Lake Nyos, which killed more than 1,700 people when it degassed in 1986, holds about 0.15 km³ of water. Kivu holds some 550 km³.
This is the eternal threat and it cannot be mitigated against and it will never, ever, go away unless the worst case actually does take place, Kivu does degas, and survivors and others rebuild. The innocent civilians whom I saw swimming, fishing, working, playing and living in Gisenyi and Goma, however, have another threat ever-present in the context of their lives and that is man-made and significantly more complicated. It is the aftermath of a genocide interrupted and unavenged, a war entering its fourth decade, made unresolvable by what may be the planet’s richest and most dangerous underground mineral deposits; the second unique geological aspect to this most beautiful corner of the world.
Africa’s Great War has taken over five million lives and is the deadliest conflict since the Second World War. This essay is not a history of that war, nor of the genocide in Rwanda which precipitated it; it is an attempt to explain the root causes of the conflict, the reasons why the United Nations transformed, for the first and thus far only time, a peacekeeping mission into an offensive military force, and why the wealth under the earth guarantees that the cycle of man-made violence remains perpetual. The genocide of the Tutsi tribe which took place in Rwanda in 1994 was stopped in its tracks, not by an intervening third party as required by the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, signed in 1948 with 153 signatory states, but by an invading ragtag militia of displaced Tutsi soldiers, driven by a man of unusual military genius. This man, Paul Kagame, has led Rwanda in one form or fashion until this very day, and his rebel army stopped the genocide and drove the heavily supported and well-armed killers across the Gisenyi-Goma border into Congolese territory. There, finally, the world took notice and acted: their action was to feed, shelter, and support the newly displaced killers while the victims took stock in a country gutted like perhaps none before.
This injustice has never been fully addressed nor atoned, and understanding it sheds considerable light on the events of the past thirty years. It has been significantly complicated by what is buried beneath the hills of eastern Congo. Here lie some of the planet’s most valuable and strategic resources: gold, coltan, cassiterite, wolframite, drawing the attention and rivalry of the world’s great powers, complicating the motivations and actions of all the players, from Rwanda and the Congo to the United Nations, China, the United States, and beyond. Interrupted and contested vengeance for the worst crime possible, situated directly on top of the world’s most contested resources has created a perpetual violence machine, in which every party involved has a motivation to maintain the cycle of violence rather than resolve it.
II. Precursors to Genocide
The border dividing these lands is arbitrary, colonial, and permeable. In the verdant Virunga mountain jungles north of the cities, home to the famous mountain gorillas, the border becomes more theoretical than observable. The same people live on both sides, speaking the same language, Kinyarwanda, keeping the same long-horned Ankole cattle, and belonging to the same tribes, although sometimes with slightly different names. From 1916, Belgium administered both the Congo and Rwanda (having taken over from the Germans), and the border only solidified upon independence. It is crossed daily by countless locals at the two Gisenyi-Goma checkpoints, la Grande Barrière and la Petite Barrière, and en masse during times of danger.
Those locals, families, tradesmen, workers, belong overwhelmingly to two specific tribes, the Hutu and the Tutsi. While each group traditionally features specific racial characteristics, prior to the age of imperialism, membership was loose and could be altered by the acquisition, or loss, of cattle. The ethnic archetypes are real, notwithstanding President Kagame’s strictly enforced laws banning the mention of race, and he himself stands as what a Belgian colonial administrator would have considered the perfect example of the archetypal Tutsi: strikingly tall, lean, with a more narrow nose and face and a slightly lighter tint of skin than his Hutu countrymen. The Hutu archetype was shorter, darker, with a slightly wider nose and face. Yet these were the extremes and intermarriages and changes in fortune could elevate a member of the majority Hutu into the minority cattle-owning Tutsi. The population of Rwanda, then and now, was a seamless blend of people, crossing the spectrum so comprehensively that race and tribe were evident at a glance only in the most extreme cases.
Goma and Gisenyi form one continuous urban area, divided by the border and its two crossings, 1.7 kilometers apart.
