A new horrific crisis is unfolding again in DRC. In their drive to capture Goma, hundreds, if not thousands have been killed. Tens of thousands have fled from DRC for fear of being conscripted into M23. International “peacekeepers” have failed to keep the peace.
By Paul Moorhouse and Ndumiso Ncube, 5 March 2025
In January 2025, 14 South African National Defence Force (SANDF) soldiers were killed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Scores of wounded soldiers have been evacuated.
The remainder of SA’s 1-2000-strong ‘peace keeping’ force remain trapped by advancing M23 rebels, who have captured the city of Goma in Kivu province. M23 have also captured the second city, Bukavu.
Troops and Romanian mercenaries loyal to the Kinshasa-based government of President Félix Tshisekedi have fled to neighbouring Rwanda.
These South African casualties highlight the horrific crisis once again unfolding in DRC. In their drive to capture Goma, hundreds, if not thousands have been killed. Tens of thousands have fled from DRC for fear of being conscripted into M23.
World’s bloodiest conflict since World War II
These figures though are a drop in the ocean of successive civil wars which have plagued the DRC since 1960, the world’s bloodiest conflict since World War II. More than 10 million people have perished from atrocity killings, institutional sexual violence, starvation, and disease.
Nonetheless, they raise important questions.
Many South Africans wonder why their government, presiding over the most unequal society in the world, has sent an armed force 5000 kilometres from home to die like rats in a trap.
The casualties arose because SA capitalism has played on a humanitarian crisis to spread the tentacles of its imperialist power across Africa. The ‘peacekeeping’ force only hopes to maintain peace to the extent that resources can be secured and exported to guarantee profits for capitalist monopolies.
There are chilling parallels between the role of this force, sent to the DRC in 2023 by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to replace United Nations troops and events unfolding at home.
In November SA police sealed all entrances to the Stilfontein gold mine to force out ‘illegal’ informal miners. By January at least 100 miners held hostage by the police had perished from dehydration or starvation.
Berlin Conference carved up Africa
Both the African National Congress and the parties in the Government of National Unity place the profits of mining companies who have plundered Africa since the 19th Century over human life.”
The approach of the modern-day capitalist governments differs little from the practices stretching back to the 1884 Berlin Conference which carved up the land and wealth of Africa between Europe’s imperialist powers, to fuel capitalist profits.
The roots of today’s Congolese conflict can also be found in the decisions of the Berlin Conference.
Firstly, what is now the DRC was granted to King Leopold II of Belgium. Eight years previously, Leopold had hired the US journalist and explorer Henry Morton Stanley to carve out a territory in the Congo basin for Belgium to exploit. 2.345 million square kilometers of real-estate was granted to Leopold, his personal possession as absolute monarch.
Secondly, in establishing the boundaries of what Leopold misnamed the ‘Congo Free State’ and other colonial possessions, delegates drew arbitrary lines on maps provided by Stanley and other Western explorers. These carved up existing communities and nations over the heads of the people.
Consequently, DRC and other states of post-colonial Africa inherited a patchwork of ethnic conflicts, exacerbated by decades of divide-and-rule tribalism employed by imperial administrators.
Imperialists introduce ethnic conflict
Before the intervention of imperialism, differences between the Hutus and Tutsis the two main population groups in Kivu and neighbouring states of Rwanda and Burundi were nowhere near as sharp. The language, religions, beliefs and cultures of the two peoples were similar.
The Hutus were engaged in arable farming, while the Tutsis who arrived in the Great Lakes region later tended to raise cattle. The imperialists, needing to involve the local elite in administering their colony favoured the Tutsis who tended to be taller.
They were offered better education and in general treated as ‘superior’ to the Hutus. When in the 1930s the Belgian authorities introduced ‘ethnicity’ into their system of rule, the Hutus and Tutsis were seen no longer as social groups but separate races.
Exploitation of natural resources
Leopold set about enriching himself, harshly exploiting the indigenous peoples to produce timber, ivory, palm oil, and rubber for export. Rubber was especially profitable due to increased use of bicycles in the 1800s and the later automobile revolution. By 1901 as much as 6000 tons of rubber were extracted from the ‘Free State’.
