Years of investigations have confirmed the Rwanda Defence Force (RDF) has de facto control of the M23 militia, whose latest insurgency forced about 500,000 Congolese to flee their homes in January.
In June 2024, a UN experts report concluded that Rwanda had around 3,000 to 4,000 troops in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to reinforce M23. Despite this, the country’s president, Paul Kagame, in an exclusive interview with CNN International correspondent Larry Madowo (@larrymadowo on X) on 3 February nonchalantly responded, ‘I don’t know’, when asked if any Rwandan troops were in the DRC.
Many have accused Rwanda and Uganda of exacerbating the crisis in the Congo by funding and training the M23, who have wreaked havoc in the resource-rich DRC.
In this clip from Episode 18 of our ‘Pan-African Attitude’ podcast, Kambale Musavuli (@kambale on X), political analyst at the Center for Research on the Congo-Kinshasa, peeled back the layers of Kagame’s disingenuous response, citing evidence of Rwanda’s role over the last three decades in the Western-backed war that had k*lled 6 million Congolese by 2010 and internally displaced about 7 million as of last year. He rhetorically questions how Kagame can know everything else but nothing about his army’s whereabouts.
Moreover, Musavuli, who is also the West Africa representative for Pan Africanism Today’s secretariat, sheds light on Rwanda’s propaganda machine on social media and how it uses artificial intelligence (AI) to obscure the truth.
You can watch the complete 6 February episode on our X, Rumble and Patreon platforms.
Sources:
https://docs.un.org/en/S/2024/432
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/03/africa/rwanda-kigame-troops-dr-congo-intl/index.html
https://www.caritas.org/2010/02/six-million-dead-in-congos-war
https://drcongo.iom.int/en/news/internal-displacement-overview-2024-published
The Conflict in Eastern DRC and the State Responsibility of Rwanda and Uganda