The Twa, a third and historically marginalized forest people, are, and have been, a tiny minority in the region, representing approximately two percent of the population and they stand mostly outside this history, although they as a people are equally subject to the aftermath of the genocide. Rwandan tribal flexibility was incompatible with the European racial rigidity of the last century and Belgian administrators and their German predecessors seized upon the distinctions, made them into law, and into a label. Between 1933 and 1935 every Rwandan was issued an identity card, classifying them as irrevocably racially a Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa, as were their children. It was no longer a matter of tribal membership; it was race as identity. The Belgians favored the Tutsi elite, considering the taller, fairer cattle-herders as inherently superior and destined to rule over the darker, poorer Hutu. Six decades later, during the genocide of 1994, those identity cards would often determine who lived and who was killed.
Belgian colonial administration emphatically divided the country by initially providing only the Tutsi minority with education, opportunity, and social and political dominance. As independence drew near, the Belgians shifted their patronage, belatedly embracing democracy, disempowering the Tutsi and supporting the majority Hutu. In 1959, the Hutu revolted, sparking a revolution aided and abetted by the Belgians, which swept the Tutsi from power, abolishing the Tutsi monarchy, killing tens of thousands of Tutsi and driving hundreds of thousands more into exile in neighboring Uganda, Burundi, Tanzania, and the Congo. Among the refugees was a toddler, a boy of unusual drive and genius, who, when his people and country faced their greatest test, rose to the moment and never stepped aside. He is Paul Kagame, the face of modern Rwanda for the past thirty years, and a truly extraordinary man. When the genocide began in April 1994, he was thirty-six years old.
III. Genocide Interrupted
The Tutsi driven from Rwanda were barred from returning for thirty years, and for many this became a countdown with their lives defined by, and building up towards, that moment. The young Kagame joined Yoweri Museveni’s successful rebellion against Ugandan leader Milton Obote and eventually rose to become his Chief of Military Intelligence in 1986. But Kagame and his fellow Rwandan exiles in the Ugandan army were building their own organization, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), and after the thirty-year exile ended and Tutsi exiles were still not welcome into their homeland, the RPF invaded Rwanda in an effort to overthrow the Hutu leadership. Kagame was not involved in the invasion; he was in Kansas, at a training course run by the United States Army which he cut short and flew home after the commander of the ill-fated invasion was killed on only the second day of the operation. Kagame took command of the defeated troops, withdrew them into the mountains, and rebuilt them into a disciplined and efficient fighting force. A force which battled the ruling Hutu government to a standstill and ultimately, three years later, to the negotiating table.
The Arusha Accords of 1993 established a tenuous peace between both factions, but to the ruling Hutu Power government in Kigali, the return of the Tutsi played upon historical fears of prior domination and their response was to prepare for the worst. Dating from even before the signing of the Accords, the government led by President Juvénal Habyarimana purchased tens of thousands of machetes and began a vocal internal propaganda campaign of dehumanization and fearmongering, preaching to the Hutu population that the choices were either to kill or be enslaved. The pressure was nationwide, comprehensive, and saturating and on the evening of 6 April 1994 the tensions boiled over into action when a plane carrying President Habyarimana was shot down over Kigali, killing everyone onboard. No one has ever taken responsibility for the attack, but within hours, organized killings of Tutsi civilians began across the capital and across the country.
For one hundred days, the Hutu Power regime systematically organized and executed the killing of between 800,000 and one million people, the overwhelming majority of whom were Tutsi, mostly in close quarters, often by neighbors they knew, wielding the machetes provided by the government. People were killed in their homes and schools, and when they tried to flee, they were killed in the streets, at roadblocks, and in the churches. When killed by strangers, the determination of life or death, was the race indicated on the identity card. Few were spared and much of it was televised. The world watched from afar and the United Nations watched from within the country and neither intervened despite the clarity and obviousness of the crimes and the legal obligations of the nations of the world to prevent genocide. And all parties knew precisely that this was indeed a genocide; the UN commander on the ground in Kigali had written and warned for weeks of what was coming, only to have his force reduced and his mandate of nonintervention reinforced. The United States forbade its officials from using the word “genocide,” knowing that doing so triggered legal obligations to do something. No one did… except for Paul Kagame and his rebel army.
