Your Excellency Nicholas Checker,

Welcome to a region that has taught the world more about resilience than it has ever received in return. I write to you not as a diplomat, but as something perhaps more stubborn: a scholar who studies peace, and a Genocide survivor who has bled for it.

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I was born in Rusizi, where Rwanda, Burundi, and DR Congo touch shoulders like siblings. I grew up believing a border is a line drawn by strangers, not a wall built by God. That belief has been tested by 30 years of war, but it has not been broken.

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You arrive at a moment when American interest in the Great Lakes Region has never been higher: diplomacy, minerals, strategy. These are legitimate interests, and I do not pretend otherwise. But interest without integrity becomes extraction, and extraction without justice becomes another chapter of the same old wound. Peace, Ambassador, must sit above all else – because without it, minerals become curses, and diplomacy becomes theater performed over graves.

A fear your country knows intimately

I must speak plainly about a fear that Rwandans carry in their bones – a fear your own nation knows well, even if it has not always acted on that knowledge.

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The Kinshasa-backed FDLR genocidal militia are not an abstraction to us. They are the architects and heirs of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, a genocide the United States, by its own admission, failed to prevent or stop.

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A failure Samantha Power herself has documented in painful detail. President Clinton stood on Rwandan soil in 1998 and called that failure a mistake of the world. President Bush later echoed similar words of regret. Apologies were offered, and we received them with the dignity survivors must hold onto. But an apology is not a policy, Ambassador. A fear proven real by history does not evaporate with time – it becomes a permanent variable in how a nation calculates its own survival. When Rwanda looks across its western border and still sees armed criminals who once carried machetes now carrying rifles, integrated into political and military structures inside DR Congo, that fear is not paranoia. It is memory doing its job.

Facts, not sides

Rwanda and DR Congo are both exhausted, both frustrated, and both quick to accuse the other. I will not ask you to choose a side; I ask you to choose facts.

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DR Congo is one of the poorest nations by economic measure, yet one of the richest on earth in minerals, a contradiction sustained, tragically, by war itself. Peace would cost certain networks more than war does, and that is precisely why peace is resisted.

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Every country protects itself according to its deepest nightmare. Rwanda’s nightmare is a genocidal ideology that was defeated militarily but never fully extinguished, only pushed across a border. DR Congo’s nightmare is non-ending violence, foreign domination and occupation. Both fears are real. Both deserve to be understood, not weaponized.

A generation born in exile

There is a generation of Congolese – Banyamulenge and others – who were born inside Rwanda’s refugee camps, because their parents fled DR Congo in 1996-97 when they were being hunted simply for who they were. I ask you, humbly but urgently: visit Kiziba Refugee Camp.

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Do not send a delegation. Go yourself. Sit with a grandmother who has waited 30 years to go home. Listen to a young man who has never seen the country his passport does not even name. Ask why that is the case. Statistics cannot carry what their voices will tell you in one afternoon.

What real intelligence requires

Your intelligence services understand something I only know as a scholar: information without intention is incomplete. Knowing troop positions is not enough, one must know why. Why does the DR Congo find it strategically acceptable to partner with FDLR despite its genocidal history and ideology?

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When precisely were Rwanda’s current security measures established, and in direct response to what escalation? Why are Ugandan troops operating in North Kivu, and under what understanding? These are not rhetorical questions; they are the architecture of any durable peace. Skip them, and Washington will simply be arbitrating symptoms while the disease multiplies.

The ask

So, this is what I ask of you, Ambassador, on behalf of a region and the generations still unborn in it:

1. Insist, unambiguously, that the killing stop – and that any intent to destroy an ethnic group, wherever it hides, be named for what it is.
2. Demand clarity of intention from every armed actor – FDLR, national armies, AFC/M23, and foreign forces alike, before demanding compliance.
3. Visit Kiziba. Let a refugee’s testimony inform your policy before a minister’s briefing does.
4. Treat Congo’s mineral wealth as a reason to build institutions, not merely supply chains.
5. Rebuild trust. Not just with Rwanda or DR Congo alone, but with a region that has watched great powers arrive for resources and leave before reconciliation.

Otherwise, Ambassador, we will simply be having this same conversation with your successor, 20 years from now, apologizing again for what could have been prevented today.

Peace is not naïve. It is the only strategy sustainable enough for the children being born, right now, in a camp you have not yet visited.

With respect and hope,

Hyppolite Ntigurirwa

Scholar, Survivor, Son of the Great Lakes

A Yale World Fellow (2020)