2025-02-01
36 分钟Congo looks on paper, preposterous.
Rwanda is tiny, home to 14 million people.
The DRC is enormous and home to maybe 105 million people.
As a military undertaking, it appears to make as much sense as Luxembourg attacking France.
But it is happening.
Rwanda invading the DRC, that is not the Franco Luxembourg war of 2025, at least not as of this broadc.
Earlier this week, Goma, the biggest city in the DRC's east, population perhaps 2 million,
was seized by an alliance of rebel groups of which the best equipped are M23, a barely disguised Rwandan proxy militia.
Latest reports have the insurgents on the march towards Bukavu, another decent sized Congolese city.
One rebel commander, Kornil Nangar,
who has undertaken something of a career pivot since being director of the DRC Electoral Commission,
has declared an intention to lead his legions all the way to the capital Kinshasa,
as far by road from Goma as Dallas is from New York City.
And Nangar and his troops would be dealing with a lot more potholes.
But it has been done before, sort of during two colossal wars in the DRC around the turn of the 21st century,
to which the outside world paid remarkably, if not scandalously, little attention.
Rwandan backed forces forces and or Rwandan allies toppled one Congolese regime,
that of loopy tyrant Mobuto Sese Seko, and menaced another.
The DRC's present government has described this latest Rwanda sponsored incursion as a declaration of war.
Why has Rwanda taken yet another pop at its mighty neighbour?