It claims it wants to protect Tutsis against militant Hutu groups, including the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), which counts among its forces elements accused of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Originally part of the Congolese military, M23 is dominated by Congolese Tutsis. The UN Security Council’s Group of Experts on the DRC has previously implicated Rwanda of backing M23. The DRC has blamed Rwanda for reorganizing and arming the latest insurgency. There was no official explanation as to why or to where the majority of the ex-combatants had gone.

By 2017, however, only some 390 were still at Bihanga. A month later, some 1,374 were dispatched to Uganda’s Bihanga Military Training School for demobilization. In November 2013, another cohort of some 1,500 M23 fighters-the remainder of the rebel group-surrendered to the Ugandan military after their strongholds were overrun by UN and FARDC forces. Embassy which transferred him to the International Criminal Court to face war crimes charges.

“The Terminator,” handed himself over to the U.S. That March, one cohort of hundreds of fighters fled to Rwanda. Between March and November 2013, M23 suffered numerous defeats at the hands of the Congolese military, the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO), and the Force Intervention Brigade (FIB) consisting of Tanzanian, Malawian, and South African troops. In June, another M23 prong operating farther north overran the border city of Bunagana, forcing Congolese soldiers to flee to Uganda.Īll this has come as a surprise given the 10-year lull in M23 activities. They then pushed south toward the provincial capital, Goma, and across Rwanda’s border city of Gisenyi. In May, they overran the Rumangabo military base, FARDC’s largest military installation in North Kivu. In October and November 2021, Uganda had been a target of suicide bomb attacks that President Yoweri Museveni blamed on the ADF.īy March 2022, M23 had seized key parts of Rutshuru territory, bordering Uganda and Rwanda. This occurred the same month that Ugandan forces were deployed to the province to pursue the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a Ugandan rebel group that also operates in North Kivu and Ituri. The current crisis erupted in November 2021, when the largely defunct March 23 Movement (M23) militant group carried out lightning strikes on military positions of the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (FARDC) in the villages of Chanzu and Runyonyi in North Kivu Province, just west of the Ugandan and Rwandan borders. Ambassador Said Djinnit, the former Special Envoy of the United Nations Secretary General for the Great Lakes Region contributed to the analysis.Paul Nantulya, a research associate at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies who also worked on the South African-led Lusaka Agreement peace process and the Inter-Congolese Dialogue.Cedric De Coning, a co-director at the Norwegian Institute for International Affairs and former advisor to the African Union’s Peace Support Operations Division.Claude Gatebuke, the director of the African Great Lakes Action Network.Kwezi Mngqibisa, a senior research fellow at the University of Johannesburg who previously worked on South African efforts to broker peace between Rwanda and the DRC as part of the Lusaka Agreement.To help clarify what is driving the worsening security situation, the Africa Center for Strategic Studies compiled this explainer drawing on the insights of multiple experts including: The myriad actors and interests involved, however, often defy easy analysis. The precipitous escalation of the security crisis in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) risks reigniting interstate conflict in the Great Lakes region. The seeming rapid deterioration of security in the eastern DRC and resurgence of M23 are an outcome of longstanding regional rivalries between Rwanda and Uganda.

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