In January, the rebel group M23 captured Goma, the largest city in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The ethnic Tutsi militants, who have been intermittently fighting the DRC government for years, restarted their rebellion in 2021 and have rapidly captured territory since the beginning of 2025. Since taking Goma, they have moved to the south and also captured the large city Bukavu, giving them control over an area that is home to millions of people.
M23 is widely believed to be backed by Rwanda and its long-time President Paul Kagame, a charge that Kagame has always denied. This troubled region remains racked by brutal inter-ethnic and multinational conflict featuring countless armed factions. Perhaps more importantly, it contains some of the world’s largest deposits of key minerals, such as cobalt, which is necessary for the manufacture of electronics. Across a nearly impassable rainforest from the capital of Kinshasa, eastern Congo has proven impossible for the central government to rule, but the African Union and United Nations remain devoted to maintaining historic borders no matter how impractical. There is little the United States can or should do to help stabilize the situation, but it is long past time to consider accepting the breakup of the DRC.
The current troubles in in the eastern Congo date back to the 1994 Rwandan genocide, a story that is widely known but poorly understood. Western experts, in an extension of popular academic theories, have found it convenient to claim that the division of Hutus and Tustis was made up by Europeans as a method of colonial control. Although it was used that way, and their legal classification system was arbitrary and based on physical characteristics, this division within the society of this region dated back hundreds of years prior to the arrival of colonialism. The most simple way to understand the division is that the Tutsis were a noble class who kept cattle, while the Hutus were agriculturalist serfs. The colonialists ruled through the Tutsi monarchy, and Hutus overthrew both in the 1959 Rwandan Revolution.
In 1990, the Rwanda Patriotic Front, made up of Tutsi refugees based in Uganda, started a civil war trying to take back control of Rwanda, and in response in 1994 Hutu extremists began a genocide against the country’s Tutsi population. Ultimately, the RPF were able to chase the Hutu militants out of the country and won the civil war. In a dark historical irony, though the world had stood mostly silently during the genocide, or in France’s case sided with the government, once the genocidaires were exiled in the eastern DRC, their well-being became a major international concern. The Hutus who committed genocide received more assistance than the original victims; granted, the humanitarian needs were genuine, as they were facing famine and retributive violence.
Hellbound and Down 