RUTSHURU, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO—On paper, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) should be among the world’s richest countries. Geologists estimate that it holds more than $24 trillion worth of gold, uranium, copper, coltan, cobalt, germanium, and other precious metals and minerals. Add to that hardwood from its vast forests, and Congo should be, if not the wealthiest country on earth, be to the twenty-first century what Saudi Arabia was in the twentieth century.

How Dysfunctional is the Democratic Republic of Congo?

Of course, that will not happen. The DRC is among the world’s most corrupt countries. Transparency International ranks it alongside war-torn Sudan and military junta-run Myanmar. Successive DRC governments have embezzled a total sum that rivals the International Monetary Fund loans they receive.

In 2018, Congolese went to the polls in an election the State Department applauded as the DRC’s first democratic transfer of power. It was not, however. Election observers, diplomats, and even Congolese in the capital, Kinshasa, acknowledged politician Martin Fayulu as the true winner. He had edged out declared victor Félix Tshisekedi in votes, but backroom deal-making deprived him of the victory. Outgoing President Joseph Kabila and various political faction and clan leaders promoted Tshisekedi, the son of a former Zairian prime minister who reportedly spent his years in exile as a pizza deliveryman in Brussels, in order to protect their own interests. Western and African countries were willing to ignore the fraud, fearing that Congo’s tenuous stability was on the line.

It was a failed bet. While the West, African leaders, and international financial organizations sought to prop up the illusion that Congo had changed, Tshisekedi subordinated Congo’s future to his own. Corruption accelerated, funds disappeared, and development remained sclerotic. Consider: While Congo has received billions of dollars in aid annually, including more than $800 million over the past year just from the United States, it lacks basic infrastructure, with corruption continuing to siphon away any benefit from assistance. The DRC is the second largest country in Africa, with a total area more than three times that of Texas, yet it has less than 1,900 miles of paved roads, which is less than the tiny island nations of Bahrain and Singapore. Not even North Korea has a smaller proportion of paved to unpaved roads.

Why is Eastern Congo a Fertile Ground for Insurgency?

Unable to run on any positive change as re-election loomed in 2023, Tshisekedi embraced a dangerous strategy of playing Congo’s patchwork of ethnic groups off each other. Given that two civil wars over the last three decades have killed over six million people, this was a very dangerous strategy.

Three years ago, eastern Congo was at relative peace. The DRC and Rwanda, former belligerents, cooperated in security and intelligence to defeat terrorism. The two countries coordinated a gas extraction project in Lake Kivu. There was cautious optimism in the beleaguered city of Goma that border trade would transform it into a regional hub and improve the lives of residents more often in the news as victims of violence and volcanos.

Tshisekedi cynically fractured that peace with rhetoric reminiscent of the 1994 anti-Tutsi genocide in Rwanda, claiming that the Tutsi, who have lived in eastern Congo since at least the eighteenth century, are alien interlopers. Militias, many including veterans and sons of the génocidaires who perpetrated the 1994 slaughter, subjected Congolese Tutsis to looting, rape, and slaughter. Under Tshisekedi, the number of armed groups in Congo increased from 70 to more than 200.

Today, Kinshasa argues it must use the militias to combat the March 23 Movement, better known as M23, as it wages insurgency in eastern Congo. On August 7, 2024, Tshisekedi declared, “Never, ever, so long as I am president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, will I have the M23 delegation…in front of me to negotiate.” Two days later, a Congolese court sentenced in absentia the M23 leader Corneille Nangaa to hang. The U.S. government, meanwhile, sanctions M23 and the multi-ethnic coalition of rebel groups that have coalesced around it as regions, tribes, and municipalities turn against Tshisekedi. No matter how many Chinese drones and sniper rifles Tshisekedi imports under the loosened reporting regimen the Biden administration approved, nor the influx of East European, Wagner Group, and Blackwater mercenaries rumored to be in place, the best Kinshasa can hope for is stalemate.

The reason is simple: The problem in the North Kivu province is not foreign interference; it is Tshisekedi’s own governance. Indeed, while the UN Group of Experts repeats rumors of Rwandan presence as a mantra, often amplifying and laundering accusations that start in Kinshasa or with academics whose experience in the region is a decade removed, a major problem exists with that narrative. If Rwanda or Uganda continue to deploy thousands of their own forces to North Kivu, why has the government not been able to produce a single prisoner or body? Indeed, by repeating the accusation, the State Department may be compounding the human rights tragedy by giving sustenance to Tshisekedi and Forces Democratiques de Liberations du Rwanda (FDLR) propaganda that denies the legitimacy of Tutsi communities in eastern Congo in much the same way that Ottoman Turks denied Armenian legitimacy and German Nazis denied Jewish legitimacy. In effect, when Tshisekedi says Rwandans occupy North Kivu, he is suggesting Congolese Tutsis are actually Rwandans.

