Introduction
In debates about the war ravaging eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, one analytical angle remains too often overlooked by international commentators. Much is said about geopolitical rivalries, mineral resources, and regional influence dynamics. But two fundamental realities are frequently forgotten that, together, render the project attributed to Paul Kagame not only illegitimate but structurally impossible to achieve. The first is legal and political: the principles of territorial integrity and state sovereignty constitute, in international law as in African diplomatic practice, a barrier that no regional actor can cross with impunity and on a lasting basis. The second is sociological and frequently misunderstood: the Banyamulenge, like the Congolese Tutsi and Hutu living in the DRC, are not victims of a deliberate policy of exclusion orchestrated by the Congolese State. Like hundreds of other ethnic groups in this vast country, they are populations marginalised by structural poverty, lack of access to education, and social exclusion inherited from decades of underdevelopment and poor governance. Confusing these two realities means constructing a legitimising narrative that rests on no serious foundation.
Territorial Integrity: A Non-Negotiable Principle
Contemporary international law, as consolidated since the United Nations Charter of 1945 and the Constitutive Act of the African Union, establishes clear principles. The territorial integrity of states is inviolable. No external power may, in the name of protecting an ethnic minority, a cross-border community, or a national security interest, arrogate to itself the right to fragment a sovereign state recognised by the international community.
This principle is not a legal abstraction reserved for public law textbooks. It constitutes the very foundation of post-colonial African political architecture. The Organisation of African Unity, which became the African Union in 2002, made the intangibility of colonial-era borders a founding dogma, precisely because its members knew that challenging a single border would open a Pandora's box impossible to close again on a continent where borders everywhere cut across ethnic, linguistic and cultural realities of extreme complexity.
Kagame knows this. His legal and diplomatic advisers know this. That is why Rwanda never officially claims to be pursuing the creation of a Republic of Kivu or any autonomous entity in eastern Congo. Military action is always dressed in a rhetoric of security, population protection, and the fight against negative armed groups. But the facts on the ground, documented by successive reports from United Nations expert groups, tell a different story: that of an external military power supporting, arming and directing a rebellion whose administered territories increasingly function as a separate proto-entity.
This contradiction between international law obligations and the reality of Rwandan actions on the ground constitutes precisely the strategic Achilles heel of Kigali. For as long as the DRC retains its formal sovereignty, recognised by the entire international community, any attempt at fragmentation will remain illegal, illegitimate, and a source of permanent opposition from both African states and Western powers. No state, to this day, has recognised the M23 as a legal political interlocutor endowed with territorial legitimacy. This absence of international recognition condemns the project to remain in indefinite suspension, unable to transform itself into a durable political reality.
The DRC, a Country of Hundreds of Peoples: A Reality That Analysts Minimise
The second analytical error, perhaps the most serious and widespread in international expert circles, consists of reducing Congolese complexity to a binary or triangular confrontation between Tutsi, Hutu and Banyamulenge. This simplification betrays a profound misunderstanding of what the DRC actually is.
The Democratic Republic of Congo is one of the most ethnically complex states on the planet. It comprises more than 450 distinct ethnic groups, speaking hundreds of languages and dialects, spread across a territory of 2.3 million square kilometres. In the provinces of North Kivu and South Kivu alone, the principal theatres of current conflicts, dozens of communities coexist: Nande, Hunde, Nyanga, Tembo, Shi, Rega, Bembe, Fulero, and many others, in addition to the Banyamulenge, Congolese Hutu and Tutsi. These populations have their own histories, their own land claims, their own intercommunal tensions.
None of these communities is officially persecuted by the Congolese State in the sense of a deliberate policy of racial or ethnic exclusion. What marginalises them is the endemic poverty of a state that has never managed to build adequate public services across its entire territory. It is the absence of health and educational infrastructure in landlocked regions. It is systemic corruption that deprives local budgets of the resources needed for development. It is Kinshasa's historical inability to exercise effective administrative authority across a gigantic territory.
