Eastern Congo War

To understand the Eastern Congo war, a conflict that has consumed this part of the Democratic Republic of Congo for more than three decades, it is necessary to begin beyond its borders. The story leads back to Rwanda in 1994, to the genocide against the Tutsi and to the months in which one of the defining crimes of the late twentieth century permanently altered the political and military balance of Africa’s Great Lakes region. When the Rwandan Patriotic Front took Kigali and brought the genocide to an end, an immense population fled across the border into what was then Zaire. Among the civilian refugees were members of the former Rwandan Armed Forces and militias responsible for the killings. Many retained their weapons, rebuilt their structures and settled in camps close to a border that would never again truly separate the Rwandan crisis from the conflict developing inside Congo.

Their arrival transformed a region already marked by deep tensions over land, citizenship, political representation and the identity of its communities. North and South Kivu had long been home to Congolese Hutu and Tutsi populations alongside other communities whose relationships with the state and with one another had repeatedly been manipulated for political purposes. Colonial borders had never corresponded perfectly to the populations living on either side of them. The aftermath of the Rwandan genocide introduced thousands of armed men into this already fragile landscape and turned eastern Zaire into the rear base of a regional conflict.

For Rwanda, the presence of former génocidaires across the border represented an existential security threat. Allowing them to reorganise in Zaire meant accepting the possibility that they might one day attack Rwanda again. For many Congolese, however, Rwanda's increasing intervention became another threat in itself: that of a neighbouring state using legitimate security concerns to justify military operations and the construction of political, economic and military networks inside Congolese territory.

Much of what followed grew from this contradiction.

In 1996, the First Congo War began. A rebellion led by Laurent-Désiré Kabila and decisively supported by Rwanda and Uganda advanced westwards across the vast territory of Zaire. The forces of Mobutu Sese Seko, weakened after decades of dictatorship, corruption and institutional decline, were unable to stop them. In May 1997, Kabila entered Kinshasa, Mobutu fled and Zaire became the Democratic Republic of Congo. A war rooted partly in the consequences of the Rwandan catastrophe had ended by overthrowing one of Africa’s longest-standing regimes.

Victory did not bring stability. Relations between Kabila and his former Rwandan and Ugandan allies deteriorated rapidly. In 1998 another rebellion erupted in the east and the Second Congo War began, this time on a far greater scale. Several African states intervened directly, while numerous armed movements fought across a country almost the size of Western Europe. Rwanda and Uganda backed rebel forces, while Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia intervened in support of Kinshasa. Beneath this interstate war existed dozens of local conflicts involving territory, political power, community identity, security and access to natural resources.

Peace agreements eventually brought the formal interstate war to an end and a political transition culminated in elections in 2006. In eastern Congo, however, violence never truly disappeared. Some armed groups were disbanded, others were partially integrated into the new Congolese army, and others simply changed names, alliances or territory. Rwandan Hutu armed structures eventually crystallised around the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, the FDLR, while different Mai-Mai militias continued to operate according to local and communal defence agendas. Rwanda, meanwhile, continued to regard the presence of the FDLR in Congo as a threat to its national security.

It was within this landscape that Laurent Nkunda emerged.

Nkunda was a Congolese Tutsi and a former officer in rebel movements backed by Rwanda who had subsequently been integrated into the Congolese army. He later rejected Kinshasa's authority and established the National Congress for the Defence of the People, better known by its French acronym, CNDP. Nkunda presented his movement as a force protecting Congolese Tutsis against the FDLR and other hostile armed groups. To the Congolese government, however, the CNDP was a rebellion against the state and an extension of Rwandan influence inside the country.

Those competing interpretations would accompany the movement throughout its existence. Threats against Congolese Tutsi communities and the continuing presence of armed groups historically connected to perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide were realities that could not simply be dismissed. So too were Rwanda's support for Nkunda, abuses committed by his forces and the Congolese state's inability to impose legitimate authority across much of North Kivu. Reducing the conflict to ethnic hatred, competition for minerals or foreign intervention alone obscures its complexity. In eastern Congo, all these dimensions became entangled.

By 2008, that accumulation of unresolved conflicts had once again erupted into open war. The CNDP launched a major offensive against the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo and began capturing strategic positions across North Kivu. In October, Nkunda's forces seized the important military base at Rumangabo and advanced along the corridor connecting Rutshuru to Goma. Congolese army units collapsed at several points, and during their retreat some soldiers looted towns and attacked civilians, adding another layer of violence to an already chaotic situation.

