Should Rwanda draw US sanctions for violating Congolese sovereignty? (Updated April 2, 2023)
A PBS video notes Rwanda’s allure for global corporations but focuses on political repression there, including torture. Go to clean, modern downtown Kigali, and you’ll wonder: “Is Rwanda’s pro-business government a major reason why the country isn’t drawing strict economic sanctions from the US and elsewhere? Do corporate tax breaks and profits and high rises count more than human rights?” The US in 2021 doled out some $185 million in aid of various kinds to Rwanda despite the cruelty there, including the use of machetes to intimidate prisoners.
The issue isn’t just a harsh, thuggish regime at the internal level, however. Rwanda has violated the sovereignty of its neighbors in the mineral-rich Democratic Republic of the Congo, such as through the support of murderous M23 rebels. I wish the PBS video had explored this topic even though it nicely sums up Rwanda’s domestic issues. The outages from President Paul Kagame are spilling into the area of foreign relations. Here’s a video from African Insider documenting some of Rwanda’s sovereignty violations in the Congo. Rwanda is supporting the rebels with people and weapons and in other ways—with eyes on a major coltan mine. Coltan is a strategic mineral for the making of electronic components such as capacitors, and Rwanda would like to rake in well over $1 billion a year from processing coltan, especially for the U.S. ally of Quatar.
No, the corruption- and violence-ridden DRC itself isn’t a paragon of a nation. But should the US and its friends do more about Rwanda’s M23 connections, given the human rights issues and the instability that in time could imperil cobalt and coltan supplies and the like? The US needs to consider the issue of economic sanctions or lack of them.
Please note the complexities here. US sanctions could bring the Rwandans closer to the Chinese and Russians. Could the answer be to win over enough US allies to make the sanctions work if they’re necessary? And how much time to give Rwanda before going this route?
Related: Bloomberg analysis in the Washington Post noting the Rwandans’ claim that it needs to deal with chaos in the DRC, as well as the endangerment of Rwandans who fled to the Congo from a bloody civil war. Still that is no excuse for Rwandan support of M-23, documented by the UN and Human Rights Watch.
Note: I updated my February 25 post on April 2 with a different video—three years old but still on target—and tweaked the commentary after the link to the original YouTube disappeared.