President Trump’s top officials are raising alarm that violence on the ground in eastern Congo is outpacing U.S. efforts to implement a peace deal to end 30 years of conflict between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda.
The warnings from Trump’s top officials counter the president’s repeated claims that he has ended “un-endable wars.”
Trump’s special adviser for Africa Massad Boulos, who is also father-in-law to the president’s daughter Tiffany, conceded last week that fighting had not ended and more work was needed to follow through on the U.S.-brokered peace agreement between Congo and Rwanda.
“A lot of people are skeptical … and they say, ‘Oh, the fight has not ended.’ First of all, these things don’t end overnight. That’s number one. These things take some time,” Boulos said Sept. 24 during remarks at Semafor’s Next 3 Billion Summit in New York.
“Has implementation [of the peace agreement] really started? Not fully yet, not fully.”
Days later, Mike Waltz, Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, raised alarm that M23 Congolese rebels and the Rwandan Defense Force in Congo were blocking United Nations peacekeeping forces, referred to as Monusco, and undermining Washington’s efforts.
“We too strongly condemn the continued obstruction of Monusco’s operations, particularly by M23 and the Rwandan Defense Forces in North Kivu. Such actions we agree are absolutely unacceptable,” Waltz said at a meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Sept 30.
Waltz’s remarks came the same day Trump boasted to hundreds of U.S. generals and admirals convened at a meeting hosted by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that he had “saved” Congo.
“They’ve been fighting for 31 years, 10 million people dead. I got that one done, and very proud of it.”
‘Peace is still mostly a promise’
At the U.N. Security Council, members heard testimony that a rise in attacks by M23 and other militias in eastern Congo had led to a 122 percent increase in civilian deaths, compared with only a few months earlier.
Human rights abuses by M23 far outpace those documented by other groups, according to the U.N. report.
The atrocities included mass killings, forced military recruitment, and crimes against humanity: summary executions, torture, abductions and sexual violence.
“Peace in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is still mostly a promise,” Bintou Keita, the U.N. special envoy overseeing Congo, told the council.
“There are discrepancies between the progress we see on paper and the reality we observe on the ground, which continues to be marred with violence.”
Trump’s entry into the peace talks started earlier this year and culminated in the signing of an agreement of peace principles on June 27 between the foreign ministers of Rwanda and Congo.
While Rwanda and Congo are not formally at war with each other, the spillover of the 1994 Rwandan genocide into eastern Congo is the starting point of 30 years of violence in the mountainous jungles of the region. In the wake of the Rwandan genocide, Hutu refugees, including the perpetrators of violence against Rwanda’s Tutsis, fled into eastern Congo.
Rwanda has only recently acknowledged it has military forces inside eastern Congo, claiming its movement of troops is a self-defense measure. It denies that it supports the M23, a claim the United Nations rejects.
“Kinshasa, broadly speaking, says ‘we’ve been invaded.’ And for Kinshasa, like for Ukraine, that’s it … we’ve been invaded. We have a right to self defense, full stop,” said Richard Moncrieff, project director for the Great Lakes with the International Crisis Group.
“The Rwandan framing is that this conflict is a Congolese conflict, and within that, the Congolese Tutsis are perennial victims, and that the blame lies with Kinshasa for not resolving some of those underlying conflicts and discriminations.”
Washington’s engagement is welcome
Sustained diplomatic efforts that have included Angola and other African nations to resolve the conflict have taken place over the last few years. Qatar is mediating talks between Congo and the Rwandan-backed M23.
The Trump administration, spearheaded by Boulos, entered the diplomatic fray in March with a plan to use the promise of economic prosperity to spur peace, linking U.S. investment and development of eastern Congo’s critical minerals as a major carrot to halt fighting.
“Folding commercial mineral deals into a peace deal is very odd, it’s like wearing a dark suit but having pink [sneakers] on,” Moncrieff said.
Still, he did not dismiss U.S. engagement out of hand.
“My overall take on the Washington agreement is that it’s welcome in the sense that it makes some very important statements about territorial integrity. It is a negotiation between the actual parties, that is Rwanda and Kinshasa … It addresses some of the main concerns, and it takes it to the top. Those things are quite welcome,” Moncrieff said.
But he criticized Rwanda as stalling for time and said only meaningful pressure would trigger change from Kigali, such as withholding World Bank funding.
“I think that Washington underestimated the determination of Kigali to face them down,” he said.
Michael Rubin, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, who has spent time both in Kinshasa and with M23, said Congo shares blame in the stalling of the peace process.
“The biggest problem right now is that [Congolese President Felix] Tshisekedi really needs to talk directly to M23,” Rubin wrote in an email to The Hill.
“They are not going away, and the longer he believes he can sidestep reform by relying on an external peace process, the worse things will get. Add into the mix that M23 simply governs better than the Congolese government, and blaming Rwanda seems increasingly like a distraction that impedes peace.”
Rubin said the U.S. involvement has shown some promise, in particular movement on an economic framework to revamp mineral supply chains and develop reforms as part of the peace process between Kigali and Kinshasa.
“It’s a positive step, and trade flourished prior to Tshisekedi’s second election when he upped the ethnic populism and restarted the war,” he noted.
“But when I interviewed people trading into Uganda from M23 territory, they were pretty consistent: they could not care less about the broader politics. There simply were less customs duties on the border than internal taxes levied by Kinshasa if the trade headed west.”
Rubin warned against Trump’s penchant for showmanship and insistence on quick results regardless of substance as a recipe for disaster.
“Wishful thinking doesn’t supplant careful diplomacy, and premature announcements relieve the pressure on belligerents,” he wrote.
“Trump’s greed also interferes. There is simply no way there can be progress without a sincere national dialogue inside the DRC [Congo], but Tshisekedi uses the promises of contracts to sidestep that.”
Moncrieff agreed that sustained, patient and expert diplomacy is needed in this scenario but also warned even that is not a guarantee for success.
“It’s a hard stone to push,” he said.
Source: The Hill
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