Kagame’s RPF stormed out of the mountains of northwest Rwanda and conquered the Hutu Power army and drove the killers to flight. This and this alone stopped the genocide. The genocidaires fled across the borders, overwhelmingly to the Congo, with between one and two million Hutu refugees flooding the areas just west of Lake Kivu. Among the civilians, many of whom participated in the killings, were the organizers, the defeated army and the Interahamwe militias responsible for the greatest number of murders. They settled into the camps, armed, organized, and with their command structures intact. As Kagame’s men took stock of a country which had been brutally ripped apart, they pleaded for assistance from the international community to rebuild. The international community, which had refused to lift a finger or spare a soldier (or a dollar) to stop the genocide did finally respond and they did so in force. Vast amounts of aid, money, food, medicine, shelter, and logistics support all arrived and all of it went to the refugee camps housing the killers.
The camps were situated on vast plains from old eruptions of Mount Nyiragongo, impossible to dig into and thus unsuited for sanitation as latrines could not be dug. The water supply was contaminated almost instantly and cholera swept through the camps. Approximately twelve thousand people died in the first month and international footage conflated the tragedies live on television: A genocide and civil war sparked a refugee crisis and health emergency, action was necessary. What was not on television was that the men administering the camps, controlling the aid, were the same killers who administered the genocide. The camps soon became among the best-supplied parts of central Africa, and the defeated genocidal army made no secret of its lack of repentance, while it taxed the rations, drilled its fighters, and recruited from the pool of camp-bound civilians. Many aid workers complained, but decisions were made to feed and help all in the camps rather than withdraw and allow the innocent among them to suffer.
As such, Rwanda watched as the killers rested, recovered, and regrouped, only a few kilometers from the border, protected by the human shields of the civilian refugees and western aid agencies. Kagame’s force had just stopped the genocide of its people with no help from the outside world and then watched as the outside world sprang into action to shelter and protect the killers at the gate. The United Nations, which watched the killing from inside Kigali itself, now protected the killers who continued to broadcast their genocidal propaganda announcing to one and all their intention to return and finish the job. The very nations who refused to utter the word genocide now lectured Rwanda on the sanctity of refugee camps and the necessity for restraint.
This unfinished reckoning of an interrupted genocide is the key to the man-made violence which has riven the region ever since. Inside Rwanda, Kagame instituted the highly effective Gacaca court system, a community-based system of justice and reconciliation designed to address the crimes committed, mete out appropriate justice, and reconcile the nation. It has been an overwhelming success. Outside Rwanda, however, the killers were never confronted, never disarmed, never reconciled and never faced justice. All of the violence in the region since springs from this reality.
IV. Unyielding
Paul Kagame is currently President of Rwanda and has led the nation in one office or another since the end of the genocide in 1994. It is an oversimplification to imply his sole responsibility for the trajectory of the nation since that time, but it is undeniable to note that he assumed control of a nation destroyed, whose treasury was empty, whose infrastructure was wrecked by war, and whose people were traumatized like few before. From that beginning, Rwanda has surged to become one of Africa’s most shining success stories, leveraging international assistance and centralized control to create a near corruption-free society, a bastion of safety and stability, with universal healthcare and education, and sustained economic growth. Criticized and even sanctioned by the West for being insufficiently “democratic,” Kagame’s Rwanda tolerates neither discussions of ethnicity nor political dissent and the government’s policy of tracking down and silencing Rwandan dissidents abroad has not negatively impacted Kagame’s re-election percentages, which are consistently in the high ninety percent range. Neither President Kagame nor the Rwandan public at large seems to be impacted by external criticism or sanctions, which can perhaps be understood when the man at whom the criticism is leveled is the same one who personally witnessed the same critics’ inaction during the genocide and their active assistance to its perpetrators afterwards. While Rwanda has been led by the same steady and decisive hand since the genocide, the Democratic Republic of the Congo has had a strikingly different experience in the same three decades: one of coups, invasions, corruption, and instability. This asymmetry is one of the many reasons tiny Rwanda has been able to continually prevail over its massive adversary and neighbor.
