Relations among neighbouring states are never free of disagreement. Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo) share borders, communities, trade, history and serious security concerns. Precisely because their futures are inseparable, disagreements among them should be managed through evidence, reciprocity and sustained political dialogue.
What should not become normal is the repeated attempt by Burundi and the DRC to make Rwanda the explanation for almost every political, military or institutional failure confronting them. Lack of good governance in both countries should not be tolerated by blaming Rwanda as a scapegoat.
The pattern is now familiar. When RED-Tabara attacks Burundi, Rwanda is accused. When grenades explode in Bujumbura, Rwanda is invoked. When Kenya expels irregular Burundian citizens , Burundi President shamelessly imputes that on Rwanda. When the Congolese army loses territory, Rwanda becomes the entire explanation. When Congolese citizens rebel against exclusion, insecurity or persecution, their grievances are denied political substance and attributed to Kigali. When military developments in South Kivu turn against the expectations of Bujumbura and Kinshasa, Rwanda is again presented as the source of the crisis and the West echoes that with no verification.
Burundi and the DRC are, of course, different countries facing different challenges. Their responsibilities should not be confused. Yet their political narratives increasingly converge around the same method: externalise domestic failures, minimise internal causes, place Rwanda at the centre of the explanation and then ask the international community to treat accusation as established fact.
Why has this approach become so attractive?
The first reason is political convenience. An external enemy is useful to governments facing difficult questions at home. Burundi has lately lived with unresolved consequences of the political crisis that erupted in 2015. Questions of political inclusion, civic space, institutional confidence, economic management and the role of security organs have not disappeared. Poverty, fuel shortages, inflation and pressure on basic services were not created in Kigali and cannot be corrected by accusing Kigali.
The DRC faces an even deeper crisis of state authority. For decades, successive governments in Kinshasa have failed to establish effective administration, disciplined security institutions or equal citizenship across the eastern provinces. Hundreds of armed groups operate on Congolese territory. Communities have repeatedly been mobilised against one another. Congolese Tutsi have had their nationality questioned, their security threatened and their political grievances dismissed as foreign manipulation.
These are not problems imported overnight from Rwanda. They are consequences of colonial disruption, post-independence political choices, institutional weakness, discriminatory citizenship policies and the repeated militarisation of unresolved grievances.
Blaming Rwanda changes the subject. It allows Burundi to avoid explaining why its own armed opposition persists. It allows Kinshasa to avoid explaining why the Congolese state remains absent from large parts of its territory, why its army repeatedly collapses despite years of international assistance, and why armed groups such as FDLR are recruited as auxiliaries instead of being disarmed. Government performance is converted into a question of foreign aggression, and national responsibility is displaced across the border.
The second reason is that accusing Rwanda erases the political origins of armed conflict. Burundi has a legitimate duty to protect its population against RED-Tabara. The group must be held accountable for attacks it commits. But RED-Tabara is a Burundian movement born of Burundi’s political crisis and operating largely from eastern DRC. Its existence cannot simply be reassigned to Rwanda.
The same intellectual shortcut appears in the Congolese treatment of the AFC/M23. Whatever allegations are made about external support (and these should be examined seriously), the movement cannot be understood solely through Rwanda. Its members are Congolese. The grievances concerning the security, citizenship and political inclusion of Congolese Tutsi did not begin with the latest military offensive. Agreements were signed with earlier rebellions and repeatedly left unimplemented. Reducing the entire question to Rwanda removes Kinshasa’s obligation to address the Congolese causes of Congolese rebellion.
External involvement and internal causation can coexist. Recognising one does not eliminate the other. Diplomacy becomes dishonest when allegations against a neighbouring state are used to deny the history, identity and grievances of citizens within one’s own state.
The third reason is that blaming Rwanda helps legitimise politically useful military coalitions. Burundi’s armed forces are not detached observers of the crisis in eastern DRC. They have operated on Congolese territory, initially in pursuit of Burundian armed groups and later within broader arrangements supporting Kinshasa. The Congolese government, meanwhile, has relied on Wazalendo formations and has repeatedly been accused of cooperation with the FDLR, the armed group created by elements linked to the forces responsible for the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.
The 2025 Washington peace agreement between Rwanda and the DRC explicitly incorporated a plan for the neutralisation of the FDLR and the corresponding disengagement of forces and lifting of Rwanda’s defensive measures. That sequencing matters. It is formal recognition that the FDLR is not a rhetorical invention but a security problem requiring action. The continuing international oversight of the agreement likewise treats neutralisation of the FDLR as an outstanding obligation.
Yet Burundi and the DRC often demand immediate recognition of their own security claims while dismissing Rwanda’s concerns as a pretext. This is not collective security. It is selective security.
