The Messy Underbelly of the UK’s Rwanda asylum policy
As Rishi Sunak tries to get his Rwanda migration policy through parliament, it offers a pertinent opportunity to investigate the dark underbelly of this policy and its potentially catastrophic geopolitical implications. The conservative government argue that the policy, which legalises the transportation of asylum seekers to Rwanda, will ease the number of migrants crossing the English Channel in small boats. This controversial policy has already been once rejected by the UK supreme court and Sunak has faced his toughest political opposition yet with the resignation of two senior Tory MPs over the bill.
The opposition argument to the Rwandan policy has been to emphasise the inhumanity of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda. This article seeks to go deeper to explain the sinister roots of this policy, its implications for UK approaches to Rwandan leader Paul Kagame, and its potentially devastating consequences for African geopolitics.
To do this, we must first investigate the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame. Michela Wrong produced a ground-breaking piece in Foreign Affairs which investigated the role of Kagame in sowing chaos in Congo.
Wrong explored Kagame’s role in the resurgence of the M23 movement in Eastern Congo. The M23 are a military group composed of mutinying Congolese soldiers who have accused the Congolese government of breaking their vow to integrate the majority-Tutsi community into the army. In response, they have launched campaigns in the Great Lakes region, capturing the Mushaki and Rubaya settlements in February 2023. Rubaya is naturally rich in coltan which is mined for smartphones, laptops, and electric vehicle batteries.
So far, the conflict has resulted in a surge in instances of violence including gang rapes of women, mass executions of men, and the forced military recruitment of boys. It has also displaced over 800,000 Congolese people, who have been forced to sleep on Goma’s streets or in poorly sanitised refugee camps where cases of cholera have surged.
Impact on region
Moreover, the conflict between the M23 and the Congolese army has destabilised regional power dynamics in Eastern Africa, resulting in increased clashes between Rwanda and Congo. In January 2023, Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi sent military jets into Rwandan airspace to warn Kagame of his continued support of the M23 movement. In response, Kagame threatened to deploy Rwandan troops ‘massively’ along Rwanda’s border with Congo.
Military escalation between the powers, has also drawn in military responses from Uganda, South Sudan, Angola, Kenya, and Burundi, signalling a troubling new dawn in East Africa which threatens to turn Eastern Congo into a battleground for economic and regional domination.
Kagame has continually denied any involvement with the M23 movement, but in December 2022, a UN report used aerial footage to prove the Rwandan government’s direct involvement. The report tracked Rwandan supply of machine guns, mortars, and long-range fire power to the M23 which has transformed them into a sophisticated military force.
Michela Wrong asserts that Kagame’s support of the M23 is not about lust for mineral resources, since M23 controlled areas contain few important mines and fighting has actively disrupted illegal smuggling routes. Instead, she poses, Kagame ‘wants to appear as the world’s most important player.’ She frames Kagame’s desire to be unavoidable or ‘incontournable’.
The important subtext to understand Kagame’s support of M23 is the strengthening relationship between Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni and Congolese president Tshisekedi. In 2022, the Congolese president permitted Uganda to send mechanised equipment into northeastern Congo to clear equatorial forest and repair 140 miles of road. This deal looks set to accelerate cross-border trade between Uganda and Congo. This arrangement confirmed Kagame’s fears that Rwandan economic hegemony in Congo will be threatened by Uganda, a prelude to Ugandan ascendancy in East-African regional power dynamics.
History of M23
This is not the only time the M23 have been active in the Great Lakes region. In 2012, the M23 force captured North Kivu’s capital, Goma. The groups’ murder, rape, and torture of East Congolese civilians sparked international outrage and saw a prompt clampdown by western states who revoked funding to Kagame and threatened to sanction Rwandan officials for aiding and abetting war crimes. The result was a swift retreat from Kagame who pulled his support for the M23 group who quickly disbanded.
Although the violence and shape of the insurgency in eastern Congo is practically identical to the 2012 movement, the M23 now looks demographically different. Whereas in 2012, the leadership was majority Tutsi, and the soldiers were majority Hutu, in this instance, both the leadership and the fighters are predominately Tutsi. This shift has unnerved some critics of the regime who point to the killings of Hutu civilians and the newly empowered M23 position which claims, ‘we are here to stay’ to argue that similar ethnic divisions to those that led to the Rwandan genocide could arise again.