This is also the first reason why the war cannot and does not end. Every attempt to broker peace between Rwanda and the Congo ultimately includes the request which Kagame can never accept: that the perpetrators of the genocide be granted an amnesty and the right to live in perpetuity mere kilometers from the Rwandan border. He has never agreed, and will never agree, to disarm and withdraw his proxy forces on the pledge that the Congolese government or anyone else will be able to enforce the disarmament of the Hutu militias. Without that trust, without the ability of the Congolese government or the United Nations to enforce the terms, Kagame cannot and will not unilaterally disarm and withdraw. The United Nations forfeited its ability to play this role when it transformed, for the first and thus far only time in its history, a peacekeeping force into an offensive attacking one. The manner in which they did so reveals the second reason the war cannot end and all but guarantees that it never will. It shows why a conflict masquerading as a regional affair is actually a global geopolitical hotspot and explains why the United Nations and the great powers of the world have a stake in maintaining the status quo and why no one is coming to the rescue. The reason is the second extraordinary geological anomaly of the region, and it is buried in the ground throughout the Kivus.
V. The Riches
Some of the most coveted minerals on the planet are concentrated just under the surface and sprinkled throughout eastern Congo. Here lies tantalum, tungsten, tin, and gold. The minerals that power the world’s handheld phones, guide its most advanced weapons, and the precious metal which undergirds the world’s sovereign reserves. One mine alone, in Rubaya in North Kivu, provides a substantial percentage of the coltan which refines into tantalum and that mine is administered, taxed, and operated by a rebel movement, not a government or corporation. It continues to churn out the product the world demands, a bit of which is in the device being used to read this very essay. A separate companion essay, “The Laundering,” will discuss the mechanics of this trade, how it works and why, but here the key consideration is the understanding of what the presence of this wealth has done to the region and the conflict raging above it.
This wealth complicates the situation in multiple ways. First, it provides Rwanda with a rationale to unofficially administer portions of the Kivus in perpetuity, extracting and exporting the mineral wealth at scale. Paradoxically, the ultimate resolution of Rwanda’s security dilemma would simultaneously end a significant portion of its revenue stream, and while Kagame may or may not be willing to do so, he would never make that choice based on a promise the other side has shown itself unable to enforce. Second, Congo’s inability to enforce has become an asset in itself, as a strong and well-governed Congo would administer its own riches in the Kivus, set its own prices, and select its own customers. An ungoverned eastern Congo is a land of opportunity, run by militias and warlords, with minerals unaudited and sold at a discount to willing buyers and downstream purchasers around the world. For those powers, it is not only the discounted price which is the benefit, it is that the status quo protects access at all. This is the third and most consequential complication. The outsized importance of these resources makes them a matter of geostrategic competition rather than simply a line item on central African balance sheets or the internal ledgers of various rebel movements. Washington and Beijing, among others, vie for access to these minerals and neither is willing to risk an outcome of a strong Congo seizing control and choosing one partner over the other. Whereas Rwanda’s motivation in entering eastern Congo was to resolve the crimes of 1994, the great powers’ motivation is to ensure that the resolution is never complete, as it threatens the status quo and the status quo means guaranteed cheap access to the most strategic and sought-after minerals on Earth.
VI. The Task
The status quo has not been static for the past three decades. This author has visited Rwanda many times over the past decades, almost always including Lake Kivu, and has never seen a nation overtly at war. This is because Rwanda has fought the Congo for thirty years using proxies, and proxies, by their very nature, are never fully under their sponsor’s control. The first was the largest and the most successful. After two years of watching the world feed, shelter, and protect the genocidal forces camped in the outskirts of Goma, with no indications of anything other than stability, Rwanda acted. They chose a rebel leader, the Congolese Laurent Kabila, and sponsored his rebellion, which broke the camps by force and scattered the killers deep into the countryside. Armed by its patron, the rebels swept across the then-Zaire, taking Kinshasa by force in 1997 and ending the thirty-two-year dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko, driving him into exile. Kabila renamed the country the Democratic Republic of Congo and named himself its President.
Each proxy force has been replaced by the next. The génocidaires and the United Nations mission have been continuous throughout.
In less than a year, he turned on his former sponsors and ordered all Rwandan forces out of the country. Rwanda’s response established the pattern in place today: with the loss of control of one rebel group, they established control of another, in the same place, with the same responsibilities: maintain the buffer and continue the revenue. In 1998 Rwanda backed another rebellion, but unlike the first one, this did not topple the Congolese regime and instead drew in nine neighboring African states, and became Africa’s Great War, killing five million people. Kabila himself was a casualty, assassinated by his own bodyguards, and replaced by his own son Joseph, who ruled for the following eighteen years.
