Can Trump’s Peace Initiative Stop the Congo’s Thirty-Year War?

“What kind of power?” I asked.

“All kinds of power,” he said and smiled.

In June, when Trump announced that he had brought peace to eastern Congo, he described it as “a glorious triumph.” But the M23 had not agreed to disband. A militia spokesman told the Associated Press, “We are in Goma with the population, and we are not going to get out.”

A Western diplomat in the region told me that the M23 seemed to be attempting to set down permanent roots in North Kivu. They had upended the traditional system of justice, administered by tribal chiefs. After registries of property deeds were burned during the fighting, the M23 had simply handed out land to people it favored.

Taking Goma had given the M23 control of a vast arsenal left behind by the defeated Congolese Army—as much as a third of the country’s military equipment, the diplomat said. The militia had also acquired an estimated twelve thousand new troops, many of them captured government soldiers who were either enticed or forced to serve. “The M23 have never enjoyed this level of control before,” the diplomat said. “The risk for them is they now have fallen into the same trap as the D.R.C. government—having to administer the territory they control.”

If the M23’s stewardship of North Kivu is a test case for running the country, it is not encouraging. Patrick Muyaya, the D.R.C.’s minister of communication, told me that electricity and banking services had lapsed in Goma, while the “ethnic cleansing of Hutus” had continued. In July, according to the U.N., M23 fighters massacred more than three hundred civilians in a group of frontline villages about forty miles from town. “Every day, there is killing,” Muyaya said. “The people running that part of the country—the only thing they know is crime.”

An hour’s drive northwest of Goma, across a vast moonscape of black lava, is a shambolic roadside community called Sake. For several years before the fall of Goma, it was a frontline town in the fight between the M23 and government forces. Displaced people’s tents, made from plastic sheeting supplied by N.G.O.s, are pitched alongside abandoned homesites, many of them burned to their foundations. The settlement is dug into jagged rock around a Catholic church, the Miséricorde Divine.

The priest, a burly man with wary eyes, explained that he had been appointed to Sake in 2src23, when the Wazalendo were entrenched there. As the M23 moved in, he said, it captured several hundred Hutu refugees and forcibly trucked them away. The church was looted and burned, and the town became “like bush,” he said, with almost no inhabitants remaining. “We had to start from zero again.”

Gradually, people had returned, but they struggled to sustain themselves, and attacks continued. Some drivers for a relief agency had been kidnapped during a visit to the priest’s compound, so no one stayed overnight at the church anymore. When I asked if he slept there, he retorted, “How could I leave? I’m the priest.” But many of the civilians were packing up and heading to Goma. “They think it’s an oasis of peace,” he said wryly. Along with the threat of violence in Goma, there was a shortage of food, because the farmers who supplied the city had fled their land. The priest said that he was forty years old and had known nothing but conflict in his life. With a disgusted look, he said, “I’m very tired of fighting, and I call upon the leaders to end it.”

The Presidents of Congo and Rwanda have spent much of the past year trading insults. Tshisekedi has likened Kagame to Hitler and declared, “One thing is responsible for this situation, and that is Rwandan aggression.” Kagame tends to be cutting, rather than blunt. When Tshisekedi threatened to send his air force to strike Rwanda, Kagame responded, “Tshisekedi is capable of everything except measuring the consequences of what he says.”

The son of Tutsi exiles to Uganda, Kagame served as an intelligence officer in the Ugandan Army before returning to lead the Rwandan Patriotic Front. As President, he has been the subject of both praise and condemnation abroad. He is a ruthless strategist capable of waging bloody wars, but he has also fostered a remarkable program to reintegrate tens of thousands of former génocidaires into Rwandan society. He has been accused of many authoritarian acts, including assassinating political opponents, but he has turned his country into a regional powerhouse, with a disciplined army that has been deployed to aid embattled allies. “Rwanda has made itself an amazingly efficient place to work and do business in—as long as you stay in your lane,” a former State Department official told me. “You want to root for them. But, on the other hand, they have been responsible for several decades of horrific actions inside D.R.C.”