Indeed, neither the DRC, its allied militias, nor the FLDR, the perpetrators of the 1994 genocide, stand any chance of victory for two reasons. First, for the Tutsis, if not other local ethnic groups, the struggle is existential. Second, the problem is not foreign military sponsorship but rather a reaction to poor governance. For the United Nations, State Department, and European foreign ministries to support Tshisekedi’s narrative and believe peace will come when Kinshasa restores its own authority will only condemn the region to decades more bloodshed, if not a Third Congo War.

The Kurdistan Model

I spent the last week in M23-controlled territory, hiking through the mountain forest to reach the region. I interviewed businessmen, saw mosques and churches, and hung out in busy markets. I also took a day to visit the frontline near Kibirizi and spoke to prisoners and deserters, M23 officials, and local civil society.

What I witnessed was not what the State Department and Congolese government reported, but I did see a path forward for peace. Locals from across the region’s ethnic spectrum had uniformity of opinion about Kinshasa. The DRC constitution embraces a decentralized system in which Kinshasa receives all customs and tax revenue but then remits 40 percent back to the provinces. Tshisekedi and President Joseph Kabila before him, however, have failed to make good on this specific guarantee. At least in North Kivu, what the Congolese government and various aid groups today describe as looting of Congo’s resources by M23 and other local groups appears much more to be normal trade, with the only difference that local authorities are now utilizing customs revenue to support local projects rather than Tshisekedi’s pockets.

More than three decades ago, the international community faced an analogous situation to North Kivu in Iraqi Kurdistan. Like the Tutsis in eastern DRC, the Iraqi Kurds faced ethnic cleansing, if not genocide, at the hands of not only Saddam Hussein but also earlier Iraqi leaders as well. The Kurds created the Peshmerga militia to defend themselves from slaughter by an army and militias under the command and control of a corrupt and egomaniacal dictator.

As locals in North Kivu complain that Kinshasa takes their money but gives nothing in return, Kurds complained that Baghdad long neglected them or even purposely sought to starve them into submission. Culturally, the ethnic mosaic in eastern DRC is as different from southern and western DRC as northern Iraq is from south.

For decades, the late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein depicted the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan as terrorist groups. The State Department was prone to agree for three reasons: First, they believed Saddam was a moderate. Second, they were influenced by a much larger Arabist lobby in the State Department and Central Intelligence Agency and the comparatively small number of Kurdish voices in Washington’s policy debate. Third, of course, was their fear of separatism.

All three concerns were wrong. Subsequent history showed Saddam was no moderate. The State Department’s bet on Saddam ultimately cost Americans thousands of lives and more than $1 trillion when policymakers consider the conflicts Saddam’s actions subsequently sparked. As for the second worry, there is little doubt vocal Arabist voices in the intra-agency process amplified Arab concerns over those of the Kurds. There is nothing nefarious about this. There are twenty-one Arab countries (twenty-two including Palestine), and an additional three countries speak Arabic as a co-official language. Many diplomats had zero experience with the Kurds but absorbed the anti-Kurdish worldview of where they served. In hindsight, Masrour Barzani’s ill-advised 2017 referendum notwithstanding, the Kurds have abandoned separatism in favor of federalism. The doomsday arguments against federalism never materialized.

Today, much of the narrative surrounding eastern Congo focuses on the humanitarian plight of refugees and displaced persons fleeing the fighting. Here, too, there is a similarity with Iraqi Kurds. In 1991, the Americans, British, and French, with Turkish support, launched Operation Provide Comfort to protect Kurds fleeing Saddam’s onslaught and to carve out a safe haven for them in northern Iraq. It was a much more moral solution than forcing Kurds to submit themselves to Saddam’s whims and revenge. Freed from the immediate threat of Saddam’s vengeance and enjoying a modicum of stability, Iraqi Kurdistan grew and thrived. While its current leadership risks what the Kurds have achieved through corruption and greed, for its first two decades at least, Iraqi Kurdistan outperformed the rest of Iraq.

This can be the blueprint for eastern Congo. Tshisekedi has opened the door to constitutional revisions by hinting he wants a third presidential term. Without conceding to that demand, his willingness to amend the constitution provides an opening to amend it to allow a federal solution in eastern Congo. This need not lead to separatism as the region is not monolithic but rather has a patchwork of ethnicities, none of which has a majority. Nor is constitutional revision necessary in the short term. Iraq did not formalize its own federalism until 2005, two years after Saddam’s fall.

Rather than demonize M23, the United States and the international community should recognize its reality and its natural role as the core of a new government. International officials should work with the group to build capacity and develop a broad-based regional government to collect revenue and fund public works with transparency. Rather than prevent internally displaced people or refugees from returning to M23-administered territories as the international community now does, they should facilitate their return. Reintegration is already underway for those displaced who avoid the DRC army and FDLR checkpoints to return to their homes. Eastern Congo federalism could also advance peace by creating a buffer between Rwanda and Uganda on the one hand and the DRC on the other to head off what appears to be a march to war.

The definition of insanity is doing the same action repeatedly but expecting different results each time. It is time for the United Nations and the United States to stop this insane approach, which has poured billions of dollars into Kinshasa and international NGO pockets without positive outcomes, especially when another model exists. 

Michael Rubin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Image: bmszealand / Shutterstock.com.