Formally, Africa’s Great War ended in 2003, with a peace agreement and the incorporation of Rwanda’s primary proxy, the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie, into the Congolese Army. In reality, this political agreement requested one rebel group to join forces with the side they had just battled to a standstill, and many declined. One of them was a Congolese Tutsi named Laurent Nkunda. Refusing the terms of the peace agreement, he withdrew his fighters and formed a new movement, the CNDP (the National Congress for the Defense of the People). The name was the mission: the protection of the ethnic Tutsi from the Hutu militias, still at large, still armed, and at times supplied by the Congolese state. Nkunda and the CNDP’s task was clear, and it has been the constant demand from Kigali: hold and control the Kivus; suppress the Hutu killers, destroy them if possible, but keep them far from the borders; keep the mineral wealth flowing; do not exceed the mandate and attempt to conquer the Congo. This tasking is specific and it is not typical for rebel groups. Nkunda’s assignment, and that of his successors, was neither liberation nor conquest, it was the maintenance of a status quo.
He exceeded his brief. An effective and charismatic leader, Nkunda expanded his area of control, routing the Congolese army, marching to the gates of Goma and speaking openly of repeating Laurent Kabila’s accomplishment of seizing the capital and the whole of the country. He became an internationally known figure, receiving journalists in his base camp in the Virunga volcanoes and speaking and acting like a slightly eccentric head of state and a warrior prince with his signature silver tipped cane; not like the proxy warlord Kigali required him to be. Kigali’s status quo required a carefully calibrated force which would not draw the scrutiny of the world, would not threaten a renewal of Africa’s Great War and the intervention of neighboring states. And thus, Nkunda was removed. In 2009, he was placed under house arrest in Rwanda, where he is believed to remain to this day, uncharged, untried, and unavailable for comment.
In that year, Kigali and Kinshasa reached an understanding in which Rwandan troops themselves would cross the border and engage directly with Hutu rebels, who promptly dissolved into the jungles. Nkunda’s group, the CNDP, was reluctantly absorbed into the Congolese army but again rebelled a few years later, regrouping as M23, the March 23 Movement, with the same mandate, same goals, and same limitations as their predecessors.
VII. Better Never Than Late
Throughout all of this the United Nations has been present, in Rwanda as UNAMIR/MINUAR with their blue helmets warning about, and then watching, the genocide, then administering the refugee camps, and finally deploying the largest and most expensive peacekeeping mission in its history, MONUC (later MONUSCO), in the Kivus. For almost twenty years, the United Nations claimed it did not have the ability to intervene, but in reality it had the ability, the power, and the opportunity. Then, a situation arose which proved that all that had been missing was the will, and the United Nations did once what it has not done before or since and transformed an avowedly neutral force into a lethal weapon of offensive warfare and unleashed it.
In November 2012, M23 forces seized the city of Goma, unchallenged by any of the 20,000 UN peacekeepers stationed in the country, whose mandate only permitted force to protect civilians in immediate danger. However, this time, Kigali was politically vulnerable in a way unlike ever before. The United Nations Security Council, well aware of the illegal and unregulated extraction of the conflict minerals of the Kivus, had created a Group of Experts to investigate and report on the situation. They uncovered and produced compelling evidence of the proxy relationship between Rwanda and M23 and the routine extraction and export of Congo’s mineral wealth. The United States, United Kingdom, European Union, and the African Development Bank, among others, suspended one hundred fifty million dollars of aid from Rwanda, roughly forty percent of its budget. The press turned against Kagame. On 28 March 2013, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 2098 which created within MONUSCO an unprecedented Force Intervention Brigade (FIB), three thousand soldiers from South Africa, Tanzania, and Malawi, armed and tasked with offensive operations, on its own initiative, to neutralize and disarm armed groups in the Kivus. The Security Council was uncomfortable enough about this precedent to deny in writing that it could even be considered one. In October and November of 2013, the United Nations abandoned its neutrality and the FIB joined forces with the Congolese Army and attacked and defeated M23, driving it from the Congo in a matter of six weeks.