The Banyamulenge suffer from these same ills exactly as the Nande suffer from insecurity in the Beni territory, as the Hunde suffer from land pressure in Masisi, and as the populations of Ituri suffer from intercommunal violence. These are forms of structural marginalisation, inherited from the collapse of the Zairian state under Mobutu and aggravated by thirty years of successive wars. This is not a policy of ethnic apartheid directed from Kinshasa against a specific community.
When international analysts uncritically adopt the Rwandan narrative according to which the Banyamulenge are victims of systematic state persecution that would justify an external armed intervention, they commit a fundamental intellectual error. They instrumentalise a reality of economic and social marginalisation shared by millions of Congolese citizens, transforming it into a legitimising argument for a war that actually serves very different geopolitical and strategic interests.
A Broader African Phenomenon: Structural Marginalisation Is Not a Congolese Exception
One of the most persistent intellectual errors in the analysis of African conflicts is to treat each crisis as an isolated phenomenon produced by singular local dynamics. The reality is very different. The situation experienced by the DRC, namely the difficult coexistence of multiple ethnic groups spread across borders inherited from colonisation, within a context of structural poverty and weak statehood, is not a Congolese exception. It is an African reality common to dozens of countries, and understanding this is essential to avoiding the analytical errors that fuel discourses legitimising unjust wars.
The African continent was carved up at the Berlin Conference of 1884 and 1885 with no consideration whatsoever for the ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and economic realities of the populations living there. Families were separated. Peoples were divided between multiple colonies that became multiple states. Groups that were once unified now find themselves citizens of different countries, sharing a language, a culture, and kinship ties across borders that states struggle to administer effectively.
This is the situation of the Fulani, found in some twenty countries of West and Central Africa, from Senegal to Cameroon, through Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria and Guinea. In each of these countries, the Fulani are often perceived as marginal, in tension with sedentary populations over access to land and grazing grounds. In each of these countries, this marginalisation is primarily the product of a state insufficiently equipped to arbitrate land conflicts, ensure universal public services, and economically integrate nomadic or semi-nomadic populations. It is not the product of a deliberate desire for ethnic exclusion directed from the capitals.
The same reality is observed with the Tuareg, divided between Mali, Niger, Algeria and Libya. The Malian and Nigerien crises carry within them this same analytical confusion: the marginalisation of the north is presented as an intentional policy of Bamako or Niamey against a particular ethnic community, whereas it primarily reflects the inability of these states to finance public services in vast, landlocked, sparsely populated desert zones. This is a problem of fiscal capacity, infrastructure and decentralised governance, not a programme of institutional apartheid.
In Kenya, the recurring tensions between pastoral and agricultural communities in the Rift Valley or northern regions of the country follow the same pattern. The Turkana, Pokot, Samburu or Kenyan Somali live in historically under-resourced regions in terms of public services. This reality results from public investment choices conditioned by scarce available resources and the economic priorities of governments with limited capacities. It is not the consequence of a deliberately discriminatory ethnic policy.
In Ethiopia, the question of Nations, Nationalities and Peoples, formalised in the federal Constitution of 1995, illustrates the extraordinary complexity of governing a state that counts more than eighty ethnic groups. Tensions between Tigrayans, Amhara, Oromo and Ethiopian Somali find their origins in regional development inequalities and competition for access to agricultural resources and institutional positions. These tensions are real and painful, but they cannot all be reduced to the malevolent will of a dominant group to crush the others.
In Cameroon, the anglophone crisis highlights development and administrative representation inequalities between the majority francophone regions and the anglophone regions of the North-West and South-West. Here again, the deep roots lie in colonial inheritances and deficits of inclusive governance, not in a programme of deliberate cultural extermination, even if the government's blunders and acts of violence aggravated a situation that could have been managed very differently.
