments by Western companies. Rwanda this month agreed to accept 250 migrants being deported by the U.S.

To help M23 seize Goma, just across Rwanda’s border, Rwandan commandos and other troops, armed with advanced surface-to-air missiles and guided mortars, shelled peacekeepers in January, killing three of them, according to the U.N. The U.N. Security Council said Rwanda’s actions could constitute war crimes.

“The victim has become the oppressor in many ways,” said Ladd Serwat, senior analyst for Africa for the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, a U.S.-based nonprofit that tracks political violence worldwide.

The U.N. says some 4,000 Rwandan troops fought alongside the rebels, whose ranks are filled largely with Congolese Tutsis and other Rwandan-language speakers. Human Rights Watch estimates more than twice that many were involved. At times, according to the U.N., there were more Rwandan troops on the front lines than there were Congolese rebels. M23, founded in 2012, had roughly 5,000 fighters when it took Goma, and has since grown to some 12,000 through voluntary and forced recruitment, according to Serwat. Numerous Rwandan soldiers, especially Congolese Tutsis who had been refugees in Rwanda, have now joined rebel ranks, he said.

The U.S. demanded Rwanda withdraw from Congo. The European Union imposed sanctions on Rwandan military commanders, to no avail.

“Rwanda will not be bullied or blackmailed into compromising national security,” the Rwandan foreign ministry said in response.Congolese Red Cross members and volunteers carried bodies to a cemetery in Goma in February. Photo: EPA/Shutterstock

Rwandan officials routinely deny their forces have been involved in the fighting. When pressed, however, a senior Rwandan official told The Wall Street Journal: “Defensive measures became more active.”

The language was echoed in the U.S.-brokered Rwanda-Congo peace agreement, in which Rwanda obliquely agreed to a “lifting of defensive measures.”

Shadows of the genocide

From the Rwandan point of view, the chaos that is eastern Congo is inextricably linked to the 1994 genocide, in which ethnically Hutu extremists slaughtered an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

Paul Kagame, now Rwanda’s president, was a young child in the late 1950s when his father, Deogratias Rutagambwa, a member of the royal family, joined a half-million other Tutsis and fled to neighboring Uganda to escape what was to be one of many outbreaks of intramural Rwandan ethnic violence.

Kagame grew up in a refugee camp and came to resent the treatment that expatriate Rwandans received from the Ugandan government. He joined a Ugandan rebel movement that seized power in 1986. He later served as the country’s head of military intelligence and received U.S. military training.

Kagame’s eye remained on Rwanda, however. In 1990, he joined a Tutsi uprising against the Hutu-dominated Rwandan government. The two sides negotiated a truce in 1992.

Two years later, the airplane carrying Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana, a Hutu, was shot down by parties unknown. A spasm of bloodletting followed, with government forces and Hutu extremists murdering Tutsis en masse. Victims were slashed to death with machetes and burned alive as they sought sanctuary in churches.

Kagame’s troops fought back, seizing the capital, Kigali, and chasing the extremists into Congo. After serving as defense minister and vice president, in 2000 Kagame became president, a position he has held ever since.

Kagame included moderate Hutus in his government and, in an effort to break the cycle of ethnic conflict, ordered that national ID cards no longer specify a citizen’s ethnic identity. His government erected genocide memorials throughout the mountainous country. Rwanda became a favorite of Western aid donors, its cities clean and its government well-run.

Kagame’s rule, however, has turned dictatorial. Human-rights groups accused his agents of hunting down some political opponents and jailing others.

“There is nobody in Rwanda who is in prison that should not be there,” Kagame told reporters in 2022. “We have a justice system that is actually functional and fair.”

To the extent they subtly acknowledge their involvement in Congo, Rwandan officials say they’re simply defending their own borders and Tutsi cousins who are persecuted in Congo.

Acled, the conflict-monitoring group, counted 63 cases of violence targeting Rwandan migrants and Rwandan speakers in Congo since 2018, resulting in at least 69 deaths.

One Tutsi farmer from eastern Congo told the Journal that he had fled to a refugee camp in Rwanda late last year after Hutu extremists kidnapped his daughter. To get her back, the family had to cobble together a $3,500 ransom, an astronomical sum in eastern Congo.

The militants taxed Tutsi farmers $2 per cow, in addition to a levy on milk, he said. “If you couldn’t meet the milk quota, they’d cut off the cow’s legs,” the farmer said.

“We’re trying to survive,” said Lawrence Kanyuka, the rebel spokesman in Goma. “We’ve been pushed to defend our people here.”

Genocide ideology

In their ill-fated defense of Goma, the Congolese army, according to Rwandan and M23 officials, fought shoulder-to-shoulder with the heirs of the Hutu extremists who carried out the genocide, mostly members of an armed faction called the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda. Congolese officials, they say, speak of Tutsis in dehumanizing terms that encourage discrimination and worse.