Thus, the UN itself revealed that it required approximately a month and a half, three thousand men, and a few signatures to defeat a rebel group in the region. Far from an unavoidable tragedy, such as an eruption from Nyiragongo, or a degassing from Lake Kivu, the man-made violence could indeed be stopped. So why did the United Nations choose to abandon its neutrality not to stop a genocide or to mete out justice to its perpetrators, but instead to target the one group maintaining the status quo? In that autumn of 2013 there were more than just one “armed group” in the Kivus. One was M23 and it was driven from Goma and back into Rwanda. Another was the FDLR, the militia descended and evolved from the Hutu Power army and the Interahamwe militia who committed the genocide in 1994, the very group M23 was tasked with keeping at bay. The FIB showed its capacity to defeat armed groups but it targeted only M23, never once directing the same force against the FDLR. The one organization which had been witness to the entire history, yet claimed regretful impotence to counter the violence, opted to change their mandate and finally took military action against the one force still fighting the genocidaires. This was a political decision, one taken in the context of the growing great power interest in Kivu’s mineral wealth, and was made because overt Rwandan control of the Kivus carried the same risk that over Congolese control did: potential restricted access and greater cost to the tantalum, tin, tungsten, and gold below.
The FIB won that battle, although M23 has returned to the Kivus and controls Goma itself today. But the victory cost the United Nations something dear. The protected status of peacekeepers as noncombatants depends upon them not being a party to a conflict and the FIB made MONUSCO and the United Nations a party to this one. When M23 marched yet again into Goma in January of 2025 they refused the UN any role in negotiations, considering it a belligerent party rather than a neutral arbiter. The famous Blue Helmets came and traded their neutrality to win a battle, not to end a war, or stop a genocide, or provide justice delayed, but to destroy the one force holding the genocidaires at bay while leaving the killers untouched. The choice was a political one, in which the great powers preferred cheap and unaudited access to stolen mineral wealth guaranteed by instability and threatened by a strong Rwanda or Congo. Better, for the people of the Kivus, that they had never come at all.
VIII. Contagion
It is not only violence which is contagious and it is not only wealth which emerges from the fertile ground in the Kivus. The caves and mine shafts are home to the fruit bats which carry Marburg virus, an Ebola variant which kills, swiftly and horribly, the vast majority of those it infects. Often, those are the men forced underground in the informal mines of eastern Congo. In 1998, along with its ore, Marburg virus leached out of the Gorumbwa gold mine in northeastern Congo. It killed 128 of the 154 miners infected, ninety-four percent of whom had worked in the underground mines rather than open pits. Ongoing violence kept the outside world from investigating for six months and the outbreak ended because the mine flooded and the patients died. Twenty-six years later, Rwanda itself recorded a Marburg outbreak, traced to a young man exposed to bats in a mining cave and the cycle continued.
The great outbreak of 2018 swept across the Kivus and the greater region, and was used by the Congolese government to cancel elections, control the population, and limit freedom of movement. For a population accustomed to the ever-present threat of violence from man and nature, government overreach was a step too far and they revolted, attacking treatment centers and health workers. Foreign press, aghast and unable to comprehend that the significantly greater daily danger was malaria, reacted with condemnation, confusion, and hostility.
In the first months of this year, Ebola itself was again detected in the gold-mining town of Mongbwalu. It has expanded to become the second-largest Ebola outbreak yet recorded, of a strain as yet without treatment. Arguments have been made in the press that the great powers ought to intervene, not for humanitarian reasons per se, but in order to secure preferential access to the mineral wealth beneath the dead, the dying, and the at-risk. By the time of writing, over twenty-five hundred deaths have been reported, primarily in Ituri province with cases in six provinces in eastern Congo; the outbreak in Uganda has been contained as of the end of July according to the Ugandan government. The United Nations continues to cite regional insecurity as a reason for insufficient prevention or mitigation.
Principal mineral sites and filovirus outbreaks, 1998 to 2026: the wealth and the disease come out of the same ground.
Variants of the same brutal disease, in the same region, contested by variants of the same rebel groups, recurring over three decades, alongside the same volcanic threat and the same gigatons of methane and carbon dioxide lurking under the surface of the lake all target the same people. They are trapped in a cycle of violence both natural and man-made, guaranteed to continue not only by the heat of geologic patterns but by the cold calculus of the geopolitical chessboard. It is a perpetual violence machine.
