High-profile X podcaster and Elon Musk protégé Mario Nawfal recently produced some slick propaganda with Rwandan President Paul Kagame. His team repeatedly asked me to record a six-minute response but then neither played it nor explained why. This is a slightly longer version of my recorded response.
Mario Nawfal recently traveled to Rwanda to interview Rwandan President Paul Kagame, then posted the results to YouTube and his X page. He billed the results as a deep investigative dive into the politics of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where Rwanda has been at war for the last 30 years.
The trouble with Nawfal’s investigation is that his only source is the Rwandan President himself. He sits down for lengthy one-on-one exchanges, in which he repeats Kagame’s talking points, then invites him to elaborate on them. Why are Kagame’s statements true? Because he’s the president and he says they are. And because they’re wrapped in slick production values and whiz-bang graphics created by Mario Nawfal’s team.
Here’s some of what he missed:
Rwandan troops have invaded DRC in indisputable violation of the UN Charter, claiming the right to conduct a pre-emptive invasion. This is well-documented in UN Group of Experts Reports on DRC in June 2024 and December 2024, and in decades of UN reports produced since Rwanda and Uganda first invaded DRC in 1996 and then again in 1998.
News reports often say that Rwanda is “supporting M23,” but in May and December 2024, the UN Group of Experts reported that M23 and Rwandan troops are actually integrated and operating under Rwandan command.
On February 21, the UN Security Council passed a resolution demanding that M23 withdraw from its positions and that Rwandan Defense Forces withdraw from DRC.
What Paul Kagame calls the incompetence of the Congolese government is no excuse for an invasion. There are incompetent governments all over the world, but incompetence doesn’t justify invading one’s neighbors.
Rwanda is not in Congo to protect Tutsis or pursue genocide criminals. It’s not in DRC to keep genocide criminals from returning to commit another genocide in Rwanda. Kagame’s been using those excuses to loot Congolese resources for the past 30 years.
This is well-documented in UN Group of Experts Reports on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 2001, 2002, 2003, and other bi-annual reports produced between 2004 and 2024.The 2001 report described a “Congo desk” that Rwanda set up to manage various aspects of resource trafficking, including its sale into international markets.
In December 2024, the Group of Experts reported that M23 had conquered Rubaya, which has the largest coltan mine in the African Great Lakes Region, and set up a parallel administration controlling mining, trade, transport and taxation of minerals produced. They said that at least 150 tons of coltan had since been smuggled into Rwanda.
In 2018, Rwanda declared total gold exports of 2,163 kg, while the United Arab Emirates officially imported 12,539 kg from Rwanda during the first nine months of the same year.
In January 2008, the International Rescue Committee reported that since Rwanda and Uganda’s 1998 invasion of Congo, 5.4 million people had died as a consequence, mostly from displacement and disease and nearly half of them children. This is a number far greater than the entire Tutsi population of eastern Congo, which seems to be roughly 600,000 and is definitely nowhere near 5.4 million. Should Congo’s Tutsi minority be protected? Of course. Absolutely. Should 5.4 million Congolese people and Rwandan refugees die in their name? Obviously not.
No one has done a study of war-related mortality since 2008, but it’s no doubt much higher. By November 2024, the population of Internally Displaced Persons, IDPs, had swollen to nearly 7 million, most of them in the Kivu Provinces and in Ituri Province neighboring Rwanda and Uganda. In mid-January, the UN refugee agency estimated that 230,000 more people had been displaced since the beginning of the year, and during the first week of February, the World Food Program reported 700,000 displaced in the City of Goma alone.
Rwanda angrily dismisses the findings of the entire human rights and investigative staff of the United Nations. I had firsthand experience of this in 2010, when I attended a conference on genocide at Sacramento State University, where I sat quietly listening till near the end of the day. Then, at a small breakout session on Rwanda, I raised my hand to suggest that anyone evaluating the Rwanda Genocide and its aftermath in DRC should consider sixteen years of UN investigations including the 1994 Gersony Report, the 2000 Garreton Report, the 2001, 2002, and 2003 Reports on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth in the DRC, and the UN Mapping Report on Human Rights Abuse in the DRC, 1993–2003. That was 2010 and the UN Office of Human Rights had just published the Mapping Report, which documented the Rwandan army’s “systematic and widespread” massacres of Rwandan Hutu refugees in DRC. It said that these massacres might be ruled to be genocide in a competent court.
The 1994 Gersony Report, commissioned by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, was suppressed for decades, but finally leaked in 2010. UN human rights investigator Robert Gersony had concluded that Kagame’s RPF army had committed systematic massacres of Rwandan Hutus in 1994 in areas of Rwanda that it controlled. Canadian investigative journalist and author Judi Rever reported more extensive RPF massacres in her groundbreaking 2018 investigative work In Praise of Blood: Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front.
However, at Sacramento State, I didn’t even get so far as to name the reports. Before I could finish a sentence, the Rwandan moderator interrupted me, outraged. How dare I mention these reports? He stopped me from saying one more word, and then it got worse. Around 10 of Kagame’s acolytes surrounded me screaming, then one actually grabbed hold of me before someone from the university intervened. I filed an assault complaint with the Sacramento State Campus Police, which is still in their records.
I’m telling this story to demonstrate what a threat the UN investigations are to the Kagame regime, such a threat that I was assaulted for even mentioning them in a room of fewer than 30 people at a small state university.
Ann Garrison is a Black Agenda Report Contributing Editor based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at ann@anngarrison.com. You can help support her work on Patreon.
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