> and are there for the resources that the DRC has
Oh dear. This has found its way on to HN. Since finding resources that clearly explain the situation is difficult from the west and difficult in english, the situation is many times more complicated. It's true that some of the resources that flow out of the eastern DRC flow out through Rwanda. It's true that M23 is clearly backed by Rwandan people and money. And for the record, I do not support any of the involved groups or states, but I do speak a couple of the many involved languages, and I did marry into the region, and I have spent years in north kivu in both the congo and in rwanda, southern Uganda, and a little in Burundi, and a little in Tanzania, and I have a large social network across the region.
Let us start with the surface level. M23 is just a puppet of Rwanda for regional imperialism, right? But the profits of the mines in the east Congo have never gone to the east Congo: the DRC has been essentially refusing to build infrastructure, or even govern, the east Congo since Zaire, since the first DRC, since the Belgian Congo, since the Congo Free State. And it's not easy, either: trying to govern Goma from Kinshasa is like trying to govern Berlin from Lisbon, but without developed roads or trains, through dense forest and up a river with many cliffs and rapids that make using it... actually governing the eastern Congo from Kinshasa is absurd. It's purely through the insistence of the west that this actually be the case.
Second, the DRC has one of the worst militaries (the FARDC) in the world. Probably easily the worst compared to the insane wealth it sits on top of. It's not a mistake: there has, essentially, never been a peaceful transfer of power in the country's history since colonization. This has been exacerbated by the literally hundreds of local militias that pepper the north and east of the country, actively armed by the government. This creates a situation of lawlessness and violence seen in few other places on earth: for instance, it has the highest rate of sexual violence of any place on earth, one of the highest rates of malnutrition, one of the lowest literacy rates, one of the lowest life expectancies. So: the country invests in collecting money from the mines as policed by its own military, invests in local militias to counter the military, and refuses to actually govern the area to enforce its own laws, build schools or hospitals, educate its populace, develop some of the most fertile ground on earth, let alone actually build supply chains around the mines it produces. By all reason it should be one of the wealthiest countries on earth, and yet it is not.
Third, the ethnic conflict of abanyarwanda never vanished. Not only does the FDLR (the remnants of the interahamwe) survive and thrive in the Congo after having fled their blatant attempt to exterminate the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994, it is actively armed and works with the FARDC. Today you can go onto TikTok and find members of the FDLR who were born in the Congo talk about how much they hate the Tutsi and want to exterminate them once and for all. For the last six decades, the radios of northern and eastern Congo are filled with rhetoric about the Hema/Tutsi/Nilotic conspiracy to dominate the Bantu (Hutu/Lendu). Think the anti-semitic rhetoric we're all familiar with, but amplified by a conflation with hatred of the bourgeois, all driven from a city 1500 kilometers away. For a region that has one of the lowest literacy rates on earth, this means that violence has simply not stopped during this time. And yes, even today, abanyamulenge are subjected to concerted, state-driven, mass violence—because the locals think that Rwanda, the hand of Hema imperialism, has been on a centuries-long campaign to drive the Congolese from the region and take it out on the highland herders. The Hutu have, of course, also been subjected to mass violence for decades—including multiple obvious and internationally recognized genocides—but anti-hutu rhetoric is certainly not spread by Rwanda, or (by all indications available in the languages I can read) M23, or any of the AFC.
Why does the DRC actively perpetuate this ethnic conflict? Because it is a barely functional state, and the rulers are all deeply corrupt, and much of this money flows from the mines in the east, and it is easier to blame ethnic conspiracies than it is to build roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, electrical infrastructure, and in short develop anything. To admit the reality in naked terms—a necessary step to heal—would immediately start a civil war across the entire country, which is again barely tied together with twine to begin with. Both Kabila Sr (...an enormously interesting man) and his son clearly attempted to govern in an idealistic sense... but both eventually turned back to relying on ethnic tensions to explain the poor governance, particularly outside of but also in Kinshasa itself (...confusingly, but racism has rarely been very rational)
And of course, the mines are of deep international interest. Specifically, Canada, the US, China, and the UAE (I'm sure others too) all have their grubby mitts in the region developing only the infrastructure solely necessary to extract minerals, raping and enslaving the local populace, and paying off all the local governments to keep this ruse going. The governments of Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda, and the DRC are each complicit in this obvious crime against humanity, each interested in their cut of the dollars that flow outward.
