KIGALI, Rwanda —
The Biden administration is wading into one of the most complicated conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa: escalating violence along the border between Congo and Rwanda that has echoed in the wars, genocide and rapes that stalked the region in recent decades.
On a five-day swing through the region that ended Friday, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken held several rounds of talks with leaders from both countries. He urged restraint, diplomacy and respect for national sovereignty, but came away with little progress to report.
“Every country in the region must respect the territorial integrity of the others,” Blinken said after meeting with Rwandan President Paul Kagame.
“We’ve seen where the failure to respect these principles can lead in the immeasurable consequences” of decades of conflict that killed, maimed and displaced millions of African civilians, he said.
Blinken’s stepped-up engagement is part of what the administration has billed as a “new chapter” in U.S. relations with Africa, designed to counter the growing regional influence of China and Russia, who are financing huge infrastructure projects or offering no-strings-attached weapons deliveries. But the administration was bitterly disappointed at the refusal of most African nations to support the U.S.-led Western effort to punish Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine.
The Biden administration also hopes to find a better spirit of cooperation after what some African leaders felt was neglect — and even contempt — from the U.S. under former President Trump.
The initiative comes at an urgent time. More than 100 armed militias are operating in an eastern swath of the Democratic Republic of Congo and in parts of western Rwanda, with military forces from each country reportedly involved in cross-border attacks.
Most alarming of the groups, according to U.S. officials, is the M23 militia, a notoriously abusive rebel faction fighting Congolese troops in eastern Congo. Named for a March 23, 2009, treaty, the militia had been largely inactive after military defeat by Congo in 2013, but reemerged last year with widespread summary execution of civilians, including youths, human rights organizations say.
The United Nations recently concluded that Rwanda is clandestinely supporting M23, which Rwandan officials privately and pointedly do not deny. Like government leaders in Rwanda, most of the M23 rebels are ethnic Tutsis, who comprised the largest number of victims in the 1994 Rwanda genocide, when Hutu extremists slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and moderate Hutus