“What power?” I asked.
“All kinds of power,” he said and smiled.
In June, when Trump announced he had brought peace to eastern Congo, he called it a “glorious triumph.” But M23 did not agree to disband. A militia spokesman told The Associated Press: “We are in Goma with the population and have no intention of leaving.”
A Western diplomat in the region told me that M23 appears to be trying to put down permanent roots in North Kivu. They overturned the traditional justice system administered by tribal leaders. After property records were burned during the fighting, M23 simply distributed the land to people it favored.
Taking Goma gave M23 control of a huge arsenal left behind by the defeated Congolese army – almost a third of the country's military equipment, the diplomat said. The militia also acquired approximately twelve thousand new soldiers, many of whom captured government soldiers who were either lured or forced into service. “M23 has never enjoyed this level of control before,” the diplomat said. “The risk for them is that they are now caught in the same trap as the DRC government – having to manage the territory they control.”
If M23's leadership of North Kivu is a test of the country's governance, it is not encouraging. Patrick Muyaya, the DRC's communications minister, told me that electricity and banking services had stopped in Goma and the “ethnic cleansing of Hutus” was continuing. In July, M23 fighters killed more than three hundred civilians in a cluster of frontline villages about forty miles from the city, according to the UN. “There are murders every day,” Muyaya said. “The people who run this part of the country know nothing but crime.”
An hour's drive northwest of Goma, amid a vast lunar landscape of black lava, lies a rambling roadside village called Sake. For several years before the fall of Goma, it was a city on the front line of the fight between M23 and government forces. Tents for displaced people, made from plastic sheeting provided by NGOs, are pitched next to abandoned houses, many of which have burned to the ground. The settlement is dug into the jagged rock around the Miséricorde Divine Catholic Church.
The priest, a large man with wary eyes, explained that he was assigned to Sake in 2023 when Patriots have established themselves there. As the M23 moved closer, he said, it captured several hundred Hutu refugees and forcibly removed them. The church was looted and burned, and the town became “like a bush,” he said, with almost no inhabitants left. “We had to start from scratch again.”
Gradually people returned, but they found it difficult to survive and the attacks continued. Some relief agency drivers were kidnapped while visiting the priest's residence, so no one else stayed overnight at the church. When I asked if he was sleeping there, he replied: “How could I leave? I’m a priest.” But many civilians packed up and headed to Goma. “They think it’s an oasis of peace,” he said wryly. Along with the threat of violence, there were food shortages in Goma as farmers who supplied the city abandoned their lands. The priest said that he was forty years old and had known nothing in his life but conflict. Disgusted, he said: “I am very tired of the fighting and I call on the leaders to put an end to it.”
The presidents of Congo and Rwanda spent much of the past year trading insults. Tshisekedi compared Kagame to Hitler and said: “One reason is responsible for this situation – Rwandan aggression.” Kagame tends to be harsh rather than harsh. When Tshisekedi threatened to send his air force to strike Rwanda, Kagame responded: “Tshisekedi is capable of anything except assessing the consequences of what he says.”
The son of Tutsis exiled to Uganda, Kagame served as an intelligence officer in the Ugandan army before returning to lead the Rwandan Patriotic Front. As president, he was the subject of both praise and condemnation abroad. He is a ruthless strategist capable of fighting bloody wars, but he has also developed a remarkable program to reintegrate tens of thousands of former genocide victims into Rwandan society. He was accused of many authoritarian actions, including murdering political opponents, but he turned his country into a regional powerhouse with a disciplined army that was deployed to assist embattled allies. “Rwanda has become a surprisingly efficient place to work and do business—as long as you stick to your guns,” a former State Department official told me. “You want to root for them. But on the other hand, they are responsible for decades of horrific acts inside the DRC.”
