Misinformation doesn’t just mislead, it manufactures fools. Intelligent fools. Tribalistic activists. Empty tins that recycle nonsense, at the expense of what makes sense. They cover trends instead of stories: enter the 2025 peace agreement between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda. While media outlets lazily echo: “It won’t work because Rwandan proxy – and Congolese aggressor – M23 wasn’t included,” they conveniently ignore the actual content of the document. A legal text that calmly, repeatedly, and unequivocally acknowledges the reality their narratives have never had the space to publish. This war, and the innocent blood spilled in the east of DR Congo, was never on M23’s hands. This war has never been about Rwandan aggression. The agreement defines the only real foreign threat operating in the East of DR Congo for decades: the FDLR. I often hear that “the roots” of this conflict are too complex for a soundbite. But they aren’t. The truth is, they just don’t want to talk about the FDLR – because doing so traces this war not to rebel camps in the bush, but to European drawing rooms that hosted genocidal collaboration. The FDLR aren’t just any militia. They are the military and ideological remnants of the regime that committed the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda – the very regime France, under Mitterrand, hand-delivered into DR Congo through Operation Turquoise. A shipment ordered by a DR Congo president, Mobutu, who imported the violence of genocide directly into the Rwandophone Congolese communities he was supposed to serve. These weren’t refugees – they were génocidaires. Left fully armed, with both ammunition and racist propaganda, they crossed into DR Congo. And as Rwanda began to rebuild from that hell, the world pretended not to see what came next: they were never prosecuted, never disarmed, never neutralised, and never relocated away from our borders as international law demands – as Tanzania, for example, did at the time. Instead, they rebranded. First as ALIR, and later baptized themselves in Congolese blood as FDLR – tropical Nazis carrying out a regional agenda of ethnic extermination. Now, 30 years later, it is their violence, their hate, their ideology that the 2025 peace agreement finally names as the core threat to peace. You’ll hear that a child is sexually assaulted every minute in eastern DR Congo – but not that it was the atrocities committed by these same men in Rwanda that first led the world to recognise sexual violence as a tool of war. You’ll hear about child soldiers, but not that Rwanda’s liberators were themselves children, born as refugees to ethnic hatred. You’ll hear about displaced families, but not about the Congolese children who were made refugees by the FDLR, who are now grown – and back to defend their people against the same killers. The peace agreement corrects the record – one long distorted by diplomacy filtered through colonial guilt, and by propaganda from within DR Congo’s elite. The same elites who, for decades, have refused to “create the conditions necessary for the voluntary return and reintegration of refugees and internally displaced persons,” a responsibility DR Congo accepted under the 2010 Tripartite Agreement – but has consistently failed to uphold. The same elites who embedded FDLR génocidaires into the Congolese army (FARDC), and who exported anti-Rwandophone propaganda instead of confronting the genocide ideology thriving under their watch. But this agreement – for once – tells the truth. Article 2.4 demands that DR Congo “cease all direct or indirect support to the FDLR and any other armed groups operating in violation of international law.” It goes further – requiring Kinshasa to “demonstrate good faith efforts in dismantling these groups,” especially those identified as foreign threats to peace in the region. In place of Rwanda’s previous defensive posture, Article 3.1 establishes a “Joint Security Mechanism” between DR Congo and Rwanda, aimed at the “neutralization of the FDLR and its affiliates.” According to Article 3.3, FARDC will no longer coordinate with or conduct operations alongside the FDLR, and instead will act “in concert with the RDF under international observation” to eliminate “non-state armed actors engaged in hate-based violence.” On the civil front, Article 4.2 mandates a shift: the “eradication of ethnic hate speech, discriminatory propaganda, and the institutionalization of social cohesion policies.” And let’s be clear: this is not the first time these responsibilities were assigned. DR Congo was legally tasked with refugee return and disarmament of genocidal groups over 15 years ago. This time, joint implementation with Rwanda is not a diplomatic option – it is the structured replacement of Rwanda’s sovereign right to defend its people, with a regional and enforceable mechanism for peace. So no – Rwanda is not the aggressor. And M23 – whom the agreement mentions only in reference to future talks to be hosted in Doha, with their actual state of origin – is not a Rwandan proxy. The RDF is not invading. Rwanda is not authoring war. Rwanda is co-signing peace. And the only thing standing in the way of that peace is not a foreign rebel group, but a DR Congo-backed genocidal ideology that has outgrown its hosts. An ideology planted by Europe, nurtured through Congolese complicity, and left to rot and rot the region. An ideology that survived because too many refused to name it. Until now.
