{"id":314678,"date":"2026-04-06T12:00:26","date_gmt":"2026-04-06T11:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=314678"},"modified":"2026-04-03T13:53:26","modified_gmt":"2026-04-03T12:53:26","slug":"rwandas-30-year-assault-on-congo-the-crimes-the-criminals-and-the-cover-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2026\/04\/rwandas-30-year-assault-on-congo-the-crimes-the-criminals-and-the-cover-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Rwanda\u2019s 30-Year Assault on Congo: The Crimes, the Criminals, and the Cover-up"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Rwanda\u2019s 30-year Assault on the Democratic Republic of Congo<\/em><\/a>, a new 80-page title from <\/em>Baraka Books<\/em><\/a>, gets straight to the essentials.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Tingi Tingi, a Rwandan refugee camp in DRC, then Zaire. On 1 Mar 1997, Paul Kagame’s troops slaughtered its last occupants including children, women, and sick people who couldn’t flee.<\/p><\/div>\n

1 Apr 2026 – <\/em>Judi Rever prefaces her new book with a simple quote from the Judgment of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg after World War II:<\/p>\n

\u201cTo initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the first chapter, \u201cAn Unjust War,\u201d she makes it clear that the First Congo War, which began in October 1996, was not initiated only by Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi, which invaded the Democratic Republic of the Congo, then Zaire, but also by the US. The US engineered and orchestrated this war in order to topple the aging and incompetent kleptocrat Mobutu Sese Seko, whom they had installed after assassinating Congo\u2019s first Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba. The Cold War was over and Mobutu was no longer useful.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the United States conducted covert regime change in Congo nearly three decades ago,\u201d Rever writes, \u201cit hid its role in ousting President Mobutu Sese Seko and installing a puppet regime loyal to Rwanda and its military leader, Paul Kagame.\u201d The US and the corporate interests it represents had essentially anointed Kagame and his Tutsi elite to manage the exploitation of Congo\u2019s vast resources for maximum profit.<\/p>\n

However, the Rwandan refugee population was encamped in the way of Kagame\u2019s progress through the jungle that separated Zaire\u2019s eastern border with Rwanda and its capital, Kinshasa, near its Western border. The Hutu had historically aligned with Mobutu and besides, Kagame wanted them dead or driven back to Rwanda to die or be persecuted. He did not want them alive as refugees in Zaire or in host nations where they might speak to the crimes he had committed or organize to remove him from power, so his army set out to massacre them, ultimately chasing hundreds of thousands from east to west, leaving a trail of death and devastation.<\/p>\n

US technology was used to commit the most horrifying human rights crimes, much as it has recently been in Gaza. Rwandan forces used \u201cbait-and-kill\u201d strategies to trap and massacre Rwandan Hutu refugees in the Congolese jungle.<\/p>\n

Food and medical supplies that aid workers provided to refugees who were running away from Kagame\u2019s soldiers were the bait. The soldiers used satellites to intercept the aid workers\u2019 communications, locate Hutus in the jungle, then move in and massacre them. Most were too sick and weak to move anyway. Most of those who were able had struggled on ahead of them.<\/p>\n

Kagame\u2019s troops dug mass graves, but later unearthed the bodies and incinerated them to destroy the evidence of their crimes.<\/p>\n

Aid workers, journalists, and Congolese people reported that this was happening, but US officials in the region looked away and claimed to know nothing. Rever pays particular attention to Robert Houdek, a diplomat with a long CIA history.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had no contact with the US military at all,\u201d he told Rever. \u201cWhat you\u2019ve found out \u2026 I mean, I can\u2019t comment on. I just don\u2019t know anything about it. Were we happy to see the Mobutu regime depart? Yeah, along with the rest of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, this was not a US regime change operation, but\u00a0Rever clearly demonstrates that it was.\u00a0\u00a0Newsweek\u00a0<\/em>reported on Washington’s machinations at the time,\u00a0under the May 1997\u00a0headline \u201cWashington\u2019s African Move<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, US officials claimed to know nothing, writes Rever, because if their knowledge and collaboration were known, they could be held criminally responsible.<\/p>\n

Many people know about Kagame\u2019s crimes and Washington\u2019s sponsorship, but none of it has ever been brought to where it belongs, the International Criminal Court.<\/p>\n

After Zaire became the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the violence continued, and the resource exploitation began and then proceeded at a furious pace. One of the criminals, Bosco Ntaganda, was finally brought to the ICC to make it appear that the international community was finally doing something. Ntaganda identified as Congolese, but he was Rwandan-born and formally served under Kagame during the Rwandan War and Genocide. After settling back in eastern Congo, he became one of the region\u2019s most powerful and ruthless warlords, surreptitiously serving under Kagame\u2019s command.<\/p>\n

The ICC at first indicted him as a Rwandan, but on his first day in court, Ntaganda stood up and swore he was Congolese, and the court simply accepted his testimony, to the outrage of the Congolese. The fact that he was part of Kagame\u2019s network for stealing, smuggling, and selling Congolese minerals never became an issue before the court.<\/p>\n

Rever goes deep into the crimes of Ntaganda, whom she calls the \u201cnastiest of Rwanda\u2019s warlords,\u201d and the court\u2019s cover-up in the name of justice.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe court,\u201d she writes, \u201cwhich is often accused of being a political tool of the West, engaged in evidentiary omission, erasure, and obfuscation. Ntaganda was not a rogue warlord working on his own dime. His criminal godfather was the president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame.\u201d<\/p>\n

And of course, the court never worried that the US and its European allies enabled Kagame\u2019s crimes for the sake of their corporations\u2019 profits.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe truth is,\u201d Rever writes, \u201cthat the violent exploitation of Congo has been an economic engine for the developed world. For decades, international companies have engaged in illicit yet institutionally sanctioned trade of Congolese minerals that have been laundered by Rwanda, a country that faces no violent conflict inside its borders, where the roads are nicely paved and supply chain logistics are efficient.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rever\u2019s book is an excellent primer for those who find the Democratic Republic of the Congo too distant and too complex for comprehension. Big bombs don\u2019t fall from the sky, as they do in Gaza, and now Iran, and the press is only incidentally interested, so it\u2019s easy to ignore. However, the human suffering is of no less magnitude, and the West bears no less responsibility. These 80 pages bring it all into sharp focus without overwhelming the reader with unfamiliar detail.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She attended Stanford University and is a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/em><\/a>. In 2014 she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize<\/em> for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at <\/em>ann@anngarrison.com<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 blackagendareport.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1 Apr 2026 – Judi Rever prefaces her new book with a quote from the Military Tribunal at Nuremberg after World War II:\u00a0\u201cTo initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":314679,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[237,101,1991,100,1875,2388,1412,99,3956,2457],"class_list":["post-314678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-africa","tag-cultural-violence","tag-d-r-congo","tag-direct-violence","tag-nuremberg-trials-wwii","tag-paul-kagame","tag-rwanda","tag-structural-violence","tag-war-of-aggression","tag-zaire"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=314678"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314678\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":314680,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314678\/revisions\/314680"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/314679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=314678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=314678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=314678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}