Rwanda Creates Nearly a Million Refugees Since Signing Asylum Deal with UK Government

Twelve miles from the Rwanda border, in the shadow of the Virunga Mountains, a city of tents sprawls across the volcanic rock. A boy in his early teens points out the explosions lighting up the sky just a few miles away. There are no schools set up here yet – the thousands of children stuck here have little to do – but he’s keen to show off his few words of English. “One – two – three – M23!” he says, miming an AK-47, as artillery fired at the M23 militia blasts in the background. 

This is Bulengo, one of the Eastern DRC’s many camps for internally displaced people, where numbers have swelled to around 120,000 since 2021, when a rebel militia that many thought had disappeared resurged and tore through the North Kivu region.

After nearly a decade of quiet, the M23 – an organisation with several former and current leaders sanctioned by the UK or jailed for war crimes – is back, and as brutal as ever.

The M23’s main backer, Rwanda, has been pressured into cutting off support before but, this time, bolstered by the UK’s unwavering support, it has little inclination to pull back its proxy death squads from its campaign of mass rape and murder. 

“When the M23 came we didn’t have anywhere to go,” says Dee, a woman who fled to the camp from Kitchanga with her seven children when M23 stormed the city nearly two years ago. “They have their own rules that we couldn’t live with. They kill people and take the women away and do bad things to them.”

Like most people here in Bulengo, Dee’s children were born long after the Rwanda genocide, but its legacy has pursued them across borders and generations.

Over a hellish 100 days in 1994, and with the complicity of the French Government, extremists from Rwanda’s dominant Hutu ethnic group murdered a million minority Tutsis and any Hutus who tried to stop them. Abandoned by the international community, a Tutsi-led army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, fought back and won a decisive victory – but as both Hutu and Tutsi civilians fled across the border to escape civil war, the violence moved with them.

New militias formed under the guise of protecting their own ethnic groups, enacting hideous massacres on each other’s communities in the Eastern DRC, while using the conflict as an excuse to forcibly recruit child soldiers, sexually enslave women and girls, and seize parts of the DRC’s enormously lucrative mineral trade for personal gain.

The families sheltering in Bulengo are Rwandan Hutus, making them a target for the Tutsi M23s. 

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In 2012, a UN Security Council investigation into this militia found that the Rwandan Government was sending the group money, fighters, and weapons. International bodies and foreign governments, including the UK, suspended aid to Rwanda, and the Rwandan Government – which relied on this aid to make up 35% of its budget – softened its stance.

In March 2013, General Bosco ‘The Terminator’ Ntaganda, a Rwandan senior M23 leader, handed himself in to the US Embassy in Kigali and was transferred to the Hague, where he was convicted on 18 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, earning the longest sentence in the International Criminal Court’s history. The M23, meanwhile, dwindled almost out of existence. Until now.  

In the two years since the M23 resumed hostilities, investigation after investigation by the UN, human rights groups, Rwanda’s African neighbours, and governments around the world has concluded that Rwanda is, again, largely responsible. 

“Kigali has a long record in destabilising eastern Congo, leading to mass displacement and immense human suffering,” says Lewis Mudge, Central Africa director of Human Rights Watch. “The Rwandan support to the M23 in weaponry, troops and direct military intervention has been well-documented and Rwandan officials involved may be complicit in M23 abuses and war crimes.”

As in 2012, many governments are urgently calling for Rwanda to end this complicity.

“State support of armed groups is unacceptable, and we reiterate our call on Rwanda to end its support to UN- and U.S.-sanctioned M23 and to immediately withdraw Rwanda Defence Force personnel from eastern DRC,” a US State Department spokesperson wrote in an email. 

Missing from these calls, though, is the UK.

Rather than pressuring Rwanda to pull back from the DRC since 2022, the UK Government has actively stepped up its support for Kigali – and Kigali has stepped up its support for the M23. 

Ignoring the British High Commissioner in Rwanda’s human rights concerns, and Foreign Office warnings that this would make it hard for the UK to challenge Rwanda’s behaviour inside and outside the country, in July 2021, then Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab approved Rwanda for “intensive engagement” in the UK’s new scheme to remove refugees seeking asylum in the UK to third countries. Within three months, the M23s – who had lain low for nearly a decade – began to regroup. 

