Representative image showing soldiers guarding borders of Democratic Republic of Congo.
Credit: Reuters Photo
By Justice Malala
World leaders are scrambling to avert a full-scale war between Israel and Hezbollah. There is another war, on a scale perhaps unimaginable to many, they should rush to prevent as well.
It’s a repeat, like Israel-Hezbollah in 2006, of a war that raged between the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Rwanda and Uganda between August 1998 and July 2003. By the time it ended, nine African countries and 20 rebel groups were involved. At least 5.4 million people died through fighting, disease and malnutrition. Seven million were displaced. Africa’s World War — or the Great War of Africa, as it came to be known — was the world’s deadliest conflict since World War II.
Today, conflict between Congolese and Rwandan leaders has sharpened dangerously, peace initiatives have collapsed, an arms race is underway, and deadly clashes between both sides and militias aligned to them are frequent. All the warning lights for a repeat of the 1998-2003 war are flashing.
Tensions have been simmering for years, with frequent reports of serious cross-border clashes in the eastern provinces of the DRC. War talk and violence ramped up in the run-up to the DRC elections in December 2023 and have intensified over the past seven months. Weeks before the poll, DRC president Félix Tshisekedi said Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame was behaving like Hitler and had ambitions to expand Rwanda into eastern DRC. “I promise he will end up like Hitler,” he warned. Rwanda said Tshisekedi’s words are a “loud and clear threat.”
On July 9, a United Nations expert report confirmed widely circulated accusations that Uganda and Rwanda are backing the powerful M23 rebel group in eastern DRC. It warned that the crisis “carried the risk of triggering a wider regional conflict.” Rwanda’s government spokesperson Yolande Makolo responded that Tshisekedi had “consistently threatened to declare war on Rwanda” and that her country “will continue to defend itself.”
The reasons for the fighting are decades-old and complex, yet currently boil down to various players’ bid to dominate the DRC’s abundant mineral resources. After the 1994 Rwanda genocide, in which one million members of the Tutsi ethnic group were killed by mainly Hutu ethnic groups, militias implicated in the murders fled into the eastern DRC.
The Rwandan army pursued them, arguing that it had to arrest perpetrators of the genocide and destroy their networks. This happened again in 1998, triggering the great war and spawning a web of vested interests involving neighboring nations and armed militias, mercenaries, mining companies, local and regional politicians, China, the US and other global powers seeking a toehold in the region. Large parts of the DRC have since been “occupied” by ruthless armed groups profiting from illegal mining.
The DRC produces nearly 70 per cent of the world’s cobalt, while the Great Lakes Region is rich with tin, tantalum, tungsten, lithium and gold — all of which are key components of electric vehicle batteries, cell phones, refrigerators, jewelry, airplane parts, cars and other goods. As of 2020, Chinese firms owned or had stakes in 15 of the 19 cobalt producing mines in the DRC. Between 2022 and 2050, demand for nickel will double, cobalt triple and lithium rise tenfold, according to the International Energy Agency.
A conflagration will potentially affect or draw in other countries. Apart from the DRC, Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi, a plethora of armed groups is already in the region. The 11,000-strong UN peacekeeping mission (which goes by the French acronym MONUSCO) was supposed to leave the country by year-end, but has been asked by the Congolese government to stay on indefinitely.
South Africa, Malawi and Tanzania already have troops in the DRC as part of the Southern African Development Community’s peacekeeping mission deployed there in December 2023. The DRC’s neighbors Angola, the Republic of Congo, Tanzania, Kenya and Zambia could be drawn into the fighting. An East African Community Regional Force exited the DRC in December 2023 and may be drawn back into the conflict.
That’s not all. The Global Centre for the Responsibility To Protect says there are at least 120 armed militias operating in the region while mercenary groups such as Russia’s Wagner Group have been contracted by various role players. Worryingly, the DRC has been stocking up on arms. The country’s military spending had the highest increase in the world in 2023, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Spending on armored vehicles, drones and other military equipment more than doubled in a year to $794 million.
The 1998-2003 conflict ended because strong continental leaders intervened through dialogue. In 2000, African leaders adopted the Lomé Declaration which expressly outlawed coups, thus giving the African Union the authority to stand up to belligerents.
The current political climate, called “an epidemic” of coups by UN Secretary-General António Guterres, makes it harder to intervene. Continental leadership of the type of the early 2000s is also lacking. In its last meeting on July 12, the African Union — its authority already undermined by swaggering coup leaders in Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso and others experiencing democratic backsliding — failed to even place the Great Lakes crisis on its agenda.
Attempts to strike a new peace deal have floundered. On July 27, DRC President Tshisekedi told a meeting in Paris: “There are two processes. There was the Nairobi Process driven by Uhuru Kenyatta which, unfortunately, was subsequently managed by the new president William Ruto. He managed it very badly. The process is almost dead.”
The second initiative, the Luanda Process led by Angolan President João Lourenço, has made little headway after a disastrous meeting in February.
What now? At the request of the US, the belligerents have been observing a humanitarian truce for nearly a month, but clashes have continued. This truce should be used by international leaders — US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has admirably been heavily involved with Angola’s President Lourenço — to encourage the DRC’s Tshekedi and Rwanda’s Kagame to dial down the rhetoric and come to the table.
China, which has sold arms to both sides this year and is the dominant foreign economic player in the DRC’s mining sector, should do the same. Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates (both of which have mining interests in the DRC) should also be acting. Crucially, regional leaders such as Angola, South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya should be taking a leadership role alongside Angola’s president to avert a deterioration and assert Africa’s interests.
With 7.2 million people in the region already displaced (700,000 of them in just the first three months of 2024) by the war, a further escalation would spell disaster for the continent.