Goma became the centre of the crisis. The capital of North Kivu was far more than a strategically important city. Sitting on the Rwandan border and on the shores of Lake Kivu, it was the political, economic and humanitarian centre of a province shaped by years of displacement and war. Tens of thousands of people fled as the rebels advanced. CNDP forces reached the outskirts while Congolese troops retreated and United Nations peacekeepers attempted to prevent the offensive from becoming a battle for the city itself.

On 29 October, Nkunda announced a unilateral ceasefire and halted the CNDP offensive on Goma. The city did not fall, but the territory to its north had been transformed. The CNDP controlled Rutshuru and Kiwanja and had demonstrated something whose consequences would reach far beyond that particular campaign: Kinshasa might formally possess sovereignty over North Kivu, but it did not necessarily possess the military capacity to defend it.

A few days later, Kiwanja revealed what that fragmentation of power meant for civilians.

The town lies next to Rutshuru on the main corridor running north from Goma. The CNDP had occupied it after defeating government forces. On 4 November, Mai-Mai fighters aligned with the government attacked rebel positions and temporarily retook parts of the town. Fighting continued until CNDP forces regained control.

What happened afterwards turned the Kiwanja massacre into one of the defining episodes of the 2008 North Kivu conflict. Over 4 and 5 November, around 150 people were killed. Subsequent investigations established that most were summarily executed by CNDP fighters after they recaptured the town. Combatants moved through neighbourhoods searching particularly for young men and adolescents whom they accused of belonging to the Mai-Mai or collaborating with them. Many victims were killed inside their homes or in nearby streets. Women, children and elderly people were also among the dead. Mai-Mai fighters likewise deliberately killed civilians they believed supported the CNDP.

Kiwanja was not simply another massacre in a long war. It exposed with brutal clarity the logic that had taken hold across much of eastern Congo. Survival could depend on convincing whichever armed force controlled a neighbourhood that a civilian had no relationship with its enemy. A town could be controlled by government troops in the morning, a militia hours later and a rebel movement the following day. Identity, neighbourhood, ethnicity, age or simply remaining at home during a battle could become grounds for suspicion.

The massacre also exposed one of the central contradictions of the international response. Less than a kilometre away stood a United Nations base. MONUC was then one of the largest peacekeeping operations in the world and the protection of civilians formed part of its mandate. Yet its forces in Kiwanja failed to prevent the killings. Problems involving intelligence, communications, resources, deployment and operational priorities left civilians effectively unprotected while executions were taking place nearby.

The failure at Kiwanja became symbolic of a much wider problem. For years, the international community had invested enormous resources in Congo, supported elections, financed disarmament programmes and deployed thousands of peacekeepers, yet the state still lacked effective control over large areas of its eastern territory. In many places, security depended less on national institutions than on which armed group controlled a road, hill, mine or town at a particular moment.

The extraordinary mineral wealth of eastern Congo added another layer to this conflict. Kivu and neighbouring regions contain significant deposits of gold, coltan, cassiterite and other valuable minerals. Armed groups, military units, traders and regional networks have all generated revenue through direct or indirect control of mines, trade routes, border crossings and illegal taxation. Yet portraying minerals as the single cause of the Eastern Congo conflict is misleading. The roots of the war lie deeper, in state collapse, the consequences of the Rwandan genocide, disputes over land and citizenship, foreign intervention and the political manipulation of communal identities. Natural resources did not create the conflict on their own, but they provided ways to finance armed power and made control of territory economically valuable.

The 2008 CNDP offensive eventually changed relations between Kinshasa and Kigali as well. In early 2009, the two governments entered an unexpected period of cooperation. Rwanda arrested Laurent Nkunda, while Rwandan troops temporarily entered Congolese territory in coordination with Kinshasa to operate against the FDLR. On 23 March 2009, the CNDP signed an agreement with the Congolese government and many of its fighters were integrated into the national armed forces.

On paper, the rebellion was over. In reality, many of its political and military networks survived inside the army.

Three years later, former CNDP soldiers mutinied, arguing that the agreement had not been respected. From the date of that agreement they took the name of a new movement: M23, the March 23 Movement.

The conflict was beginning to repeat itself through organisations that were new in name but in many cases connected directly to the structures of the previous war. In 2012, the M23 rebellion launched another offensive across North Kivu and this time achieved what Nkunda had stopped short of doing four years earlier: its fighters entered Goma. The fall of a major provincial capital to a rebel movement was a profound humiliation for the Congolese government and once again raised questions about the ability of United Nations forces to protect a city at the centre of their deployment in eastern Congo.

