On 12 April, Rwanda remains in the solemn grip of remembrance. Every year, Kwibuka, the national commemoration of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, begins on 7 April and unfolds across 100 days, tracing the terrible calendar of the slaughter itself. It is a period not merely of mourning, but of moral reckoning. For Rwanda, memory is not ceremonial. It is strategic, political and existential. It is woven into the way the state reads threats, the way it interprets indifference and the way it hears the language of international admonition.
That matters now, in the latest convulsions of the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Much of the external commentary surrounding Rwanda and the DRC has reverted to a familiar grammar of denunciation, pressure, sanctions and isolation. It is a vocabulary that is emotionally satisfying to outsiders because it creates the impression of action. But it is not a vocabulary of settlement. It is not a language that can bear the weight of the region’s history. And it is not, on the evidence of the Great Lakes itself, a serious answer to the present crisis.
Sanctions will not solve the conflict between Rwanda and the DRC. They may harden positions, furnish moral theatre for foreign capitals and offer Kinshasa a rhetorical victory in distant chancelleries. But they will not disarm militias, rebuild trust, reverse state weakness in eastern Congo or answer the security question that has haunted Rwanda since 1994. The only plausible route forward lies in sustained dialogue, credible regional mechanisms and stronger continental ownership with the African Union, the East African Community, the Southern African Development Community and carefully aligned European partners all reinforcing negotiation rather than substituting for it.
The temptation to reach for sanctions rests on a misleading simplification. It presents the crisis as a matter of present tense guilt detached from historical depth. Rwanda is cast as an actor to be punished, the DRC as a victim to be vindicated and external powers as impartial custodians of order. But the region is not a morality play and peace will not be achieved by reducing it to one. Eastern Congo is a palimpsest of unfinished wars, fragmented sovereignties, cross border insurgencies, elite predation, regional interventions and unresolved questions of citizenship and belonging. Any policy that pretends otherwise is not principled. It is superficial.
To understand why sanctions are so inadequate, one must begin with the memory that Rwanda cannot escape and the world too often sanitises. In 1994, as the genocide against the Tutsi unfolded, the international system failed catastrophically. The United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda, under a limited mandate and without political backing, was unable to halt the extermination. Warnings were sent and not acted upon with the urgency the situation demanded. Powerful states evacuated their own nationals while leaving endangered Rwandans to the killers. The machinery of multilateralism, which speaks so confidently in the language of international responsibility, proved timid, bureaucratic and morally threadbare when confronted with organised mass murder.
That failure is not an ornamental historical point to be invoked at commemorations and forgotten in policy. It is central to Rwanda’s worldview. A state whose people were abandoned during genocide is not likely to accept blithe assurances that distant actors fully grasp its security fears. Nor should anyone be surprised that Kigali regards armed formations linked directly or genealogically to the perpetrators of that genocide as more than an abstract nuisance. The persistence in eastern Congo of forces rooted in the remnants of the ex FAR and Interahamwe later reorganised in part under the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda is not a side issue in Rwandan thinking. It is one of the organising facts of its regional posture.
This does not mean that every Rwandan action is beyond criticism. It does mean that criticism which severs present policy from this history is analytically unserious. Too much of the current sanctions discourse does precisely that. It treats Rwanda’s insecurity as either exaggerated or instrumental, as though the afterlife of genocide can be filed away while diplomats compose statements. But the Great Lakes crisis did not begin with the latest offensive nor with the newest communiqué from Washington or Brussels. It was shaped by the aftermath of 1994, by the militarisation of refugee populations in eastern Zaire, by the collapse of Mobutu’s order, by the Congo wars, by repeated failures to demobilise armed groups and by the chronic inability of the Congolese state to establish an effective and legitimate monopoly of force in its east.
