Introduction — Proportionality in the News
The main purpose of news is to inform. If there exists a secondary purpose of news, it is to inform broadly. Essentially every news provider under the sun has come under massive scrutiny in recent years for failing to accomplish the former—the terms “fake news” and “misinformation” have been hurled about to the point where they are almost meaningless. Certainly, criticizing certain news providers for inaccurate coverage is entirely valid. Few seem to ever criticize these news agencies, however, for inadequate coverage.
Taking a look at the headlines of any major American newspaper, it becomes abundantly clear that what we see on the news is far from a representative sample of what is going on in the world at any given time. The most obvious bias in coverage is towards US politics. While this is understandable, given that these newspapers are catering to an American audience, what is significantly less excusable is the way in which they tend to cover international affairs.
Take The Washington Post’s world news section, for instance. From February 1st through February 7th, The Post published, as follows: 19 articles on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; six articles each on Russia-Ukraine and Mexico; three articles each on Panama, Canada, and China; two articles each on Syria, India, Venezuela, and Colombia; and one article each on Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, South Africa, El Salvador, Greenland, Argentina, the United Kingdom, Japan, Brazil, Africa (as a whole), Europe (as a whole), and the Arab World (as a whole). Most of these articles have more to do with the Trump administration’s policy with regards to the country/region rather than domestic affairs, and many only deal with stories about the country/region considered “newsworthy” for American readers. For example, 11 of the 19 articles on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict discuss Trump’s recent proposal to established American ownership over Gaza and expel the Palestinian population, while only two of the articles mainly discuss the West Bank, in which an increasingly intensive Israeli military campaign has led to the deaths of at least 70 Palestinians and the displacement of thousands since the start this year alone.
Certainly, it would be unreasonable to expect a single news agency to cover current affairs in all of the roughly 200 sovereign states in the world, considering both the limited resources available to these agencies and a profit-driven media environment that makes it difficult to cover issues that the readership might not find sufficiently “interesting.” Still, some gaps in coverage appear egregious. For instance, China and India, the world’s two most populous countries, receive very little coverage. Especially with China, what little coverage the nation receives is almost exclusively in the context of its rivalry with the United States rather than domestic affairs or interactions with countries besides America. This is to say nothing of the lack of coverage for other highly populous countries, such as Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Brazil, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and the Philippines, whose combined inhabitants amount to ~1.3 billion people, or around 15% of the global population.
In a world where many developing countries are becoming increasingly relevant and assertive on the global stage, the cost to both the average American and American policymakers of ignoring them is becoming greater and greater. Failure to remain informed about world affairs beyond a small group of people with niche expertise may make it difficult for the United States to adapt to a world full of very different players than past decades. For the average American, the general lack of knowledge about these less-covered countries makes cross-cultural understanding and interchange significantly more difficult. Most importantly, it is difficult to garner public attention for serious humanitarian crises and human rights violations if they are given little more than a brief headline in a select few news providers.
For this series of articles, then, I’d like to provide a spotlight on global conflicts and other significant events that tend to be covered less by mainstream American news outlets.
The Roots of the Conflict
The first topic to be featured is the recent escalation in the conflict between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda-backed M23 rebels in the Kivu region, located in the Eastern DRC around the African Great Lakes. The conflict recently saw some coverage in mainstream news sources when the M23 took control of Goma, the capital of the resource-rich and strategically important North Kivu Province. To explain how the conflict got to this point, or why the fall of Goma is significant, however, one must go back decades, to the Rwandan Genocide and the seemingly endless string of bloody conflicts that have followed it.
While most Americans likely know what the Rwandan Genocide was, and the basics of its course—i.e., that there was conflict between Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda, that the Hutu eventually started committing mass murder of Tutsi, and that the conflict eventually ended in some way or another with reconciliation between Hutu and Tutsi—there are few who likely know much about the immediate context leading up to it. The Rwandan Genocide, which took place over a mere hundred-day span from April to July 1994, began during a crucial period of the Rwandan Civil War. The war had been raging since 1990, when the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a Tutsi-led military organization, crossed the border from Uganda and invaded Rwanda. Over the next four years, the conflict reached a stalemate, and a ceasefire was eventually reached in 1993. As negotiations between the Hutu-led Rwandan government and the Tutsi-led RPF went on, the extremist “Hutu Power” movement, whose followers viewed President Juvenal Habyarimana’s peace efforts as a threat to their safety and dominant status in Rwandan society, grew increasingly influential.
While ethnic tensions had been brewing for decades, the genocide began in full when President Habyarimana’s plane was shot down. Not even a day later, vengeful Hutu militias began nationwide mass killings of Tutsi and Hutu opposed to the Hutu Power movement. Among the dead on the first day was the country’s own prime minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana. Incensed by the outbreak of mass violence, Paul Kagame, military leader of the RPF, broke the ceasefire and began an invasion that would eventually overthrow the Hutu extremists and place himself and the RPF in charge of Rwanda.