Brutally inhumane methods such as cutting off the hands off workers who failed to meet their quotas were used. Soldiers were expected to decapitate their victims and to provide body parts as proof that their bullets had not been wasted.
Resistance forces change
Popular resistance in the Congo and international solidarity campaigns forced Leopold to cede control to the Belgian government in 1908. The Congo fell prey to an unholy alliance of the state, Catholic church, and private capital, especially giant mining conglomerates, benefitting the ruling class greatly.
By 1959 the colonial territory produced cobalt, copper, and industrial diamonds to the tune of 10%, 50% and 70% of world-wide production respectively.
Uranium ore exported from the south-eastern Shinkolobwe mine, where low-paid workers toiled in hazardous conditions under secret contracts to produce uranium, fuelled NATO’s nuclear arms race.
Meanwhile, Congolese people lacked political representation or claim to these profits. The ruling class worked hard to ensure that the indigenous people remained subservient, limiting educational opportunities even as the Congo became Africa’s second most industrialised country.
Industrialisation had just one purpose. The maximum extraction of profits by Belgian and international monopolies. As the Guyanese revolutionary historian Walter Rodney explained, through colonialism and imperialism, ‘Europe underdeveloped Africa’.
Anti-colonial struggle launched
After WWII a small layer of educated Congolese emerged, the’ Évolué’. Although these intellectuals challenged Belgian authority and colonial rule, their initial demands were modest, amounting to ‘be[coming] Belgians’ according to Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first premiere. But the seeds of anti-colonial struggle had been sown.
In 1958 Lumumba and others founded the “Mouvement National Congolais” to fight for national liberation.
Despite repression, King Badouin’s December 1959 visit triggered massive protests, forcing Belgium to invite opposition politicians to a ‘round table conference’ in Brussels.
This was the first time that the diverse indigenous peoples of the Congo were permitted any voice in political discussions concerning their homeland in eight decades of colonial rule.
The Congolese delegation overwhelmingly favoured immediate independence, but lacked a common political ideology. Tribal divisions fostered by colonialism persisted.
When the Congo gained independence on 30 June 1960, the many political parties were mostly supported by specific ethnic groups and regions.
Mobutu takes power
Within a fortnight of independence and Lumumba’s inauguration as prime minister, an army mutiny broke out, triggering a chain of events culminating in the army chief Joseph Mobutu taking power and ruling with impunity from 1965 to 1997.
During the ‘Katanga Crisis’ (July 1960-1963) provincial authorities in mineral-rich Katanga seceded from the Congo backed by the Anglo-Belgian mining house, Union Minière du Haut-Katanga. UMH-K, as well as owning Shinkolobwe, dominated copper production.
The subsequent ‘peacekeeping’ mission by 20,000 United Nations troops was not designed to protect the Congolese people but to defend ‘business as usual’: the ruthless exploitation of their labour and the natural wealth of the Congo by international capital.
Assassination of Lumumba
It is now accepted that Lumumba’s arrest, torture and murder in January 1961 was organised by senior colonial police with the knowledge of Belgian politicians, UN officials and other imperialist powers.
Similar shadowy forces, including the CIA, MI6 and the racist regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia probably organised the downing of a plane carrying the UN’s own Secretary General, with the loss of all lives.
The reason for Lumumba’s murder was simply this. He stood unequivocally for the economic, political, and economic emancipation of all Congolese people, using the wealth of the nation to free their minds and raise their living standards.
His ideas evolved rapidly in three short, hectic years of political activism and his political programme was undoubtedly incomplete. Nevertheless, it pointed to the need to break both the political and economic power of capitalism and imperialism and return Congo’s wealth to its producers.
Lumumba represented a threat to capitalist exploitation and oppression which had to be removed.
In contrast, most leaders of ‘independent’ Africa in the era of neo-colonialism, from Mobutu to the ANC leaders today, happily coexist with, and have enriched themselves through, capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism’s legacy across the continent. This means endless misery for the people of the Congo and the wider region.
Rwanda genocide
Post-colonial governments in Rwanda, a former Belgian colony, neighbouring and sharing an ethnic make-up with Kivu, did nothing to resolve, and frequently rested on, the bitter ethnic division between the majority Hutu and a minority Tutsi elite which Belgian and (before 1945 in Burundi) German colonial authorities promoted to maintain their power.