That is why punitive gestures from abroad are so often politically loud and strategically empty. Sanctions can name, stigmatise and constrain some flows of money and travel. But they do not resolve the contradictions that keep the conflict alive. They do not settle the question of armed groups operating near Rwanda’s border. They do not heal the recurrent failures of Congolese governance in North Kivu and South Kivu. They do not dissolve the political economies of violence built around minerals, land, smuggling and local patronage. They do not create a common regional security architecture. And crucially, they do not oblige the parties to negotiate the hard questions that peace requires them to negotiate.
Twenty four years later, the conflict remains unresolved.
There is also a diplomatic vanity at work in sanctions policy. External powers often imagine that coercive instruments confer seriousness. Yet the history of the region suggests the reverse. Durable movement has usually come not from punitive posturing abroad but from painstaking bargaining in and around African led frameworks. The Lusaka Ceasefire Agreement recognised the crisis as regional and demanded a regional mechanism. The Sun City process attempted to build a political order out of armed fragmentation rather than simply condemning it. The Pretoria Agreement addressed the issue of armed groups hostile to Kigali. The Nairobi Communiqué again centred the disarmament of ex FAR and Interahamwe elements. The Addis Ababa Framework sought to bind regional states and the Congolese government into mutual commitments. More recent processes in Luanda and Nairobi have tried to return the crisis to African diplomatic tables.
The lesson here is not that every agreement worked. Many did not. Some were under enforced, some were overtaken by events and some were undermined by bad faith on multiple sides. The lesson is that the architecture of peace, when it has existed at all, has been regional, negotiated and political. Sanctions, by contrast, are typically external, declaratory and reductive. They are instruments for signalling disapproval, not for constructing a regional compact.
This is where the DRC’s current diplomatic instinct deserves scrutiny. Kinshasa has every right to seek international support. No sovereign state can be expected to absorb insecurity in silence. But there is a difference between seeking support and outsourcing strategy. The more the DRC frames its security predicament primarily through the vocabulary of distant punishment, asking outsiders to discipline Rwanda rather than investing in the arduous business of regional accommodation, the more it risks weakening the very continental norms it ought to strengthen. Africa cannot spend decades arguing for African solutions to African conflicts, building peace and security organs, mobilising subregional diplomacy and then treat external tutelage as the first resort whenever tensions escalate.
That is not a plea for insularity. Europe matters. The United States matters. The United Nations matters. But they matter most when they reinforce regional diplomacy, not when they eclipse it. The United States, in particular, has long occupied an influential place in Rwanda’s external relations as donor, security interlocutor, development partner and political pressure point. Washington’s voice carries weight. Yet if that influence is primarily exercised through sanction threats untethered from a fuller regional strategy, it risks deepening the sense in Kigali that western engagement is selective in memory and shallow in diagnosis, stern on current allegations but much less searching on the long arc of insecurity that followed international abandonment in 1994.
The same warning applies to European actors. The European Union has resources, diplomatic networks and normative leverage that could be useful in the Great Lakes. But usefulness depends on posture. Europe can help by backing verification mechanisms, supporting demobilisation and reintegration programmes, financing border security cooperation and lending technical and political support to African Union, East African Community and Southern African Development Community led initiatives. It is least helpful when it slips into the role of moral prosecutor while the local and regional institutions that must carry the burden of peace are left underpowered, divided or bypassed.
The coexistence of the East African Community and Southern African Development Community tracks in the eastern Congo crisis has not always been elegant. At times it has been marked by rivalry, mixed mandates and confusion over leadership. Yet that complexity should lead to reform and coordination, not abandonment. The East African Community’s involvement recognised the immediacy of neighbourhood stakes. The Southern African Development Community’s engagement recognised that instability in the DRC is not a local inconvenience but a wider regional danger. The African Union should be the forum in which these tracks are harmonised with a clearer division of labour across ceasefire monitoring, political dialogue, disarmament sequencing, refugee protection and guarantees on non support to armed groups.
