BUKAVU: Rwanda-backed rebels have occupied a second major city in mineral-rich eastern Congo, the government said Sunday, as M23 rebels confirmed they were in the city to restore order after it was abandoned by Congolese forces.
The Congo River Alliance, a coalition of rebel groups that includes the M23, said in a statement that its fighters “decided to assist the population of Bukavu” in addressing its security challenges under the “old regime” in the city of 1.3 million people.
“Our forces have been working to restore the security for the people and their property, much to the satisfaction of the entire population,” alliance spokesperson Lawrence Kanyuka said in a statement.
The rebels saw little resistance from government forces against the unprecedented expansion of their reach after years of fighting. Congo’s government vowed to restore order in Bukavu but there was no sign of soldiers. Many were seen fleeing on Saturday alongside thousands of civilians.
The M23 are the most prominent of more than 100 armed groups vying for control of eastern Congo’s trillions of dollars in mineral wealth that’s critical for much of the world’s technology. The rebels are supported by about 4,000 troops from neighboring Rwanda, according to the United Nations experts.
The fighting has displaced more than 6 million people in the region, creating the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.
Rebels vow to ‘clean up’ disorder
Bernard Maheshe Byamungu, one of the M23 leaders who has been sanctioned by the UN Security Council for rights abuses, stood in front of the South Kivu governor’s office in Bukavu and told residents they have been living in a “jungle.”
“We are going to clean up the disorder left over from the old regime,” Byamungu said, as some in the small crowd of young men cheered the rebels on to “go all the way to Kinshasa,” Congo’s capital, nearly 1,000 miles away.
Congo’s communications ministry in a statement on social media acknowledged for the first time that Bukavu had been “occupied” and said the national government was “doing everything possible to restore order and territorial integrity” in the region.
One Bukavu resident, Blaise Byamungu, said the rebels marched into the city that had been “abandoned by all the authorities and without any loyalist force.”
“Is the government waiting for them to take over other towns to take action? It’s cowardice,” Byamungu added.
Fears of regional escalation
Unlike in 2012, when the M23 briefly seized Goma and withdrew after international pressure, analysts have said the rebels this time are eyeing political power.
The fighting in Congo has connections with a decadeslong ethnic conflict. The M23 says it is defending ethnic Tutsis in Congo. Rwanda has claimed the Tutsis are being persecuted by Hutus and former militias responsible for the 1994 genocide of 800,000 Tutsis and others in Rwanda. Many Hutus fled to Congo after the genocide and founded the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda militia group.
Rwanda says the militia group is “fully integrated” into the Congolese military, which denies it.
But the new face of the M23 in the region — Corneille Nangaa — is not Tutsi, giving the group “a new, more diverse, Congolese face, as M23 has always been seen as a Rwanda-backed armed group defending Tutsi minorities,” according to Christian Moleka, a political scientist at the Congolese think tank Dypol.
Congo’s President Felix Tshisekedi, whose government on Saturday asserted that Bukavu remained under its control, has warned of the risk of a regional expansion of the conflict.
Congo’s forces were being supported in Goma by troops from South Africa and in Bukavu by troops from Burundi. But Burundi’s president, Evariste Ndayishimiye, appeared to suggest on social media his country would not retaliate in the fighting.
The conflict was high on the African Union summit’s agenda in Ethiopia over the weekend, with UN Secretary-General António Guterres warning it risked spiraling into a regional conflagration.
Still, African leaders and the international community have been reluctant to take decisive action against M23 or Rwanda, which has one of Africa’s most powerful militaries. Most continue to call for a ceasefire and a dialogue between Congo and the rebels.
Rwanda-backed M23 rebels occupy a 2nd major city in Congo’s mineral-rich east
https://arab.news/9b7wr
Rwanda-backed M23 rebels occupy a 2nd major city in Congo’s mineral-rich east
- The fighting has displaced more than 6 million people in the region, creating the world’s largest humanitarian crisis
Trump targets non-white immigrants in renewed xenophobic rants
- During a rally in Pennsylvania on Wednesday, Trump doubled down on his tirade against Somali migrants
- "Why is it we only take people from shithole countries,’ right? Trump told his cheering audience
WASHINGTON: Back in 2018, President Donald Trump disputed having used the epithet “shithole” to describe some countries whose citizens emigrated to the United States.
Nowadays, he embraces it and pushes his anti-immigrant and xenophobic tirades even further.
Case in point: during a rally in the northeastern state of Pennsylvania on Wednesday that was supposed to focus on his economic policy, the 79-year-old Republican openly ranted and reused the phrase that had sparked an outcry during his first term.
“We had a meeting and I said, ‘Why is it we only take people from shithole countries,’ right? ‘Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden?’” Trump told his cheering audience.
“But we always take people from Somalia,” he continued. “Places that are a disaster. Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.”
Recently, he called Somali immigrants “trash.”
These comments are “more proof of his racist, anti-immigrant agenda,” Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey responded on X.
The Trump megaphone
Florida Republican lawmaker Randy Fine, on the other hand, defended Trump.
“Not all cultures are equal and not all countries are equal,” he said on CNN, adding “the president speaks in language that Americans understand, he is blunt.”
University of Albany history professor Carl Bon Tempo told AFP this type of anti-immigrant rhetoric has long thrived on the far-right.
“The difference is now it’s coming directly out of the White House,” he said, adding “there’s no bigger megaphone” in American politics.
On the campaign trail in 2023, Trump told a rally in New Hampshire that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country” — a remark that drew comparisons to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
Now back in power, Trump’s administration has launched a sweeping and brutal deportation campaign and suspended immigration applications from nationals of 19 of the poorest countries on the planet.
Simultaneously, the president ordered white South African farmers to be admitted to the US, claiming their persecution.
No filter left
“Any filter he might have had is gone,” Terri Givens, a professor at the University of British Columbia in Canada and immigration policy expert, told AFP.
For Trump, it doesn’t matter whether an immigrant obeys the law, or owns a business, or has been here for decades, according to Syracuse University political science professor Mark Brockway.
“They are caught in the middle of Trump’s fight against an invented evil enemy,” Brockway told AFP.
By describing some immigrants as “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies” — as Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem did earlier this month — the White House is designating a target other than itself for American economic ire at a time when the cost of living has gone up and fears are growing over job security and loss of federal benefits.
But, Bon Tempo noted, “when immigration spikes as an issue, it spikes because of economics sometimes, but it also spikes because of these larger sort of foundational questions about what it means to be an American.”
On November 28, after an Afghan national attacked two National Guard soldiers in Washington, Trump took to his Truth Social network to call for “REVERSE MIGRATION.”
This notion, developed by European far-right theorists such as French writer Renaud Camus, refers to the mass expulsion of foreigners deemed incapable of assimilation.
Digging into the “Make America Great Again” belief system, many experts have noted echoes of the “nativist” current of politics from the 1920s in the US, which held that white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant culture was the true American identity.
That stance led to immigration policies favoring Northern and Western Europe.
As White House senior adviser Stephen Miller recently wrote on X: “This is the great lie of mass migration. You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies...At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”