M23 eventually withdrew and was militarily defeated in 2013. For several years, it appeared that this chapter of the war had ended. But the movement never disappeared completely. Some of its fighters remained outside Congo, while the political and regional conditions that had contributed to its emergence were never fully resolved.

In late 2021, M23 returned to war. Its resurgence opened another phase of a history that was disturbingly familiar. The movement began capturing territory in North Kivu, the Congolese army once again struggled to contain its advance and relations between Kinshasa and Kigali deteriorated towards open confrontation. International investigations subsequently documented Rwandan military support for M23 and the presence of Rwandan forces on Congolese territory, while Kigali continued to frame its security concerns around the FDLR and threats emanating from eastern Congo.

During 2024 and early 2025, the offensive progressively tightened around Goma. Roads were cut, government positions collapsed and hundreds of thousands of displaced people were once again pushed towards a city that had spent decades absorbing populations fleeing wars elsewhere in the province.

In January 2025, the history left unfinished outside Goma in October 2008 returned with extraordinary force. M23, supported by Rwandan forces according to international investigations, launched its final offensive and captured the city. The rebels subsequently pushed south and took Bukavu, extending the conflict into South Kivu and dramatically altering the balance of power across eastern Congo.

Seventeen years separated the CNDP forces that stopped outside Goma in 2008 from the M23 forces that entered it in 2025. There were important political and military differences between the two movements and between the historical moments in which they operated, but the continuity is impossible to ignore. Some leaders and combatants emerged from the same networks, the security of Congolese Tutsis remained part of the political argument, the FDLR continued to feature in Rwanda's justification for intervention and the weakness of the Congolese state continued to allow large areas of Kivu to escape effective government control.

The civilian population remained as well.

Since 1994, generations in eastern Congo have grown up moving between wars whose names changed while many of their consequences remained the same. AFDL, RCD, CNDP, M23, FDLR, ADF, Mai-Mai and dozens of other armed groups have become part of a landscape of violence that for millions of Congolese is not experienced as a neat succession of separate conflicts, but as an almost continuous condition of insecurity. Massacres, sexual violence, forced recruitment, displacement, looting and the destruction of communities have accompanied more than three decades of war.

Kiwanja helps explain that continuity precisely because it was not a decisive battle and did not by itself change the course of the conflict. It was something more representative: a town caught for a few hours between competing armed forces and a civilian population immediately treated as suspect by whichever side happened to hold power. What happened there in November 2008 condensed the logic of a conflict in which civilians have repeatedly paid for the state's inability to protect them, the ambitions of armed movements and a regional struggle that was never fully resolved after the Rwandan genocide.

More than thirty years after 1994, eastern Congo continues to live with the consequences of that historical rupture, although explaining the conflict solely as an aftermath of the genocide is no longer sufficient. Over time, the war has developed its own economies, military elites, communal grievances, territorial disputes and structures of power. Each new conflict inherits elements of the previous one while adding new interests and actors. Armed movements disappear and return under different names, former rebels are incorporated into the national army only to rebel again, peace agreements dismantle some structures while leaving others intact, and neighbouring states invoke security threats that may be real while simultaneously pursuing broader regional interests.

This is why the 2008 offensive carries a different meaning when viewed from the present. At the time, the sight of CNDP forces advancing towards Goma could be understood as another crisis in what already seemed an endless war. Seen from today, it also appears as one chapter in a sequence that was never truly closed. Nkunda did not capture Goma, but political and military structures connected to that conflict survived. The CNDP formally disappeared, yet its failed integration helped produce M23. M23 was defeated, yet returned years later. Goma survived the offensive of 2008, fell to M23 in 2012 and fell again in 2025.

At the centre of that history, the Kiwanja massacre remains a warning about who ultimately pays for each transformation of the conflict. Over two days in November 2008, around 150 people were killed as armed forces competed for control of a small town in North Kivu. They did not die because Kiwanja possessed some exceptional historical importance, but because they happened to live on one of the countless fault lines running through eastern Congo.

Understanding the war in North Kivu therefore requires looking beyond each individual offensive. The problem has never been only who controls Goma, which armed group dominates a mine or which army occupies a particular road. Beneath these battles lies a much larger question that Congo has struggled to answer since the regional order collapsed in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide: who possesses the authority and capacity to govern this territory, protect its population and ensure that the borders of a sovereign state mean more than lines drawn on a map.

As long as that question remains unresolved, peace agreements may end battles without necessarily ending the war. That is perhaps the most disturbing characteristic of the recent history of eastern Congo. For more than thirty years, violence has demonstrated an extraordinary ability to change its name, adapt to new circumstances and survive the repeated announcements of its end.