In 1991, civil war between Tutsi oppositionists exiled in Kivu and Hutu militias unleashed a cycle of genocidal violence in which 800,000 died. It spawned a succession of regional and ethnic militias and barbaric conflicts across the ‘Great Lakes’ region of eastern Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi.
Following the genocide Rwandan President Paul Kagame tried to overcome the divisions in the country but failed, due to his inability to overcome the deep economic and social crisis. As the Hutu based parties left his government, he feared they would mobilise armed opposition to his rule.
Formation of M23
In 1996 Kagame began arming the Banyamulenge people and Tutsi refugees in the DRC. This militia formed the basis for today’s M23.
Banyamulenge, ethnic Tutsi residing in Kivu for centuries, had come under attack from other groups. They also felt mistreated by the Kinshasa government, boosting support for M23 which they hoped would fight for their rights.
Launched in 2012, M23 fought the Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda (FDLR) a Hutu exile group linked to the genocide. It defended Tutsi people from violence and championed their rights as citizens of the DRC.
Later M23’s aims widened, claiming to support the rights of all Congolese people against central government corruption. Their advance was halted in 2013 when they signed a ceasefire in the expectation of being absorbed into the DRC’s army.
When this was frustrated, M23 launched another offensive in 2017. They’ve now captured highly populated areas vital for economic activity, including Goma. They are pressing forward to gain control of both North and South Kivu, capturing more land than ever before.
M23’s current advance
M23 have declared that they have the capital Kinshasa in their sights as DRC armed forces have increasingly melted away, unable to stop their advance.
Both the East African Community (EAC) and SADC have demanded that M23 halt their advance, with little effect so far.
Successive interventions by the UN, SADC and EAC have not tackled the root causes of this man-made disaster, more often exacerbating them.
Peacekeepers cannot resolve problems
A 2005 UN report confirmed over 70 reports of sexual violence by ‘peacekeepers’ against children, but only identified seven perpetrators, just one of whom faced criminal charges on returning home. The UN explained it ‘has jurisdiction over its own civilian staff but no power to punish peacekeepers’.
Although SADC and the UN claim to defend democracy and constitutional rule there have only been four elections since 1960, the first in 2006, each marked by repression of opposition voices.
The political elite from Tshisekedi’s UDPS ruling party wield immense power and wealth at the expense of the people, more than 70% of whom live in dire poverty.
Successive leaders of the DRC have been complicit in capitalist inspired plundering of the country, sustaining inequality. Basic services such as education and healthcare are out of reach for most Congolese people.
Only a third of men complete secondary school education, but this is double the level for women, entrenching gender inequality and reinforcing Congolese society’s endemic gender abuse.
South Africa’s failure
South Africa and the other capitalist states in the SADC cannot overcome the Congolese holocaust of ethnic division and the intensified violence of patriarchy and the gender binary engendered by war, without opposing the exploitative system of capitalism and imperialism on which they rest.
A Government of National Unity with ANC ministers presiding over record levels of rape and femicide and actively promoting xenophobic attacks on migrant workers sitting alongside the former tribalist murderers and Apartheid stooges of the Inkatha ‘Freedom’ Party cannot offer relief to the war-weary masses of the Congo.
The SADC stumbled into the breach caused by the failure of the latest UN mission. SA ministers hope to bolster their position as a regional power. But, tied to capitalism, they can only act as geo-political ‘policemen’, sub-contracting to the big players of international capitalism.
Only mass organisation can end imperialist exploitation
These powers, the European, US and Chinese corporations continue to bleed the Congo in the best traditions of Leopold II. They are increasingly desperate to plunder its ‘rare earth’ minerals to fuel an ‘AI boom’ as they search for a road out of capitalism’s growing economic and social impasse.
The route out of this crisis lies in the hands of the South African and the Congolese masses, following the road on which Lumumba took the first bold steps.
The two biggest economies in Africa south of the equator, their mineral, industrial and agricultural wealth should be seized by those who produce it and directed to rebuild their societies and those of the surrounding nations in a voluntary democratic federation, a Socialist United Africa.
Only in this way can the inequality and ethnic conflicts created by imperialism and exacerbated by the crisis-ridden rule of neo-colonialism in Africa be overcome.