The central mistake of sanctions first thinking is that it assumes pressure can substitute for politics. It cannot. In eastern Congo, politics is the missing infrastructure. There must be a credible process in which Rwanda’s security concerns are heard rather than dismissed and in which the DRC’s sovereignty is affirmed rather than hollowed out. There must be an enforceable regional mechanism dealing with armed groups. There must be a more candid reckoning with the failures of the Congolese state in the east including the repeated incorporation, fragmentation and recycling of armed actors. There must be a recognition that military campaigns unaccompanied by political settlement simply rearrange the map of violence.
There is a further reason sanctions are the wrong answer. They flatter the international community’s conscience. They allow foreign governments, many of which were passive or complicit through indifference during the darkest chapters of regional history, to speak in the polished idiom of accountability without confronting their own selective engagement. The world wants to be seen now. That is understandable. But moral visibility is not the same thing as responsibility. Responsibility would mean remembering, concretely, what happened when Rwanda cried out three decades ago and the guardians of world order looked away.
It would mean remembering that the genocide against the Tutsi was not stopped by the international community. It would mean remembering that United Nations peacekeeping, constrained by mandate and abandoned by political will, could not meet the scale of the crime. It would mean remembering that evacuations were designed overwhelmingly around foreign lives while Rwandan civilians were left in the killing fields. And it would mean understanding that a state born again from such abandonment will not read the present through the sentimental lens preferred in western editorials. It will read it through the harder lessons of survival.
None of this absolves Rwanda of the need to act within regional and international law. But good policy is not made by pretending that historical trauma is irrelevant when it becomes inconvenient. Nor is peace built by treating one side’s fear as a mere excuse and the other side’s appeals as self evidently sufficient. If the aim is not performance but settlement then the task is to construct a process in which both security and sovereignty are addressed together.
That requires intellectual honesty from Kinshasa as well. The DRC cannot indefinitely seek peace through external denunciation while postponing the internal reforms without which eastern Congo will remain vulnerable to every armed entrepreneur with a grievance, a sponsor or a commercial interest. Security sector reform, local governance, accountability for abuses by all armed actors and the restoration of state legitimacy in the east are not optional add ons. They are the difference between a republic that governs its frontier and a state that repeatedly invites foreign attention because it cannot fully govern part of its own territory.
So what should be done
First, the African Union should convene and underwrite a consolidated political security framework bringing together existing regional processes rather than allowing overlapping initiatives to drift into diplomatic clutter. Second, the East African Community and Southern African Development Community should move from parallelism to complementarity, establishing a shared mechanism for ceasefire verification and intelligence sharing on armed groups. Third, Europe and the United States should support this architecture materially and diplomatically while resisting the seduction of punitive symbolism. Fourth, the disarmament and dismantling of armed groups must return to the centre of negotiations as a substantive condition for reducing cross border insecurity. Fifth, the DRC and Rwanda should commit to a monitored non support regime for armed groups backed by African verification and regular reporting. Sixth, peace efforts must be linked to civilian protection and refugee security because every cycle of displacement creates new resentments and new pretexts for intervention.
Above all, the region needs a politics of seriousness. That means fewer theatrical declarations from afar and more institutional patience close to home. It means acknowledging that sovereignty in the Great Lakes cannot be defended by slogans alone and that security cannot be sustained by memory alone. The task is to bring them into the same settlement.
On 12 April, while Rwanda remains deep in the season of remembrance, the world should resist the temptation to speak as though this crisis emerged from nowhere and can be disciplined from a distance. The history of the Great Lakes does not permit such innocence. The world failed Rwanda once with fatal consequences. It should not now compound that failure with a policy of shallow certitude.
Sanctions may satisfy the appetite to be seen doing something. They will not do the harder thing which is to help build peace. For that, there is no substitute for dialogue, sober, difficult and regionally anchored dialogue and for a renewed continental commitment backed, not overshadowed, by Europe, the United States and the wider international community.
That is the only path that takes history seriously. And in the Great Lakes, any path that does not take history seriously leads back to the abyss.
