The Prolonged Suffering of Eastern DRC

Since Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo’s descent into cyclical violence in 1996, the conflict has been entangled in regional and international interests and incoherent interventions.

The eastern portion of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been the theatre of one of the world’s worst cases of recurrent violence since 1996. Persistent instability has brought about mass killings, forced displacements, loss of livelihoods, and large-scale violations of basic human rights. The DRC first descended into violent conflict in 1996 at the onset of the First Congo War (1996–1997); but the origins of instability began as early as the 1960s in post-independence Congo when questions of ‘autochtonie’, citizenship, and ethnicity became foundational political fault-lines.

In the 1990s, tens of thousands of Rwandan refugees began entering Congolese territory, including members of the former Rwandan Armed Forces (Forces Armées Rwandaises) and the infamous Interahamwe paramilitary group, who played a leading role in perpetrating the genocide that decimated the lives of between 800,000 to 1 million people in 1994. This exodus cemented the entwined destinies of Rwanda and the DRC, who have since become entangled in a complicated relationship that remains difficult to define, characterized by heated tensions between citizens and leaders of both nations. Today’s violence in the DRC—which saw a sharp escalation from February of this year—remains intimately tied to such regional configurations, including but not limited to Rwanda. Often these have been marked by ethnic cleavages brought out by the divide-and-rule policies of former colonial powers and now manipulated by contemporary political actors.

2024 marks three decades since the Rwandan genocide and will, on 15 July, see Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame pursue a fourth term in office, which would elongate his presidency to nearly 30 years. But it also marks three decades since the end of South Africa’s apartheid regime, an important juncture in the development of a more proactive regional presence in the DRC, crystallized today in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (SAMIDRC), deployed in December 2023...