All Lives Matter - Finally

June 29th, 2025

For anyone who has followed the wars of the world for the last few decades, one has stood out, both for its level of violence, and for the way it seemed no one cared.

In fact, for the last three decades this one war has stood out as the best example of how the foreign policy elites - of the US, Europe and East Asia - were more interested in power politics and posturing than anything else. A long and bloody war was overlooked with what might easily be called a studied callousness. How long? Almost 30 years. How bloody? In all its various forms the war resulted in more than 6 million killed. To put that in perspective, that’s more deaths than in all the other wars fought in the last 30 years around the world - combined. 

The US has suffered about 1.4 million killed in action since 1775; so, four times as many deaths as in all US history. Of course, that’s a bit inaccurate: many - most - of the deaths in Rwanda and the Congo were not, strictly speaking “in combat” in the sense of one armed force fighting another; rather they were what one source refers to as “one sided violence.”

The roots of the war stretch back more than a century, arguably several centuries, several centuries marked by a continuing struggle for power and for land, and resulting in a number of short and violent wars, insurrections, riots and the bloody occupation of much of the region by Belgium (after Germany had briefly occupied it), followed by several massacres. All of which seemed to culminate in the Rwandan Genocide in 1994, in which somewhere around 600,000 (though some estimates run as high as 1.2 million) Tutsi were killed, mainly by machete-wielding Hutus, accompanied by the rape of more than 500,000 women. 

Tutsis then fled Rwanda into the Congo (then called Zaire) and violence and political instability came with them.

Several different groups generated armies and rose up and tried to take power, Zaire’s dictator Mobutu Sese Seko was overthrown in the First Congo War of 1996-97 - a war that was fueled by the influx of more than a million refugees from Rwanda, and Zaire became the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DROC). 

Laurent Kabila became President of the DROC, with aid from Uganda and Rwanda. A second war followed (1998 - 2003), as Kabila and his allies began to struggle with each other for greater power. Armies and insurgencies from 2 dozen African countries joined the war, fighting for various reasons, many of them less than noble, in an extremely bloody war, resulting in more than 5 million dead.

It is important to note that the war was funded in large part by the sale of certain ores, in particular: tin, tungsten, tantalum, gold, and cobalt, money that should have helped the country, rather than destroy it.

I have barely touched on the history of the war, and left out all sorts of elements; I would encourage everyone to spend a few minutes reading about the horrible mess that is the entire region and how it has been basically exploited and ignored for most of the last 30 years.

And yet, just a few months ago the President and SecState Rubio decided to try to wrestle this mess to the ground, to untie this international Gordian knot, and this past week, senior representatives of Rwanda and the Congo, in the Oval Office, signed an agreement, co-signed by Trump, calling for "disengagement, disarmament and conditional integration" of the various armies and guerrilla groups in the eastern Congo.

It’s worth noting that a UN peacekeeping mission has been in place since 1999. This is not meant to criticize the troops who make up the Peacekeeping forces or their officers. But the idea that the UN can put a force in place and accomplish nothing, neither prevent a war, nor stop one once it has started, (note: there was a UN Peacekeeping force in place in Rwanda during the 1994 massacre) should give pause when we consider these various international organizations.

Trump and Rubio have, in 5 months, have come up with something. There is a great deal more work to do, this will not be trouble free, but it is a first step. They deserve a tip of the hat and the thanks of anyone who has ever looked at the level of violence taking place in sub-Saharan Africa. There is a start… Finally.