Preface: A Warning

I do not seek to be concise and coherent. I do not aspire to erudition or flawlessness. This is not an academic paper; it is a scream into a void we’ve all agreed to call “geopolitics.” If you want tidy answers, read a UN report. If you want footnotes, consult the think tanks funded by the same corporations that profit from this war.

I write as my thoughts erupt, jagged, fevered, and unrefined. My sentences will contradict. My metaphors will bleed into hyperbole. My rage will outweigh my logic. Good. The Congo deserves more than sterile analysis. It deserves a reckoning.

This essay is a mosaic of grief, guilt, and complicity—mine, yours, everyone’s. It is fragmented because the truth about this war is fragmented: scattered across mass graves, boardrooms, and smartphone batteries. I refuse to sand its edges for your comfort. I will not suture it into coherence, because coherence is a lie we tell ourselves to avoid staring into the abyss of our own hypocrisy.

Proceed at your own risk.

It’s been years since I last wrote about politics. I told myself I’d outgrown the futility of shouting into the void, that I’d trade cynicism for quietude. But the Congo bothers me. Not the headlines, those sanitised snippets of “clashes” and “talks”, but the unspoken weight of a conflict older than my lifetime, uglier than my imagination, and more hopeless than my worst nightmares. The Congolese earth has memorised new sounds, the whine of bullets, the metallic cough of machine guns and the silence that follows.

Once, I believed that all wars, no matter how entrenched, could be resolved through dialogue. However, the Congolese conflict has tested my optimism time and again. It saddens me that the people with the power to change things on both sides often seem blinded by their own fears, ambitions, and allegiances. On one hand, Rwanda has been accused of backing rebel groups such as M23, supposedly in pursuit of political and strategic gains. On the other, Kinshasa has been faulted for its own role in mismanaging the crisis and for failing to secure true reconciliation within the country’s borders.

Each faction seems convinced of its own righteousness, while civilians pay the ultimate price. The anguish of Congolese civilians is often lost beneath grand political narratives about sovereignty, resources, and international influence. Yet behind every bullet fired stands a real person whose life or livelihood is abruptly cut short. Homes are torched, crops are looted, and people are driven away in the night. The terrifying sound of gunfire has become a lullaby for children who know no other reality. In war, there are no winners, only different shades of loss. The earth remembers the blood and the survivors bear the scars.

This is a theatre of absurdities Kinshasa accuses Kigali. Kigali denies. The UN releases a report; Rwanda calls it “neo-colonial slander.” America furrows its brow. Europe drafts a sternly worded statement. Social media dissects it all: TikTok soldiers film choreographed ambushes; think tanks host webinars titled “The DRC Crisis: 30 Years Later.”

I have neither the inclination nor the hubris to rehash every historical detail of this protracted crisis, partly because more erudite scholars have documented it with painstaking clarity and mainly because roots matter less to the drowning than the whirlpool. What I can’t understand is why, after 6 million deaths, after 100 failed peace deals, after génocidaires recycled into statesmen, the maths remain broken. War is supposed to be transactional: You fight until the cost outweighs the gain. Yet here, the ledger bleeds endlessly. M23 takes a village; the FARDC shell a market; Rwanda smuggles minerals. Uganda mediates while arming both sides. Profit? For whom? The child soldier paid in cannabis and promises? The warlord buying Dubai real estate with blood gold?

Perhaps the cold truth is that war is profitable. For some players in this conflict, chaos is not merely a by-product; it is a strategy. Minerals like coltan, gold, and diamonds have turned the eastern Congo into a tantalising target for unscrupulous actors—both foreign and domestic. Rival militias patrol lucrative mining areas, extorting the local population and smuggling resources across porous borders.

The West labels this “Africa’s World War.” As if tribalism explains it all. As if we’re watching a nature documentary. But I’ve seen this script before in Ireland, in Sudan et al.

War isn’t a continent, it’s a habit. A muscle memory. We learn to hate. We all know of that uncle who hasn’t spoken to his brother since 1994—a land dispute involving 3 square meters of maize crop. They’ll die clutching that grievance like a birthright. Kinshasa and Kigali are no different, trauma has been fossilised into identity. “You killed us in 1998.” “You invaded us in 1996.” The past is a hostage neither is willing to release and peace is mortgaged to hatred.

I have heard that the rebels have a saying: “Peace is a comma, not a period.” They’re right. Every ceasefire here is a breath held too long, a pause for rearming. The real mystery isn’t why they fight, but why they can’t imagine not fighting. Psychologists say prolonged war rewires the brain. Nations can get addicted too. Conflict becomes an ecosystem, NGOs need crises to fundraise and politicians need enemies to campaign. In Goma, “humanitarian” is an industry. White 4x4s ferry aid workers past starving crowds. A billboard pleads: DONATE NOW! 6.9 MILLION AT RISK. The decimal precision haunts me.

We pretend war has sides. It doesn’t, it has markets. The DRC’s minerals course through our devices, electric cars, and satellites, yet we feign ignorance when their trade bankrolls warlords. Rwanda, lauded as a “model” of African progress, deflects with denials slick as its Kigali skyline. The SADC, tasked with peacekeeping, staggers under underfunded mandates and geopolitical ambivalence. And the Global North? It drafts resolutions with one hand and signs arms contracts with the other.

War is a failure of imagination. To kill, you must first flatten a person into an idea: “rebel,” “occupier,” “collateral.” Having lived in this region, I have met Congolese soldiers who have become cynical, who quote Frantz Fanon between sips of Primus beer. “The Congolese are ghosts in their own land,” they say. “Even our suffering is commodified.” The slain peacekeepers knew this disconnect. Maybe their mission was always impossible, to plant stability in soil fertilised by decades of betrayal. War doesn’t persist because solutions are elusive. It persists because too many profit from its continuity.

I think there is a deeper sickness. We have unlearned how to see conflict as anything but inevitable a “natural” state for places painted as inherently broken. Africa’s wars are framed as ancient tribal feuds, never as the logical end of extraction’s greed. So the world watches, numbed by the Congo’s pain, as if it were a season finale rather than a live autopsy of humanity. No one wins in a war. Call it victory if you want. But when the dust settles, all that’s left is a wasteland—and the ghosts of what could have been

I have friends in the DRC. I have friends in Rwanda. This is not a disclaimer—it is a confession. To know people on “both sides” is to feel the war’s absurdity in your bones, to hold its contradictions like live wires. They have never met, but they are my compass points in this chaos. Both are right. Both are wrong. My friends are generous, introspective, and trapped, X by her nation’s need to outrun its past, Y by his country’s inability to escape it. They mirror each other’s prisons, one built on memory, the other on amnesia.

 The conflict is not abstract here, it is the uninvited guest at every dinner, the static in every conversation, the reason we measure time in “befores” and “afters.”

The DRC is not a country, it is a crime scene. A quarry where the world’s empires—old and new—pick through the rubble for cobalt to greenwash their carbon sins, for coltan to feed our dopamine hits, for tin to solder the illusion of progress. Rwanda is not a villain or victim; it is a middle manager in capitalism’s slaughterhouse, carving its pound of flesh with World Bank-approved knives. The M23 is not a rebellion, it is a franchise. Kinshasa is not a government, it is a cartel. And we the onlookers with our hashtags and donor funds and thoughts-and-prayers are not innocent. We are the market.

The Congo will keep bleeding. Not because it is cursed, but because we’ve priced its pain too cheaply to quit.