The end of the genocide did not mean the end of conflict in the region, however. Fearing reprisals from the new Tutsi-led government, countless Hutu, both ordinary civilians and members of the militias who committed the genocide, fled across the border to the Democratic Republic of the Congo—then called Zaire. There, they set up refugee camps, angering Kagame’s government, which viewed the presence of Hutu militias just across the border as a continued threat to Rwanda’s security.
At the same time, Zaire was suffering from severe instability. Its aging dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, who presided over one of the most corrupt regimes in modern history, found himself increasingly unable to assert control over the massive nation, which is over three times the size of Texas. For many African nations, it was only a matter of time before his regime collapsed, and Rwanda hoped to be first to see the spoils.
The Congo Wars
Rwanda pounced quickly. In 1996, a mere two years after the conclusion of one of the most devastating genocides of the 20th century, Rwandan forces invaded Zaire, in hopes of exploiting its instability to expel the Hutu militias and remnants of the old Rwandan Armed Forces from its border. Soon after, a coalition of neighboring countries, including Uganda, Burundi, and Angola, joined in on the fight, beginning what came to be known as the First Congo War. Within the span of six months, the coalition had conquered the entirety of Zaire, and Mobutu’s fled the country to Togo. Soon after, the coalition established rebel leader Laurent-Desire Kabila as president of the newly-renamed Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Peace in the region did not last long, however. Kabila soon grew frustrated with the influence of foreign advisers (many of whom were Rwandan or Ugandan) and the cohort of Congolese Tutsi who held prominent positions in his government. At the same time, Rwanda had been supplying arms to Congolese Tutsi (known as the Banyamulenge) in the Kivu region, which further outraged Kabila’s government. In 1998, a combination of a Banyamulenge rebellion in the East and a Rwandan-instigated revolt near the Congolese capital, Kinshasa, led to the breakout of the Second Congo War.
Unlike the previous war, however, the Second Congo War would not end nearly as quickly as the previous one. While Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi remained allies, other countries that had previously participated in the first invasion, such as Angola, joined the side of the Congolese government this time around. Other nations, such as Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, provided the Congolese government with extensive military support. Despite rapid initial advances, the joint Rwandan-Ugandan advance soon halted, and the rebel groups they backed failed to take Kinshasa. With stagnant frontlines and continuing conflict, the next five years would produce unimaginable suffering for the people of the DRC. As a result of disease, lack of medicine, direct deaths from conflict, and malnutrition, anywhere from one to 7.4 million people died in the conflict, with most estimates running from three to five million people. Assuming the upper estimates are true, this would make the Second Congo War the deadliest global conflict since World War II.
Continued Conflict and the Rise of the M23 Movement
Following the assassination of Laurent Kabila in 2001 and a breakdown in relations between Rwanda and Uganda, a peace agreement was eventually reached in 2002, and the war ended in 2003. Continuing a pattern that appears to have become commonplace at this point, however, conflict soon broke out again almost immediately following the cessation of hostilities. Numerous anti-government rebel groups, including Tutsi militias funded by Rwanda and the remnants of Hutu militias that had arrived in the Congo years ago, began fighting with Congolese forces in North and South Kivu.
Two major armed groups in the region funded by Rwanda were the National Congress for the Defense of the People (“CNDP”) and the aforementioned March 23 (“M23”) Movement. The CNDP was the primary Rwandan-backed actor in the eastern DRC from the mid-2000s until Rwanda and the DRC abruptly made a deal to minimize conflict in the region that resulted in the CNDP becoming defunct and reintegrating itself into the DRC by 2009. In 2012, however, Tutsi militants in Kivu who were dissatisfied with this deal formed the M23 movement. Near the end of that year, M23 forces, likely with Rwandan support, took control of Goma. Soon after, however, international pressure, along with a military effort by the UN and Congolese army to halt any continued offensives and retake the city, resulted in M23 withdrawing from Goma in early 2013.
Allegations of Rwandan involvement caused “lasting damage” to the relationship between the Congo and Rwanda, which had previously been improving since their 2008 agreement. In 2022, the M23 Movement re-emerged in North Kivu, and rapidly took control of many towns across the region. Rebel forces continued making progress over the next three years, mostly occupying territory between Lake Edward and Lake Kivu near the Rwandan and Ugandan borders with the DRC. This advance culminated in the recapture of Goma at the end of January after days of intense fighting between Congolese and M23 forces. Unlike the 2012 capture of Goma, however, M23 has not been forced out of the city, and appears to be making significant progress towards taking more territory in the DRC—potentially even Bukavu, a city of over one million people that serves as the capital of South Kivu Province. Quickly breaking a ceasefire that they themselves declared, M23 rebels have begun a march southwards. Just this week, their forces took control of Nyabibwe, a village halfway along the path to Bukavu.
The conflict between Rwanda and the DRC stands at a precipice at the moment. If Rwandan-backed rebels continue to advance further into the Congo, the possibility of an all-out war between the two countries will become more and more likely, and Central Africa may well witness the outbreak of its third major regional war in 30 years. As with the M23 offensive in 2012, however, international pressure may be able to stop a war before it is too late. While Washington remains distracted with the chaos of a new administration, however, and many other nations remain preoccupied with solving conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, it is possible that it will be far too late by the time they turn their eyes to Africa.
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