Lammy tells Rwanda it is putting $1bn in aid ‘under threat’ in DRC invasion

Rwanda has put $1bn of global aid under threat by taking part in the invasion of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, has said.

He made the direct warning in a phone call to the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, on Sunday after also speaking to the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, about the crisis.

Lammy said Rwanda received more than $1bn of global aid every year, including about £32m of bilateral UK assistance.

“All of that is under threat when you attack your neighbours, and we are clear that we cannot have countries challenging the territorial integrity of other countries. Just as we will not tolerate it in the continent of Europe, we cannot tolerate it wherever in the world it happens. We have to be clear about that,” Lammy said.

Lammy’s comments mark a break from a much more supportive British policy towards Rwanda pursued by previous Labour and Conservative governments – as well as by influential figures such as Tony Blair.

Kagame has long been feted at international symposiums, with his domestic policies being largely ignored due to the role he played in ending the Rwandan genocide and tackling disease.

This week, however, Rwandan-backed M23 rebels seized the city of Goma, the capital of North Kivu province, in the latest escalation of a conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced more than 1 million since its recent resurgence.

The DRC government, UN officials and countries including the US have accused Rwanda of fuelling the conflict by deploying thousands of its own troops and heavy weapons on Congolese soil in support of the rebel group.

A change in UK policy is conditional on how Rwanda responds to the international calls to pull back from Goma, but it appears likely UK-Rwandan bilateral relations will not easily recover.

Kagame became an inadvertent poster child of the Conservative party when he agreed in 2022 to a British request to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. To protect the agreement from legal challenge , the UK was required to turn a blind eye to Rwanda’s human rights record and designate it as a safe destination for asylum seekers. Boris Johnson called Rwanda “one of the safest countries in the world”.

Freedom of information requests showed that at the time the Home Office assured MPs that Rwanda was safe, the Foreign Office was making contingency plans in the event of a war between Rwanda and the DRC.

Kagame has for years claimed Rwandan troops did not interfere in the internal affairs of its far larger neighbour or support operations being mounted by the M23 rebels group. This required him to deny successive reports by UN groups of experts showing the linkage between the M23 and Kigali.

Lammy this week told MPs: “We know that M23 rebels could not have taken Goma without material support from Rwanda defence forces.”

Kagame’s position has been that the DRC president, Felix Tshisekedi, was arming the Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda (FDLR), a remnant of the Hutu militia responsible for the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

It is a claim with which Blair has been sympathetic, and he remains unabashed about the 15 years the Tony Blair Institute acted as a consultant to the Rwandan government.

There is now a clearer critical dimension to war in the eastern DRC. According to the Rwandan mining authority, Rwanda’s mineral export revenues in 2022 increased to a record $1.1bn. The Congolese finance minister, Nicolas Kazadi, told an FT conference that wealth was obviously coming from the DRC.

One reason the M23 is so active in North Kivu lies underground, with its rich deposits of minerals- coltan, cassiterite and tungsten.

Bintou Keita, the head of the UN mission in the DRC, told the security council in September “The criminal laundering of the DRC’s natural resources smuggled out of the country is strengthening armed groups.”

The capture of Goma will make it easier to transport these valuable minerals over the border to Rwanda.

At the security council this week, the Congolese minister of foreign affairs, Thérèse Kayikwamba Wagner, said: “What the DRC is going through is not a conflict like others. It is a deliberate and methodical aggression against a sovereign state, a flagrant violation of the founding principles of this organization and an intolerable attack against international peace and security.”