The story told about Central Africa is deceptively simple: Rwanda destabilizes DR Congo for minerals and regional dominance. Kinshasa, even calls it Genocide, ‘Genocaust’ they say. It travels well in Western media because it flatters a familiar worldview: Africa as a problem to be managed, borders as accidental, populations as pawns, and violence as proof that African sovereignty cannot be trusted. Remove that managerial premise, and the narrative collapses. The real threat is not Rwanda’s strength: it’s the possibility that DR Congo and Rwanda might one day build together. Realism suggests a simpler question: who benefits from Congo remaining ungoverned? Instability in eastern DR Congo benefits far more powerful, and wealthy, actors than Kigali. Take for example, Antwerp, known as the diamond capital of the world. Located in Belgium, a country with no diamond mines. Instability enables extraction. Instability enables smuggling. Instability enables bargaining. Instability keeps DR Congo from becoming a power center rather than a resource basin. Follow incentives, you don’t need conspiracy theories. Rwanda’s role becomes problematic only when you understand what it represents: a sovereign African state that rebuilt itself from zero, refused to become a humanitarian ward, and exercised competence rather than dependence. That alone threatens the tactit Western doctrine that Africa must be managed. That model is dangerous, not because it is authoritarian or flawed, but because it proves Africa is not condemned to divisionism. The nightmare scenario for external actors is not Rwanda destabilizing DR Congo. It is DR Congo aligning with Rwanda. A Congolese surface area with Rwandan state pan-Africanism, mineral wealth, and collective bargaining power would rewrite Africa’s strategic map. It would instantly become the continent’s, if not the world’s, largest power. The international system has never been neutral on this point. At the United Nations in 1994-1996, during Kofi Annan’s tenure at the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, UN delegates and specialists seriously considered partitioning Rwanda into a Hutu state and a Tutsi state as a “stability solution.” The implication was stunning: rather than restore a sovereign Rwandan republic, the international community was prepared to reward genocide by administratively validating its outcome. If the génocidaires had succeeded in erasing Tutsi from Rwanda, their “work” would have been completed through UN cartography instead of machetes. Rwanda rejected the logic then. It rejects it now. In her recent interview on the Rwanda-Congo crisis, filmmaker Sonia Rolland named the geopolitical fear directly: “If Congo were to ally with Rwanda today, it would become the leading economic power in Africa.” She did not mean it as a metaphor. She meant minerals, landmass, population, state capacity, logistics, and sovereignty. She meant a DR Congo the size of Western Europe paired with a Rwandan governance model of unity that delivered 8 percent growth for over a decade, 64 percent women in Parliament, compulsory schooling, and civilian security, all in thirty years. Some analysts compare Rwanda to Iraq or Afghanistan as if Kigali were a proxy fulfilling Western regional ambitions. But the comparison collapses under the most basic question: why would the West want a strong, sovereign, unmanageable Rwanda? The West didn’t want a strong Saddam. It didn’t want a strong Afghanistan, nor a strong Libya. It wanted pliable stability. Rwanda is many things, but pliable is not one of them. No serious analysis of the region can ignore the basic fact that the Congolese state has not exercised monopoly of force over its territory for three decades. DR Congo has remained a fragmented security environment. The ADF kills in Beni. CODECO slaughters in Ituri. FDLR fighters, direct génocidaire lineages, persist in FARDC standard-issue uniform. In Kwilu/Kwamouth last week, 173 internally displaced people died due to the absence of state protection. The Mobondo militia now operate at the gates of Kinshasa, the capital. The UN’s own count of armed actors in eastern DR Congo has been put at over 100 for over a decade. Meanwhile, MONUSCO has been physically present for 27 years, at a burn rate of over a billion dollars annually, without either demobilization or state restoration. The UN mission in Rwanda exited in under three years once the genocide was halted on their watch. The contrast speaks for itself: in the DR Congo, the vacuum has outlived every administration. The narrative war requires erasing origins. This region cannot be understood without the 1994 overflow. The genocide did not “end” in Rwanda; it detonated into Zaire. Two million people crossed into North and South Kivu. Camps were not humanitarian sanctuaries, they were rear bases for attacks against Rwanda. Génocidaires controlled food distribution, suppressed dissent, and reorganized under foreign and humanitarian protection. Ex-FAR and Interahamwe fighters integrated into the Congolese army. The FDLR emerged. Kinshasa never dismantled them. The international system knew all of this as it happened. Sonia Rolland broke a taboo that most analysts avoid because it demands specificity: “The first thing they did was target all the Tutsis in those camps... they continued the ‘work’... and as soon as President Kagame brought back that population, who remained as targets except the Tutsi rwandophones of North and South Kivu?” Rwanda’s “crime” is not malice. Rwanda’s crime is competence. A competent African state threatens a century-long architecture built on fragmentation, humanitarian dependency, and externally managed sovereignty. As Sonia Rolland noted: “Yes, it was Rwandans who were at the origin of certain problems, those who fled Rwanda in 1994, not those who live and share Rwanda today. Those whose children don’t even know who is Hutu or Tutsi.” So ask the only question that matters in International Relations: who benefits from allowing génocidaires and FDLR lineages to target Congolese Tutsi? Not Kigali. And certainly not Africa.