IX. Three Solutions
There are three known ways this situation can be resolved and two of them have been actively and intentionally resisted. The third cannot. Perhaps the optimal solution is the least likely: a strong, well-governed, and organized Congolese state able to peacefully control and administer all of its own territory. This scenario is ostensibly the basis for every peace plan under consideration since the official end of Africa’s Great War and, in polite society, is the only one ever discussed. A strong Congo tolerates no rebel forces, has no Rwandan buffer zone, and manages the entirety of its natural resource wealth. Simultaneously described as both the objective and unrealistic, it has not and will not come to pass because the parties able to prevent it have concrete reasons to do so.
Thus we come to the beneficiaries of the status quo, from the local to the global. Kigali routinely exports substantially more gold and coltan than it produces within its own borders. Kinshasa habitually uses the insecurity in its east as a handy scapegoat for all manner of problems and leverages the situation to extract significant foreign aid. Even more locally, Congolese officers have been documented selling their ammunition and supplies to M23 for personal profit, and the rebels support themselves by the taxes they collect from the mines they are tasked with administering. The next step outward are the businessmen, purchasers, traders, smelters, refiners, and middlemen, in Dubai, in Thailand and throughout the East, all of whom obtain precious raw materials discounted precisely because they are stolen. These are the launderers who then sell the minerals so critical to the modern world to the highest bidder, the great powers. Those powers know that a strong and well-functioning Congo could and would institute chains of custody, set prices, and possibly choose favored or exclusive buyers. The importance of the minerals makes no power willing to risk the possibility of losing access to them; cheap and available access is only possible in the absence of a strong Congo and the very powers suggesting it in writing are subverting it in practice.
The second solution is the codification of Rwandan control of the Kivus, their official annexation. This is the status quo without the benefits to the great powers. As in the case of a strong Congo, an already efficient Rwanda officially controlling the minerals beneath the Kivus would automatically end the unofficial supply chain and might choose to whom to grant or restrict access. As such, this solution is also quietly rejected. The current border is indeed arbitrary and was indeed created by Europeans unconcerned about tribal or ethnic history or continuity, yet a real border it is and the inhabitants of the Kivus are Congolese, in addition to whatever tribal group they claim. Modern borders do change, either by negotiation, as in the case of the creation of South Sudan and Eritrea or by force, as shown by the steadily shrinking Ukraine. De jure Rwandan control is different from de facto rule, and without the consent of the inhabitants, Rwanda would inherit more than territory, they would inherit an occupation. An occupation is a war of a different sort and while not a solution, it would be an ending of sorts, if it were ever to be allowed.
Thus, the status quo reigns, and eastern Congo exists in a gray ill-defined zone that serves all parties other than the people who actually live there, in the shadow of the volcano, along the shores of the lake, on the fringes of the mines. Rwanda cannot officially take the Kivus and Congo cannot control them and the resulting instability is precisely the geopolitical outcome the great powers need to ensure their access to the most precious commodities the world can offer.
The third solution, and perhaps the final one, is Mother Nature’s and brings us back to where our story began, swimming in a bubbling lake gazing at lava fields leading up to a smoking volcano. At any moment, now or in a different century, Nyiragongo may erupt in such a way as to trigger the degassing of Kivu and release from its watery prison the gigatons of lethal gas, ending the lives of all in its way and the machinations of everyone else. A tragedy of that magnitude is unknown in human history and it would leave untouched the minerals below. Without doubt, a ruthless world would begin calculating instantly the recovery of their supply chain. But it would be a resetting of the scenario, with new parameters, new problems, and new solutions.
There is no mitigation strategy for the volcano and the lake. But perhaps the great powers, led by the United Nations, may for once consider the value of the lives of the people of the Great Lakes, create transparent solutions not only for the acquisition of mineral wealth, but for a justice long denied and deferred, and put a stop, once and for all, to the perpetual violence machine. Until that time, the innocent civilians will live as they always have, trapped in a cycle they did not create and are powerless to end.
* For simplicity, I have referred to the Belgian Congo, Zaire, and the Democratic Republic of Congo as simply “the Congo.” This is not meant to belittle or ignore the separate country the Republic of Congo, whose capital, Brazzaville, I was fortunate to visit years ago and whose hospitality I recall well and appreciate. It does not play a role in the above essay.