This survey leads to a fundamental analytical conclusion. When an actor like Kagame uses the marginalisation of the Banyamulenge to justify military intervention in the DRC, he exploits a real but universally shared phenomenon across the African continent to make it an exceptional case justifying an exceptional military response. If this logic were generalised, the entire continent would need to be at war. Every ethnic group marginalised by poverty and insufficient public services would have the right to call upon a neighbouring state to defend them by arms. This is a logic of total anarchy, incompatible with any regional peace architecture.
The economic and social marginalisation of vulnerable communities in Africa is a real and urgent problem that demands serious responses. But these responses are political, institutional and economic in nature. They require strengthening the fiscal capacities of states, effectively decentralising power and resources, and implementing public investment policies that reach populations most distant from the centres of decision-making. They require building an inclusive citizenship that recognises diversity without ranking it. They never involve wars waged from outside on behalf of a particular ethnic group, to the detriment of all others.
Granting One Group More Rights Than Others: A Political Aberration
The third pillar of this analysis must be stated with total clarity. When Kagame takes up arms exclusively to defend the Banyamulenge, when he supports a rebellion that controls territories for the benefit of a single ethnic community, he is not doing justice. He is committing precisely the error he claims to be fighting: ethnic exclusion and hierarchisation.
A state that protects all its citizens equally is a just state. An armed intervention aimed at guaranteeing a particular ethnic group rights and territories that other groups will not have constitutes, in its concrete effects, a form of ethno-political injustice. It creates a hierarchy among the Congolese peoples, placing the Banyamulenge above the Nande, the Hunde, the Shi or the Tembo who inhabit the same lands and who have never had the chance to benefit from an armed external patron to defend their own claims.
This logic is not only morally untenable, it is politically suicidal. It guarantees permanent and growing opposition from all other communities in eastern Congo, many of which have already taken up arms in direct reaction to the territorial expansion of the M23. It reinforces anti-Banyamulenge and more broadly anti-Tutsi sentiment in regions where intercommunal relations were already fragile even before the current conflicts. It produces exactly the opposite of what it claims to want to achieve: instead of securing the Banyamulenge, it exposes them to heightened hostility from populations that associate them, sometimes unjustly, with a foreign military occupation.
The objective of a political entity reserved for one ethnic community in eastern Congo is therefore, fundamentally, an unattainable objective. Not only because international law forbids it, not only because the African Union and the international community will never recognise it, but because the demographic and human reality of eastern Congo makes it impossible to implement without generating endless violence. One cannot build an ethnically homogeneous state in one of the most diverse regions on the planet without massive ethnic cleansing. And massive ethnic cleansing in a post-genocide African context would constitute a scenario that no international actor could tolerate.
What Kagame Refuses to Acknowledge: Marginalisation as a Shared Condition
It must be stated forcefully because it changes everything in the analysis: in the DRC, as in the majority of African countries, marginalisation is not ethnic in its deep causes. It is structural. It strikes the Banyamulenge of the South Kivu highlands just as it strikes the Batwa Pygmies of Équateur, the Mongo fishermen of Kasai, the Luba peasants of Katanga, or the Hema herders of Ituri. What the Congolese state has failed to build is a universal administrative, health, educational and security capacity across its entire territory.
What Kagame refuses to acknowledge, or pretends not to see, is that the problem he claims to want to solve for the Banyamulenge is exactly the same problem lived by hundreds of millions of Africans in dozens of different countries. Entire communities are still waiting, in Chad, Niger, the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Guinea and elsewhere, for their respective states to find the resources, institutional capacities and appropriate governance to serve them with dignity. This wait is a shared tragedy. It is not a targeted persecution. And nowhere else is it considered that a foreign military invasion constitutes the appropriate solution to this tragedy.
This clarity, shared by most African governments and regional institutions, is precisely what renders the Rwandan project in the DRC not only illegitimate, but profoundly contrary to the collective interest of Africa as a whole.