“The genocidal ideology is being embedded in the children born today,” said Kanyuka, the rebel spokesman, who is the target of Western sanctions.

Patrick Muyaya, Congo’s communications minister, denied its army is allied with Hutu extremists. But he said circumstances forced them together when M23 and the Rwandans swept toward Goma.

“We’re in an area of war fighting the same enemy,” Muyaya said in an interview. “Sometimes they can have some collaboration or cooperation, but it’s not systematic.”

Congolese authorities say Rwanda is motivated not so much by memories of the genocide as by dreams of wealth from stolen Congolese minerals. M23 rebels have seized control of the Rubaya coltan mine—coltan is used in smartphones and other tech—and, according to Kinshasa, Congolese gold has been flooding into Rwanda.

Kagame “knows the international community is very sensitive about the Tutsi because of the genocide,” said Muyaya. The Rwandan president, he added, “keeps using those pretexts to continue his illicit economic activities” in eastern Congo.

Rwandan officials deny pillaging Congolese mineral resources, but say that, should peace prevail, they’d like Rwanda to become a mineral-processing hub for legally mined Congolese ore. The new peace accord talks vaguely of integrating Congolese and Rwandan mineral supply chains, with the U.S. government and American companies playing a role as well, a Trump priority.

Rwanda’s critics say its covert support for Congolese rebels make it complicit in human-rights abuses M23 committed.

M23’s spokesman, Kanyuka, said that when the rebels seized Goma, they uncovered atrocities against Tutsis, committed by Hutu extremists and Congolese troops.

Once they controlled Goma, M23 rebels rounded up and sometimes executed those they suspected of ties to the Congolese army or government, according to Clémentine de Montjoye, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, the nonprofit international advocacy group.

Rebels and government troops have weaponized rape during the fighting, according to CARE International. The charity says at least 67,000 women and girls were sexually assaulted in the first four months of the year.

M23 enforcers in Goma require locals to turn out Saturday mornings to clean the streets, morgues and sewers, according to residents. The mandatory cleanups mirror a similar requirement the Rwandans enforce in Kigali, one of the cleanest cities in Africa.

‘Diplomatic win’

Western governments who roundly criticized Rwanda’s invasion of Congo have praised its service in peacekeeping missions over the past 20 years, including in Haiti, Chad, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Mali and Sudan. Western governments welcome an African peacekeeping army that’s disciplined and provides besieged governments with an alternative to hiring Russian mercenaries.

“We’re part of broad conversations that aren’t just about people taking pity,” said the senior Rwandan official.

Rwandans say they volunteer for peacekeeping duty in part because they’re haunted by the memory of how U.N. forces in Rwanda failed to stop the ethnic slaughter happening in front of them three decades ago.

Likewise, Rwanda says it agreed to take in migrants expelled by the U.S. “in part because nearly every Rwandan family has experienced the hardships of displacement, and our society values are founded on reintegration and rehabilitation,” according to Yolande Makolo, a government spokeswoman.

Rwanda’s peacekeeping missions, however, aren’t purely altruistic, according to 2023 research by the International Crisis Group. While Rwandan troops helped provide security in Central African Republic, business interests connected to Kagame’s ruling party acquired mining concessions and agricultural land in the country, the group said.

Rwanda’s most-spectacular foreign-policy success, in Western eyes, has been its campaign against Islamic State-affiliated fighters who were rampaging through Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado Province. 

Insurgent violence was so intense from 2017 to 2021 that TotalEnergies and Exxon Mobil halted work on $46 billion in liquefied-natural-gas projects on the Indian Ocean coast.

In 2019, the Mozambican government brought in hired guns from the Wagner Group, the Kremlin-linked private military company. The Russian mercenaries took heavy casualties and soon gave up the fight.

In 2021, Mozambique asked Rwanda for help. The European Union agreed to partly fund the mission. Kagame dispatched 5,000 troops, who quickly drove Islamic State fighters deep into the coastal woodlands. Rwandans also help secure the gas project and have worked to win hearts and minds in the province, setting up clinics and fish markets.

The violence persists, however. Militant violence displaced almost 60,000 Mozambicans between July 20 and Aug. 3, according to the International Organization for Migration.

Eastern Congo has proven stubbornly resistant to peace in the past. Grievances run deep, and skeptical analysts predict the peace agreement that Rwanda and Congo signed in June will prove harder to implement than it was to announce.

M23 insurgents aren’t even part of it; they’re holding separate talks with the Congolese government. It remains to be seen whether the rebels will cede control of eastern Congo. Just this month, they accused the Congolese military of violating a cease-fire.

But Rwanda, it seems, has come out of the negotiations on top.

Kigali’s success on the battlefield forced Congo to the table in the first place. Congolese authorities agreed, at least in principle, to crack down on the same Hutu extremists who were their allies just a few months ago—a major Rwandan demand. And Rwanda may end up with a lucrative role in the Congo minerals trade.

“It was,” said one Africa analyst, “a big diplomatic win for Rwanda.”