Stop calling them remnants: the FDLR is a political-ideological system

President Kagame, speaking at the opening Umushyikirano, posed a question that cuts through the usual arithmetic of conflict: how does one count a threat when genocide ideology is spoken not only by militiamen, but by presidents, their aides, and senior state officials? The danger is not limited to the number of FDLR combatants. For years, the Kinshasa-backed FDLR, a genocidal force, have been dismissed as remnants. In reality, they are organizers: of fighters, of ideology, of territory, and of a diaspora infrastructure that has survived three decades without renouncing its original objective. On 3 February 2026, journalist Laurent Larcher published an investigative article on La Croix. What emerged was not a story of residual violence, but of continuity: a defeated genocidal project that adapted, and institutionalized itself after 1994. The FDLR were only meant to be a temporary militia in exile. They are the political and military continuation of the regime that lost power in Rwanda when the RPA forces, then dismissed as “rebel infiltrators,” interupted the genocide against the Tutsi. When that project failed to retake Rwanda, it shifted terrain. In eastern Congo, the FDLR succeeded in effectively balkanizing parts of the Kivus, installing a parallel administration with executive leadership, intelligence services, taxation, recruitment, and military command. As La Croix documents, this structure is a political arrangement that functions with the support of the governments in Kinshasa and Gitega. This continuity is not accidental. The armed wing of the FDLR, the FOCA, is structured along the lines of Ex-FAR, the former Rwandan army, down to battalions, intelligence units active as far as Rwanda, special forces, and officer-training schools. One detail from La Croix is especially revealing: the preservation of CRAP units, deep reconnaissance and action commandos, originally created in 1991 by French military advisers under Champs Élysée, the French presidency. Organisations planning extinction do not preserve doctrine; organisations planning a return usually do. Ideology sustains this system. “Hutu Power” did not disappear after 1994; it was rebranded as “Bantu Power,” recast in the language of autochthony, pan-Africanism, and patriotism. In this worldview, Tutsis are once again framed as foreign invaders whose extermination becomes an act of liberation, not only in Rwanda, but across the Great Lakes. Genocide is thus normalized without being named. The project is financed through violence and extraction. For over thirty years, FDLR networks have controlled mineral-rich zones, enforced charcoal trafficking systems, and terrorised Congolese civilians into providing food, labour, and shelter. This is not collateral abuse; it is the economic model. What distinguishes the current phase is formal political integration. As La Croix details, FDLR cadres have been absorbed into Wazalendo militias and embedded within the FARDC, both in the Kivus and within security structures linked to Kinshasa itself. This integration has occurred under the presidency of Félix Tshisekedi, transforming a militia force into a state-adjacent instrument. The social groundwork for Tutsi extermination in 2026 is not being laid by rogue actors, but by presidents and governments who know exactly what these forces represent, and choose to empower them. When President Kagame warns that genocidal forces are reorganizing under state protection in, he is describing a system long corroborated. Peace in the Great Lakes Region will remain impossible as long as the FDLR are treated as a security nuisance rather than what they are: a political project of unfinished genocide, administered from the Kivus outward. Recognizing that reality is not provocation. It is the baseline for honesty.

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Stop calling them remnants: the FDLR is a political-ideological system