Conclusion
The principles of territorial integrity and state sovereignty are not mere legal formulas. They are the condition of possibility for peaceful coexistence in an Africa where ethnicities everywhere overflow state borders. The project attributed to Kagame, creating by force of arms a political entity reserved for one ethnic community to the detriment of all other Congolese populations, is an aberration in terms of law, political ethics and demographic reality. It is above all an unattainable objective, condemned to fuel endless war in a region that has already suffered far too much.
The truth that too many analysts neglect is that the Banyamulenge are not the only marginalised people of the Congo, and that their marginalisation, like that of all other Congolese peoples and hundreds of communities across Africa as a whole, calls for political, economic and institutional responses, never military ones and never ethnically exclusive ones. A continent that accepted Kagame's logic as a model for resolving ethnic and social inequalities would condemn itself to endless fragmentation and perpetual wars. It is precisely for this reason that Africa, in its institutions and in its most responsible states, rejects this model with a constancy that will not waver.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is the principle of territorial integrity so important in Africa?
The African Union made the intangibility of colonial-era borders a founding principle, knowing that challenging a single border would trigger a chain of ethnic and territorial claims across the entire continent. This principle protects all African states, including the smallest and most vulnerable, against the revisionist ambitions of their neighbours.
Are the Banyamulenge genuinely persecuted by the Congolese State?
The Banyamulenge face real difficulties in accessing public services, experience land tensions, and are subjected to intercommunal violence. But these difficulties are broadly shared by hundreds of other Congolese and African communities. They result from a structural failure of the state to deliver services across its entire territory, and not from a deliberate policy of ethnic persecution organised from Kinshasa.
Is the marginalisation of ethnic minority groups a problem specific to the DRC?
No. It is a phenomenon observed in many African countries, notably in Mali with the Tuareg, in Nigeria with communities of the Niger Delta, in Ethiopia with several of its ethnic groups, and in many other contexts. In all these cases, marginalisation is primarily the product of states with insufficient resources and institutional capacities to serve all their populations, and not of a deliberate policy of ethnic exclusion.
How many ethnic groups does the DRC have?
The DRC has more than 450 recognised ethnic groups, speaking hundreds of languages and dialects. It is one of the most ethnically diverse nations in the world, which makes any project of ethnic territorial fragmentation not only illegitimate but practically unrealisable.
Does the M23 have international recognition?
No. No member state of the United Nations recognises the M23 as a legitimate political interlocutor endowed with territorial authority. Regional negotiation processes engage with the M23 only within the framework of ceasefire discussions, without recognising its political or territorial claims.
Why would the creation of a Republic of Kivu be a political aberration?
Creating an entity reserved for a single ethnic community in a region inhabited by dozens of different peoples amounts to granting that group territorial rights superior to those of others. This constitutes a form of institutionalised ethnic discrimination, contrary to the fundamental principles of equal citizenship, international law and the demographic reality of the region.
References
Mamdani, M. (2002). When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Autesserre, S. (2010). The Trouble with the Congo: Local Violence and the Failure of International Peacebuilding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Vlassenroot, K. and Raeymaekers, T. (2004). Conflict and Social Transformation in Eastern DR Congo. Ghent: Academia Press.
African Union (2000). Constitutive Act of the African Union. Lomé: OAU Summit.
United Nations Group of Experts on the DRC (2024). Interim Report of the Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo. New York: United Nations Security Council.
Lemarchand, R. (2009). The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
International Crisis Group (2024). Kivu: Breaking the Security Deadlock. Africa Report No. 325. Brussels: ICG.
Reyntjens, F. (2016). Political Governance in Post-Genocide Rwanda. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bøås, M. and Dunn, K.C. (2017). Politics of Origin in Africa: Autochthony, Citizenship and Conflict. London: Zed Books.
Herbst, J. (2000). States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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By African Rights Campaign, London, UK
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