Now, of course, Trump managed to meddle in the region, and Erik Prince with his blackwater thugs are there ensuring that the terror of drone striking civilians and villages is well understood by the people of the eastern Congo. The DRC is now using US and UAE funds to build a new paramilitary to police its mines. The result will almost 100% certainly be a larger civil war in the east in the best case scenario, and in the worst case scenario complete regional total war with millions dead. Tshisekedi has obliquely telegraphed a desire to seize territory and/or topple the states of Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi—in part because he realizes his life depends on the region not successfully ousting him. (Though—Burundi is now acting as a sort of mercenary force for the Congo, which is again unwilling to bankroll its own military, but I would not expect this relationship to last for very long.)
And do I support M23, the AFC? No. Absolutely not. But there is no solution for the region short of peace, and there is so many arms and so little infrastructure and so little centralized authority this is simply not possible. At the very least, it needs 100x the international attention and capital inflow that it is getting, and I see about as much chance of that as a wounded calf being saved from a pack of ravening wolves in the middle of nowhere. So is it surprising that Rwanda (or Uganda, or Burundi) has their troops in the DRC? No, not at all—it is an enormous, enormous existential risk to not do that. The east Congo makes the balkan powder keg look wet.
I'm sorry to have typed so much, but it is infuriating to watch the violence tearing apart my beloved north kivu being written off by one interest or the other as a simple conflict. No, there is nothing simple about the conflict, it is an enormous tragedy, and it was international intervention that created this problem with the Congo crisis—all to preserve precious mineral extraction supply chains. By all rational understanding I have, the east Congo should have some degree of self determination rather than being exploited and enslaved by Kinshasa, Uganda, Rwanda, the US, Canada, the UAE, and China—and there is simply zero path to that. Paradoxically, the attention M23 is bringing the region may have resulted in more efforts to govern.
And in the case of Ebola, nobody gives a fuck. Hah. LMAO, even. There is simply zero chance that something as delicate as disease management will visit the region before the governance question is answered. If this concerns you, become a praying person.
The resource is deeply outdated, and it has its biases and blind spots and points of frustration where the journalist who wrote it sees things from a very western perspective and/or was manipulated by the person he was interviewing or he is too skeptical to see what is in front of his face, but from the west if you only know English, I recommend the book Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa by Jason Stearns.
I'm afraid I have mildly butchered the topic, but there is no easy way to approach the utter shallowness of which this will be seen from the west. The Congo suffers from a "resource curse", and I'm afraid it will be exploited until long after I die.
EDIT: there are other resources, some better than others.
EDIT2: cleaned up my language a little bit to reflect the seriousness of the topic.
The War That Doesn't Say Its Name, also by Jason Stearns.
Crisis in the Congo: The Rise and Fall of Laurent Kabila by François Ngolet is pretty self-explanatory and illustrates well why the issue with Zaire wasn't just Mobutu, though he was particularly incompetent.
Les guerres à l'est de la RD Congo, entre génocide et statocide by Claude Nsal'onanongo Omelenge. This is the best work and most academic, but my French is rusty, so I may be overpraising it. I've had a hard time getting my hands on this one but there are PDFs if you look carefully. If you're in Europe it might be easier.
The Trouble with the Congo by Séverine Autesserre explores why peace efforts have failed.
In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu's Congo by Michela Wrong and The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State by Crawford Young and Thomas Edwin Turner explore the damage Mobutu did to the post-colonial Congo (Zaire).
Congo, A Sublime Struggle by Finbarr O'Reilly is more of a personal account, but it has excellent color pictures and you can feel the emotional investment in the topic.
Death in the Congo: Murdering Patrice Lumumba by Madeline Kalb, The Congo Cables by Emmanuel Gerard, and Chief of Station, Congo by Lawerence Devlin explain the Congo Crisis and the role that specifically the US, Belgium, and less directly the UN played in ensuring that the original DRC survived its postcolonial civil war. Carnages: Les guerres secrètes des grandes puissances en Afrique by Pierre Péan covers the francophone vs anglophone meddling in the region.
La guerre civile du Congo-Brazzaville specifically covers the rise of militias, the incentives, the funding, etc. It is a tad outdated in the current conflict—I don't know of a good resource to cover funding of militias today, but I will figure something out.
La première crise congolaise racontée aux Camerounais by Jean Koufan Menkéné is a historiographically good overview of the Congo Crisis (1960-1965) in general.
King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa covers The Congo Free State, perhaps the most ironically named country of all time as it covers how the state was the personal property of Leopold II
In the Forest of No Joy: The Congo-Océan Railroad and the Tragedy of French Colonialism by J. P. Daughton is quite good and, well, self-explanatory.
Finally, if you're a fan of Adam Curtis (a documentarian, but a propagandist of the greatest order, albeit one I tend to agree with), he has an excellent series called "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace". The final episode covers postcolonial Congo. You can find that here: https://archive.org/details/BBC.All.Watched.Over.by.Machines...