Burundi cannot demand that its allegations concerning RED-Tabara be accepted automatically while ignoring the implications of operating alongside a Congolese military coalition associated with the FDLR, Mercenaries and other militias hostile to Rwanda. Kinshasa cannot invoke sovereignty as an absolute protection against scrutiny while failing to prevent its territory and state-supported coalitions from threatening a neighbouring country.
As agreed in Nairobi over twenty years ago, sovereignty carries rights, but it also carries responsibilities. A state must not allow its territory to become a sanctuary, recruitment ground or operational platform for forces threatening its neighbours. Nor may it subcontract national defence to militias and then avoid responsibility for their conduct.
The fourth reason is diplomatic reinforcement. Bujumbura and Kinshasa increasingly validate each other’s narratives. Kinshasa presents Rwanda as the principal cause of instability in eastern DRC. Bujumbura adopts the same framework to explain RED-Tabara, border tensions and reversals affecting Burundian forces in South Kivu. Each government’s accusation becomes supporting evidence for the other.
This alignment also attracts an international audience already accustomed to viewing the Great Lakes through a simplified frame: Rwanda acts; others merely react. In that telling, Congolese and Burundian authorities possess little agency over their own policies, alliances or failures. The FDLR becomes secondary, the persecution of Congolese Tutsi becomes incidental, armed-group cooperation becomes a technical detail and decades of failed Congolese governance disappear behind one allegation.
Africa should reject this strangely paternalistic narrative. Burundi and the DRC are sovereign states led by governments capable of making consequential choices. They choose alliances. They deploy armies. They arm or tolerate auxiliaries. They decide whether to negotiate, implement agreements, reform institutions or mobilise public anger against a neighbour. Treating them as passive victims of Rwanda does not respect African sovereignty; it excuses African governments from responsibility.
None of this means that allegations against Rwanda should be dismissed without examination. Any credible claim that a state is operating on another state’s territory or supporting an armed organisation deserves impartial investigation. But the same evidentiary standard must apply to every party. Investigations must also examine support to the FDLR, cooperation with Wazalendo groups, the conduct of Burundian forces, incitement against Congolese Tutsi and violations committed by the Congolese army and its allies including mercenaries prohibited by the United Nations and the African Union.
Serious allegations require verifiable facts: locations, commanders, weapons, financial transfers, communications and chains of authority. Repetition is not evidence. Diplomatic volume does not transform a contested claim into truth.
The human and economic costs of this politics are substantial. The closure of the Rwanda–Burundi border punishes traders, farmers, students and divided families. In the DRC, the refusal to confront internal causes prolongs war and displacement. Across the region, hostile rhetoric narrows diplomatic space and conditions populations to regard neighbouring societies as enemies.
This is particularly dangerous in the Great Lakes, where political language has often prepared the ground for violence. Governments should know that manufacturing collective suspicion is not cost-free. A narrative initially designed to avoid accountability can eventually produce the confrontation it claims merely to describe.
Rwanda should continue to answer unsupported accusations firmly, calmly and with evidence. It should remain open to bilateral dialogue, military-to-military communication, border-security mechanisms and credible independent verification. Engagement does not require accepting false equivalence or conceding unproven claims. It demonstrates confidence in facts and preserves the possibility of de-escalation.
The African Union, the East African Community and the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region must also do more than record competing accusations in communiqués. They should establish disciplined procedures through which claims of cross-border support are submitted, investigated and publicly assessed. They must insist on implementation of existing agreements, including commitments concerning the FDLR, armed-group disengagement, refugee return and the protection of threatened communities.
Burundi and the DRC ultimately face the same fundamental choice. They can continue to use Rwanda as an all-purpose explanation for domestic grievances, institutional weakness, armed opposition and unsuccessful military policies. That may offer short-term political convenience and international sympathy, but it will not produce capable institutions, legitimate authority or durable peace.
Or they can accept the harder discipline of sovereignty: confronting internal failures, protecting all citizens, ending dependence on armed auxiliaries, implementing signed commitments and addressing neighbours’ security concerns with the same seriousness they demand for their own.
Rwanda is not responsible for governing Burundi or the DRC. It did not create all their political crises, economic difficulties, citizenship disputes or institutional failures. Nor should every Congolese or Burundian actor who resists the policies of those governments be stripped of agency and presented as a Rwandan creation.
The decisive question is therefore no longer simply why Burundi and the DRC keep blaming Rwanda. It is what each government avoids confronting whenever it does so. Until that question is answered, the accusations will remain less an explanation of the region’s conflicts than an instrument for evading responsibility.