Western response
In contrast to the swift international condemnation and action of 2012, the resurgence of virtually identical instances of violence over a decade later has had a drastically different response. Rather than sanctioning Rwanda, western leaders have drawn closer than ever to Kagame.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron sees Kagame as the strongman of Africa and a route to policing former French colonies, such as Mali and the Central African Republic, which have rejected diplomatic ties with France. Although Macron has pledged 34 million euros in humanitarian aid, he has refused to directly condemn Rwandan involvement in the conflict.
Similarly, the UK’s refusal to stand against Kagame is informed by the conservative governments’ Rwandan resettlement policy. The party signed a deal with Kagame in 2022 to fly asylum seekers to Rwanda for processing. They have already paid Kagame £140 million pounds in exchange for accepting the scheme. The British government perhaps unsurprisingly, have been vocal in their support for Kagame’s leadership in East Africa and have refused to criticise his role in fuelling the conflict in eastern Congo.
The United States, in contrast, has been far more vocal in condemning Rwandan support of M23 and have repeatedly called for Kagame to withdraw from Congo altogether. In December 2022, President Joe Biden met with Tshisekedi at the US African Leaders Summit in Washington, a clear show of American allyship with Congo in the M23 dispute. This stance was likely determined by the treatment of Paul Rusesabagina, a rights activist who resides in the US, who was sentenced and extradited to serve 25 years in prison in Rwanda. However, the recent release of Rusesabagina could perhaps ease US diplomatic positions to Kigali and lead to more neutral relations between the two countries.
Kagame’s international reputation has also had significant setbacks due to the emergence of evidence that his forces were culpable in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. This challenges Kagame’s narrative which paints his forces, the RLF, as the great emancipators who ended the genocide. The UN and the Refugee Agency found evidence that Kagame’s forces massacred Hutu civilians before, during, and after the 1994 genocide, and that 200,000 Hutus remain unaccounted for after Rwandan troops broke up refugee camps in eastern Congo. Human rights activists such as Denis Mukwege, have worked tirelessly to highlight the central and devastating war crimes committed by Rwanda in eastern Congo.
Kagame Politics
Kagame however spins the rhetoric, reiterating his role in silencing and defeating the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR); the extremist Hutu group responsible for the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis in 1994. Kagame’s electoral popularity has only strengthened as he argues Rwanda faces an existential threat from an imminent second genocide which will target Tutsis both inside Rwanda and Congo.
Those guilty of accusing Kagame of possible war crimes in the Congo, therefore, face the wrath of Kagame’s press machine which uses labels such as ‘genocide denier’, ‘traitors’ and ‘cockroaches’ to smear these critics. Kagame has been using these political bullying tactics throughout his political career and is well-versed in mobilising painful memories of the 1994 Rwandan genocide to marginalise voices calling for his removal.
Moreover, Kagame’s domestic political position seems sure until 2034 when he faces another election. In 2017, he received 98% of the vote with all but two of the eleven opposition parties campaigning for his re-election. Previous elections in 2010, which saw the beheading of political opponent, André Kagwa Rwisereka, demonstrate the tight grip on democratic elections of Kagame’s party, as Will Jones of Royal Holloway explains, ‘all real opposition, including that of former RFP cadres in exile has been totally smashed.’
Members of the old guard who helped Kagame win power from the FDLR have all but disappeared from the ministries of power. Kagame on July 19, 2023, retired two senior generals, Emmanuel Karenzi Karake and Jack Nziza, leaving himself and James Kabarbe, the Minister of Defence, as the only political powerhouses who served in the RFP and thereby can claim to save Rwandans from genocide. Kagame’s purging has been made possible by assassinations and abductions by his network of spies. The murder of former intelligence chief Colonel Patrick Karegeya in a hotel suite in Johannesburg in 2014 has served as an effective warning to anyone who dares challenge the president. As Kagame reiterated after news of the assassination surfaced, ‘you can’t betrayal Rwanda and not get punished for it…anyone even those still alive, will reap the consequences. Anyone. It is a matter of time.’
The UK’s Rwandan asylum policy dehumanises those who are attempting to seek haven in the UK and undermines the right of all persons to seek asylum in the country they flee to. But as this article has explored, we must also critically engage with the far-reaching implications of the policy for the wider East African region. Western governments’ refusal to condemn Kagame’s role in the violent insurgency in eastern Congo, has the power to destabilise the entire region. Western governments should repeat the sanctioning of 2012 which forced Rwanda to cease supporting the M23 to prevent wider regional escalation which will lead to more deaths, displacement, and deepen an already pressing humanitarian crisis.
By Sofia Aujla-Jones
