After Rwanda-backed rebels seized the Congolese city of Goma in 2012, powerful nations across the world registered their disapproval, announcing sanctions against Rwanda and other measures that led to the rebels’ defeat a year later.
When those same rebels battled to capture Goma on Sunday, several nations once again voiced their criticism, but they have yet to apply the level of pressure on Rwanda that eventually led the rebels to stand down more than a decade ago.
As hundreds of thousands of civilians fled escalating violence in recent days, seeking sanctuary in Goma, the rebel group M23 was right behind them. M23, which the United Nations and others say is funded and armed by Rwanda, declared that it had captured Goma early on Monday.
Now, with the fate of the city in the balance, analysts say a conflict that could be tamed with strong international pressure against Rwanda is, instead, spiraling out of control. Rwanda has as many as 4,000 troops in eastern Congo supporting the M23 advance, United Nations experts say. The government of Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s president, appears intent on rewriting Congo’s map by seizing land, and so far, beyond issuing reproofs, Western countries have barely mustered a response.
Mr. Kagame has denied that Rwanda is arming M23, or that his troops are in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He says M23 is simply defending the rights of Congo’s minority Tutsis — Mr. Kagame’s own ethnic group, which was the principal target of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide. Most analysts say that this is a pretext to occupy Congolese territory and plunder its vast mineral wealth.