Kagame’s Rise

The central African country that Kagame rules is tiny — about the size of Maryland. Its population consists of two main ethnic groups: the Hutu, who historically accounted for approximately 85 percent of the population, and the Tutsi, who accounted for most of the remaining 15 percent (statistics on ethnic identity are no longer officially collected).

German and Belgian colonial administrations made use of a certain Tutsi stratum as a ruling group. The run-up to independence in 1962 saw a reversal of the colonial order as a Hutu elite seized control and incited a series of pogroms against the Tutsi population, with tens of thousands killed and many more forced into exile.

Those Tutsi exiles, many of whom grew up in Ugandan refugee camps, became the core of a rebel movement, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF),that invaded Rwanda in 1990. They demanded the right to return to the land from which they or their parents had been expelled. Paul Kagame, one of the Ugandan exiles, became the leader of the RPF in the course of a subsequent four-year civil war.

In April 1994, a missile shot down the plane of Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana, killing Habyarimana and his Burundian counterpart, President Cyprien Ntaryamira. The question of who was responsible for the missile strike remains a matter of controversy: there is a strong, if not fully proven, case that the RPF was culpable.

In the aftermath of Habyarimana’s death, the government army and affiliated militias, with backing from France, initiated a genocide of the Tutsi and the mass killing of political enemies. Between April and July, approximately eight hundred thousand people were slaughtered.

The RPF militarily defeated the government forces in July 1994, committing massacres of their own along the way, and prioritizing military victory over rescue of the civilian Tutsi population. Kagame was subsequently but misleadingly hailed as a hero for supposedly having ended the genocide. He became the country’s de facto leader until 2000 when he formally assumed the presidency, a position he has held ever since.

From the Ashes

Many international observers consider post-genocide Rwanda to be a miracle of ethnic reconciliation and economic recovery. Blair talks of Rwanda’s “remarkable path of development,” while Anthony Blinken described the country in 2022 as having risen “from the ashes of genocide to become a global destination for innovation, for investment, for tourism.”

On a personal note, when I was an aid worker in Rwanda in 1994–95, I was generally impressed by Kagame’s RPF. They were competent, seemed genuinely committed to national reconstruction, and evidenced little or no corruption. I also largely accepted the narrative that they had ended the genocide. However, the overwhelming accumulation of evidence since that time has caused me and most others to become highly critical of RPF rule.

We now point to Kagame’s implausible election victories, allegedly gaining over 99 percent of the vote in the most recent presidential election of 2024, and his practice of severe repression, including the imprisonment and assassination of political opponents, independent journalists and anyone else who challenges the regime.

Kagame also presides over a highly unequal economy whose gains predominantly accrue to a narrow circle of regime insiders, although it must be acknowledged that progress in the fields of education and health is real enough. Rwanda is deeply dependent on external aid as well as resources stolen from other countries.

The country from which the Rwandan elite has stolen the most is the neighbouring DRC. Rwanda first invaded the DRC (then named Zaire) in 1996, pursuing the remnants of the previous genocidal regime whose forces had fled there.

The DRC soon became the site of a conflict known as the Second Congo War that involved several African states, with Rwanda and Uganda ranged against DRC President Laurent Kabila (initially installed with Rwandan backing) while Angola, Namibia, and Zimbabwe sent troops to support him. The war claimed an estimated five million lives, including those who fell victim to hunger and disease. It dragged on after Kabila’s assassination in 2001, formally ending in July 2003, though often intense violence between various factions has persisted since then.

Through all this, Rwanda has been plundering and devastating the DRC. The International Crisis Group has described Rwandan actions over three decades as a pattern of “long-term territorial expansion including grabbing mineral-rich regions.”

Plundering Congo

Earlier this year, there was considerable media focus on the advance of a militia group called M23 across the DRC’s east. This advance led to an estimated three thousand deaths (mostly civilians), mass displacement, human rights abuses, and humanitarian crisis. The RPF-led Rwandan Defence Force (RDF) has consistently supported M23, with four thousand RDF troops on the ground in early February.

Rwanda, in turn, enjoys external support, including from the European Union. This was exemplified by a 2024 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) designed to ensure that Rwanda supplies the EU with designated “critical” raw materials, including tantalum/coltan (used in a range of electronic devices), tungsten, and gold. The EU has allocated over €900 million to Rwanda to support resource extraction.

However, it is well documented that a large proportion of “Rwandan” resource extraction involves the systematic theft of DRC minerals and other raw materials, both directly and through the medium of militias like M23. The gap between Rwanda’s own production and its exports of those materials has long been glaring. For example, even though domestic production of gold is limited, Rwanda is estimated to have exported a staggering $654 million worth in 2022.

As Jason Stearns, a former UN investigator, noted earlier this year, the figures have continued to grow:

Mineral exports from Rwanda are now over a billion dollars a year. That’s about double what they were two years ago. And we don’t know how much, but a fair chunk of that is from the DRC.

