Rwandan President Paul Kagame at a youth summit in Kigali. June 26, 2016. Photo courtesy Paul Kagame/Flickr.

The following is an excerpt from Rwanda’ 30-Year Assault on Congo: The Crimes, The Criminals, and the Cover-Up by author, journalist, and Canadian Dimension columnist Judi Rever, released on March 1, 2026 by Baraka Books. For more information, visit www.barakabooks.com.

In 1996, forces loyal to Rwanda’s military leader Paul Kagame entered the Congolese village of Muheto, killing more than a dozen civilians and setting fire to countless homes. A few weeks later, the attackers returned and slaughtered 16 more people, in what would be the beginning of a decades-long campaign by Rwanda and its proxies to use Congolese bodies as battlefields. While many armed groups have committed heinous atrocities over the years, Kagame’s fighters have always been the dominant predators in eastern Congo. His forces have captured farmers’ fields, stripped families of their livelihoods and trafficked vast quantities of strategic minerals, which they sell to big tech suppliers on the global market. Kagame and his military coterie have become rich while millions of Congolese people have died in agony. As a geopolitical lynchpin on the African continent, Kagame has largely enjoyed a privileged status with Western nations and has remained legally and politically untouchable.

Trying to understand the vast chasm between justice and international criminal law is a sobering experience. Year after year, the Rwandan and Congolese people have witnessed the sheer breadth of Kagame’s impunity, and the abject refusal by international courts to hold him and his closest commanders accountable for their crimes. No matter what Kagame does, he gets away with it.

The Rwandan president’s ability to dodge the law has long been tied to international politics, money, and the interests of global power elites. Nevertheless, the crime scene under Kagame and the logistics of building a legal case against him, at least in the early years, seemed to factor in as well. The creation of Kagame’s impunity, however Orwellian, is worth examining.

Shortly after the International Criminal Court (ICC) was established in 2002, the office of the prosecutor quickly decided against opening any investigation in the Kivu provinces in eastern Congo —where Kagame’s proxies were committing the worst crimes against humanity—because Kagame posed too great a risk to investigators collecting evidence and it was too difficult to operate on the ground. An investigator who worked in the office of the prosecutor told me that Kagame was considered a very dangerous actor and had already taken on a Mafiaesque power. Initially, lawyers at the court were afraid of going after him.

The ICC’s chief prosecutor at the time, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, decided instead to open a file in Ituri, further north, where it was safer for investigators to collect evidence of war crimes. Shortly thereafter, the ICC decided against targeting Kagame’s most dangerous warlords in Ituri, and instead chose to prosecute low-level suspects such as Thomas Lubanga, whose militia killed, tortured, and abducted civilians. Lubanga was initially backed by Uganda, another belligerent nation embroiled in Congo’s conflict, but eventually switched sides to Rwanda. Lubanga was the first person to go to trial before the ICC. He was convicted in 2012 of recruiting and using child soldiers in Ituri and sentenced to 14 years in prison.

Moreno-Ocampo travelled to Kigali and asked Kagame point-blank for Ntaganda, the investigator said. But Kagame told him that this was not going to happen. The Prosecutor did not object.” Moreno-Ocampo was fond of calling the Rwandan president Paul. The investigator disagreed with Moreno-Ocampo’s prosecutorial approach, and insisted that Kagame could have been removed from power with a narrowly focused, well-crafted investigation and prosecution.

In 2013, Ntaganda walked into the US embassy in Kigali and was handed over to the court. Six years later, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison for atrocities in Ituri, including murder, rape, and conscripting child soldiers. He was never prosecuted for crimes he committed in the Kivus, though. Ntaganda was charged and convicted as a Congolese warlord, not as a Rwandan, and not under the direction of Kagame. There was no attempt by the ICC to build a case around Rwanda’s primordial role in Ntaganda’s crimes.

The ICC has resolutely refused to stop Kagame’s crusade. It is no wonder that the Congolese view the court as a tool of the West. Today, Kagame has deployed an estimated 7,000 troops in Congo and has secured nearly complete control over Congo’s key mining areas. His government finances, arms and controls a militia known as the M23 that has seized the economic capitals of Goma and Bukavu. The M23 has carried out widespread summary executions and horrific sexual violence; it has displaced hundreds of thousands of Congolese civilians and plundered record levels of minerals over the last year, despite a ‘peace accord’ brokered by US President Donald Trump. Washington recently announced targeted sanctions against senior Rwandan military officials, including the army’s chief of staff, and blocked military assets the Rwandan military may hold in the United States. But Rwanda’s top military brass has always been a revolving door, and Kagame, as Rwanda’s commander-in-chief, was left untouched. His personal assets remain intact and he can travel freely. At his whim, senior military officials will be easily replaced. With no arms embargo levelled against Rwanda, Kagame’s war machine in Congo will continue to murder, brutalize, displace and exploit.

In the meantime, in the small village of Muheto, forces loyal to the Rwandan leader continue to haunt locals who dare to remain.

Judi Rever is a journalist from Montréal and is the author of In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front.

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