In March 2022, while the UK Government was preparing the scheme’s funding documents to be signed by the Chancellor, the Rwanda-backed militia attacked UN peacekeepers and Congolese forces in the Eastern DRC, and shot down a UN helicopter. Forty-six thousand civilians were driven from their homes. In a single week, Rwanda had helped create nearly half as many refugees as the 92,000 the UK was looking to clear from its backlog of applications. 

At this point, the Rwanda agreement was still weeks from being signed.

The UK could have pulled out or demanded Kigali end support of the M23 as a condition of the deal. This had, after all, worked in 2012, when the UK – then Rwanda’s second-largest individual donor after the US – blocked £16 million in aid over concerns Rwanda was sending fighters and equipment to the M23.

But this time around, in the wake of the attacks, the UK publicly announced the new refugee resettlement deal – the Migration and Economic Development Plan – on 14 April, and made its first payment of £120 million to the Rwandan Government the same month. 

A Guardian investigation found that the UK Government also asked the Foreign Office to rewrite its own report on Rwanda’s safety and human rights record to make it sound more positive, and even sent the document to a Rwandan Colonel for review. Far worse than simply staying silent, as the Foreign Office had feared, the UK seemed willing to manipulate its own findings in the services of Rwandan PR.

Almost immediately, Rwanda-backed atrocities escalated.

In May, Rwanda sent 1,000 soldiers across the border to support a major M23 offensive, attacking more UN peacekeepers and seizing territory. Over the next few days, the militia tried to seize the provincial capital, Goma, displacing another 70,000 people. 

The UK Government sent Rwanda another £20million. 

Over the next 12 months, M23 militants waged a campaign of unbridled destruction and violence across the Eastern DRC. In the village of Kinshishe, investigators documented 14 mass graves left behind by the departing militia, while women in Kanombe, Kitchanga, and Mushaki describe being gang-raped in front of their children and husbands.

“As they were raping me, one said ‘we’ve come from Rwanda to destroy you’,” a survivor told Human Rights Watch. A string of UN Security Council reports asserted that Rwanda was backing these atrocities, triggering international outcry – except from the UK, which instead paid Rwanda another no-strings-attached £100 million.

By October 2023 – 18 months after the UK signed its deal with Rwanda – not a single asylum seeker had been relocated to the country. A record number of people had, however, been displaced in the DRC, with almost a million of these refugees directly attributable to the M23. By now, the UK had paid Rwanda over a quarter of a billion pounds while refusing to answer questions about how the money was being spent.

“The UK Government continuously refuses to call out and condemn Rwanda’s support for M23,” says former Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn, who has also long campaigned against UK complicity in conflict mineral exploitation in the DRC. “How much more violence, death and displacement should the people of the DRC endure before the international community wakes up and takes action?”

Asked whether any of this money had been or could be used to fund either M23 rebels or the Rwandan military’s illegal incursions into DRC, a Home Office spokesperson said that the money was “intended” for various development sectors (and to claim otherwise would be “simply incorrect”) but did not state whether funds had actually been used for this purpose and did not respond to repeated requests for clarification.

The spokesperson also refused to name a single project that had been or would be funded by the MEDP or the Economic Transformation and Integration Fund (ETIF). They declined to say which Rwandan ministry was responsible for administering the ETIF or whether the UK Government has any way of ensuring these funds are used for their intended purpose. 

The spokesperson said that initial set-up costs for asylum processing were covered by a separate payment (of £20 million) in 2022, leaving the other £220 million unaccounted for to date.

In an email, the Rwandan High Commissioner’s Office in London said that “funds received under the MEDP go towards ensuring we are prepared to receive the migrants when they arrive, and towards Rwanda’s economic and social development”.. It declined to provide any specific examples of development projects or investments. Asked repeatedly whether any UK money is used to fund the M23, the High Commissioner’s Office described the militia as a “Congolese problem” but did not deny the allegation.

“Rwanda is not responsible for security and governance failures in the DRC, including the integration of the genocidal militia FDLR into the DRC armed forces,” it said, referring both to the