The European Parliament has voted overwhelmingly for the EU to suspend the MOU. Belgian MEP Marc Botenga made the case for suspension:

This MOU needs to be suspended. In fact, it should have never been signed. We know there are Rwandan soldiers on Congolese soil and that is done to steal, to pillage certain natural resources. In fact, this MOU with Rwanda encourages these troops.

Yet the European Commission has claimed that suspension “could be self-defeating” and that it would remove “an incentive to ensure responsible mineral production and trade by Rwanda.” It is hard to see what is “responsible” about the current situation.

Of course, the EU is not alone in placing access to vital natural resources ahead of human rights concerns. The Trump administration sponsored a much-trumpeted peace deal signed in June 2025 between Rwanda and the DRC. But violence on the part of M23 and other actors has continued. The best that can be said is that some of the warring parties have paused their attacks — for now.

Nor will the plunder be stopped: a coalition of eighty Congolese civil society organizations has described the agreement as “a framework to normalize the current illicit resource and power grabs underway” by Rwanda and its allies, “including Western powers that covet the DRC’s minerals and support Rwanda with financial aid.” The United States, like the EU, is seeking to access Congolese raw materials in an example of what is euphemistically termed “peace-for-resources” diplomacy.

Rwanda, Mozambique, and the EU

Donald Trump’s attempts to gain access to the natural resources of other countries (evident also in relation to Ukraine) are certainly crude. But Europe has no claim to the moral high ground given its own approach to the DRC. Another African country in which both Europe and Rwanda are involved underlines the point.

A civil war has raged in northern Mozambique since 2017 between the government and Islamist-associated rebels. In 2019, French oil and gas company Total announced a €19 billion investment in the mining of offshore gas deposits, but rebel activity threatened this project. In response, the EU has launched a support program for the Mozambican military, backed up by Rwandan forces that the EU has subsidized.

Some of the same Rwandan business interests involved in the looting of DRC resources are also involved in Mozambique, again seeking to exploit lucrative mining and other opportunities. A senior Rwandan military commander previously implicated in attacks in the DRC was identified in 2024 as being in charge of the Rwandan forces in Mozambique. As in the case of the DRC, MEPs have called for a halt to this support to the Rwandan military, which is channelled through the laughably named European Peace Facility, again to no effect.

The extraction of resource revenues has largely excluded poor Mozambicans, though they bear the costs. As Rehad Desai explains:

The only beneficiaries are the politically connected elites who receive the crumbs left on the table by the international corporations. The local populace is left to watch as their agricultural and fishing livelihoods are adversely affected.

It is precisely those costs to locals that have fuelled rebellion. While the EU says it is combating Islamist terrorism, Corporate Europe Observatory researcher Kenneth Haar more accurately characterizes the real stakes as “access to gas supplies and the defence of European-French investments.”

Rwanda’s role here as a partner to Western power points to one reason for its positive reputation in many quarters and its status as a Western “donor darling.” Kagame’s willingness to accept deported refugees from the UK (albeit in a scheme now abandoned) and from the United States is another factor.

Also germane is its significant contribution to UN peacekeeping missions, though hardly for altruistic reasons. As in the case of Mozambique, Rwandan businesses typically follow closely behind such deployments, usually under the umbrella of Crystal Ventures Limited, an RPF-owned holding company that dominates the Rwandan economy and pioneers the pursuit of RPF economic interests abroad.

Projecting Power

Rwanda is no passive player or Western puppet. It is a skilled and manipulative actor in its own right, as demonstrated by its projection of concerted military-commercial power, and its sponsorship of global sporting clubs and events in order to enhance its profile and reputation.

Kagame has also expressed strategic appreciation for Chinese interventions in Africa, implicitly warning Western powers that Rwanda could move closer to China if the West were to restrict its backing. There have, at times, been some such restrictions from various countries, including Belgium, the UK, and the United States, but they have been temporary and partial.

A further strategy Rwanda deploys to legitimize its abuses will be familiar to critics of Israel. It is notable that Rwanda has earned a reputation as “one of Israel’s best friends in Africa,” and cooperation between the two countries has continued since the latest onslaught on Gaza began. Israel commits genocide in Gaza while claiming to be hunting terrorists; Rwanda devastates and loots the DRC while claiming to be hunting the supporters of the 1994 genocide.

Just as Israel seeks to deflect criticism of its actions by accusing all and sundry of antisemitism, Rwanda accuses its critics (both internal and external) of engaging in “genocide denial,” or even support for genocide, as the RPF regime enjoys what Filip Reyntjens terms a “genocide credit.” In 2008, Kagame passed a law that criminalized any reference to crimes committed by the RPF as constituting “genocide ideology,” and numerous political opponents have been jailed under its terms.

That I was supportive of the RPF back in 1995 was a mistake. The fact that people are still supportive of the regime after three decades of tyranny and crimes against humanity is something else again. Yet with backers like Clinton, Blair, and the European Commission, Kagame’s dictatorship is still going strong and shows no signs of moderating its barbarism — at home or abroad.