Ottawa has stayed silent on Rwandan aggression while continuing to back Africa’s most ruthless regime led by Paul Kagame.
Eastern Congo is facing a devastating foreign invasion and Canada is once again siding with the aggressors targeting that tortured land.
In the latest phase of three decades of Rwandan-instigated insurgency, Kigali’s proxy March 23 Movement (M23) rebel force recently took control of Goma, a city of two million and the biggest in eastern Congo. Four hundred thousand people have been displaced in fighting since the start of the year and over a million during the past three years.
The Canadian government has stayed silent on Rwanda’s aggression while continuing to back its leader, Paul Kagame, who presides over a brutal police state. On Sunday, Global Affairs Canada released a statement critical of the “escalation of violence” in Congo, but which failed to mention the thousands of Rwandan soldiers in the country (the statement vaguely referred to “foreign troops” in eastern Congo). M23 rebels previously took control of Goma during a rebellion in 2012 but withdrew after only a few days following international pressure on Rwanda.
While causing mayhem in Congo and solidifying his dictatorship, Kagame continues to receive Canadian support. In August, Canada’s High Commissioner in Kigali, Julie Crowley, celebrated his ‘victory’ in the presidential election with 99 percent of the vote, securing another five years in power. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has also met with Kagame multiple times. Six months into Rwanda’s latest incursion into Congo, Trudeau attended the June 2022 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Kigali. The PM focused his discussion with Kagame on opposing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, ignoring Rwanda’s ongoing aggression in Congo. It was also announced that Canada would open a full diplomatic high commission in the country.
Ottawa provides tens of million of dollars in assistance to Rwanda annually. As detailed in an article in the Globe and Mail, Canada even greenlit $19 million for an institute set up to combat the use of child soldiers in Africa despite its links to the Rwandan military, which has secretly used its own troops to recruit and abduct children and force them to wage war.
Ottawa has backed Kigali as it has unleashed mayhem in Congo over the past 30 years. In 1996, Ottawa supported Rwanda and Uganda as they jointly invaded the eastern Congo (then Zaire) to target Hutu rebel groups who had fled to the country after the Rwandan genocide, effectively launching the First Congo War. In the fall of that year Canada led a short-lived United Nations force into the region, designed to dissipate French pressure and ensure that soldiers loyal to Zairean President Mobutu Sese Seko did not take command of a force that could impede the invasion. Rwandan forces marched 1,500 kilometres to topple the regime in Kinshasa and then re-invaded after the Congolese government it installed expelled Rwandan troops. This led to an eight-country war between 1998 and 2003, which left millions dead. Since then, Rwanda and its proxies have repeatedly invaded the eastern Congo.
In 2002, eight Canadian companies including American Mineral Fields, Banro, First Quantum, Hrambee Mining, International Panorama Resources, Kinross Gold, Melkior Resources and Tenke were implicated in a UN panel report on the “Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.” The report detailed widespread abuses by Canadian and other foreign mining companies and recommended that Ottawa undertake a formal inquiry into the allegations and investigate the matter. This has never been done.
As I detailed in my 2015 book, Canada in Africa: 300 Years of Aid and Exploitation, Canada has long played a role in impoverishing the Congo. Over a century ago Royal Military College of Canada-trained officer William Grant Stairs, a Halifax native, participated in two deadly expeditions to expand European influence over what was then called the Belgian Congo. In 1887, Stairs was one of ten white officers in the first-ever European expedition to cross the interior of the continent, which left a trail of death, disease and destruction. A few years later Stairs led a 1,950-person mission to conquer the resource-rich Katanga region on behalf of Belgium’s King Leopold II. Today Stairs is honoured with a street, island and multiple plaques, despite committing atrocities and adding 150,000 square kilometres to the Belgian king’s monstrous colony.
During this period Hamilton, Ontario’s William Henry Faulknor was one of the first white missionaries to establish a base in eastern Congo. Between 1887 and 1891 Faulknor worked under Mwenda Msiri, the ruler of the Yeke Kingdom, who would later meet his death at the hand of Stairs. Faulknor’s Plymouth Brethren explicitly called for European rule over Katanga and like almost all missionaries sought to undermine local governance.
Following Faulknor, Toronto-born Henry Grattan Guinness II established the Congo-Balolo Mission in 1889. The mission operated in remote areas of the colony, where King Leopold’s Anglo-Belgian Rubber Company obligated individuals and communities to gather rubber latex and chopped off the hands of thousands of individuals who failed to fulfill their quotas.
Faced with the violent disruption of their lives, the Lulonga, Lopori, Maringa, Juapa and Burisa were increasingly receptive to the Christian activists who became “the interpreter of the new way of life,” writes Ruth Slade. Not wanting to jeopardize their standing with Leopold’s representatives, the Congo-Balolo Mission repeatedly refused the appeals of British-based solidarity campaigners to publicly expose the abuses they witnessed.
In the 1920s the Canadian trade commissioner in South Africa, G.R. Stevens, traveled to the Congo and reported on Katanga’s immense natural resources. In de facto support of Belgian rule, a Canadian trade commission was later opened in the colony in 1946. In response to a series of anti-colonial demonstrations in 1959, a report to External Affairs noted that “savagery is still very near the surface in most of the natives.”
Ottawa backed Brussels militarily as it sought to maintain control over its massive colony. Hundreds of Belgian pilots were trained in Canada during and after the Second World War, and through the 1950s Belgium received tens of millions of dollars through Canadian NATO Mutual Aid, a multilateral defence trade program. Canadian Mutual Aid weaponry was likely employed by Belgian troops in suppressing the anti-colonial struggle in Congo.
Immediately after independence Canada played an important role in the UN mission that facilitated the murder of anti-colonial Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in 1961. Hundreds of Canadian troops worked to undermine the independence leader who Prime Minister John Diefenbaker labelled a “major threat to Western interests.” Canadian Colonel Jean Berthiaume assisted Lumumba’s political enemies by helping to kidnap the popular leader. Lumumba was then handed over to soldiers under the authority of Mobutu Sese Seko and sent to Katanga where he was tortured and executed.
Canada had a hand in Mobutu’s rise and Ottawa mostly supported his brutal rule. In the almost three decades since Mobutu himself was overthrown, eastern Congo has been largely under the influence of Rwanda and its proxies.
Congo has been wracked by more than a century of violent colonization and imperialism resulting in millions of deaths—and Canada has supported it all, or at best stayed silent while watching it happen. The federal government’s strong support for the Kagame regime today contradicts Canada’s purported human rights principles and should be seen as a stain on our global reputation.