The complex relationship between Rwanda and SA peacekeeping forces

SANDF soldiers have suddenly found themselves fighting against the Rwandan Defence Force

The smoking Nyiragongo volcano above the Congolese city of Goma reflects the seismic instability in the Great Lakes region, where SA is on the horns of a dilemma far more serious than the deaths of the two SA soldiers killed in a rebel mortar attack in February: it is now both allied to, and at war with, Rwanda. The defeat of those responsible for Rwanda’s genocide by Paul Kagame’s rebel army, back in 1994 when SA was preoccupied with the coming of democracy, set in motion powerful forces that created the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) under Laurent-Désiré Kabila — yet precipitated three decades of conflict in the region.

The “new African leaders”, such as Kagame, Kabila and Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni indeed brought democracy, but of a distinctly authoritarian presidential style that proved incapable of stopping the widening gyre of insurgency that swept out from its epicentre in the Great Lakes.

The First Congo War that brought Kabila to power started with his Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (AFDL) acting as Kagame’s proxy force in hunting down génocidaire Interahamwe hidden among the almost 1-million Rwandan Hutu refugees mostly clustered around Goma. Emboldened by US (and SA) corporate funding and allied to Rwanda, Uganda, Angola, Burundi and Eritrea, the AFDL took the capital, Kinshasa, on May 17 1997.

But it committed many atrocities, killing about 60,000 villagers en route to power. This ethnic cleansing sowed dragons’ teeth in an already fragile and fragmenting region.

The Second Congo War started in 1998 when Rwandans and ethnic Tutsis forced out of, or defected from, the DRC armed forces by Congolese nationalist sentiment seized Goma and called themselves the Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD), backed by a revanchist Rwanda.

With Kabila’s forces thus aligned with the persecuted Hutus in the Great Lakes, Angola again threw in its lot with Kabila and was then joined by Zimbabwe, Tanzania and Namibia, while Uganda and its proxy militia and Burundi stood with the rebels.

It turned into the most devastating conflict since World War 2: drawing in about 30,000 child soldiers, and leading to allies Rwanda and Uganda turn on each other, it left an estimated 5.4-million war dead.

In 2003, I was in Kinshasa to examine the implementation of the Pretoria Peace Accords, which had, technically, brought an end to the war. I found a bustling city presided over by a Mao-like golden statue of Kabila — who had been assassinated in 2001 by his own child-soldier bodyguard — where the hospital surgery still had to have a sign outlawing assault rifles in theatre.

The next year I travelled with then SA defence minister Mosiuoa Lekota to Kigali and Butare in Rwanda, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Kagame’s forces’ defeat of the genocidal Hutu regime. I had dinner one night overlooking the hills of an apparently spotless Kigali with a coterie of the Rwandan general staff.

I was deeply impressed by their surprising youth, and their unshakable faith in the righteousness of their cause that has helped them rebuild Rwanda — and repeatedly carried them over the border in hot pursuit of their enemies, with the resulting destabilisation of the Great Lakes.

In 2006, I was in Goma looking at SA’s assistance in helping the country integrate former soldiers and guerrillas — just as we had once done in forming the SA National Defence Force (SANDF). The UN peacekeepers there said the threat level was high as they had been battling to contain multiple guerrilla insurgencies.

By 2012, a new rebel force had been added to the bubbling stew: the M23, formed from another batch of pro-Rwandan mutineers. But with its Rooivalk helicopter gunships an SANDF deployment helped credibly defeat the M23 the next year, a Recce sniper killing five rebel officers in one day.

Nine years later the SANDF sent 1,200 soldiers to fight against jihadis in Cabo Delgado province of northern Mozambique; deployed alongside Mozambican security forces, they are part of a Southern African Development Community (Sadc) component, but are also supported by 2,800 troops from the Rwandan army. The operation has been largely successful: the remaining perhaps 250 terrorists have been pushed back into a forest hideout.

But then things fell apart again in 2024 in Goma, where 1,198 SANDF soldiers are part of one of only two UN peacekeeping forces in the world empowered to engage in combat — and the SANDF has suddenly found itself fighting against the Rwandan Defence Force.

Jason Stearns and Joshua Z Walker of the Congo Research Group say the resurgence of M23 comes as a result of DRC President Félix Tshisekedi switching policy sharply in mid-2021, from allowing Rwanda to send its military into the country to suppress former Interahamwe rebels called the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), to instead privileging Uganda and Burundi in chasing down their own rebels.

“Rwanda suddenly felt isolated, even vulnerable, surrounded by hostile neighbours. According to UN investigators, it probably resumed throwing its weight behind the M23 in November 2021,” they write.

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Rwanda denies this and claims the FDLR is integrated into the DRC army, but patched up relations with Uganda. Yet a 2022 East African Community intervention force of Uganda, Burundi, Kenya, Tanzania and South Sudan was suspected by Tshisekedi of supporting M23 (in his successful re-election, he swore he would “march on Kigali”), and so was replaced on December 15 by a Sadc contingent from SA, Malawi and Tanzania.

It is this force, as well as the current UN peacekeeping mission, that have sustained casualties at M23 hands. Concern escalated to the AU, then to the UN Security Council by mid-February 2024, because the Rwandan army had already bombed Goma’s airport and deployed surface-to-air missiles, which the US state department says “threaten the lives of civilians, UN and other regional peacekeepers, humanitarian actors, and commercial flights in eastern DRC”.

The Economist has opined that “there is a risk of a catastrophic third regional war being sparked in Congo”, though the International Crisis Group says while unlikely, outright war between Rwanda and the DRC “cannot be entirely discounted”.

With 15 African peacekeeping missions since 1999 under its belt, the SANDF has established a solid diplomatic and fighting reputation. But its Cabo Delgado deployment is set to end on April 15, and the UN mission in the DRC by the end of that month, so entanglements with Rwanda are increasingly insufferable.