When M23 rebels swept into the Congolese city of Goma this week, world powers urged them to immediately withdraw. Instead, the Rwanda-backed insurgents are intent on showing they can restore order and govern.
On Thursday, power and mobile data services, which had been down for days, were back up. The border with Rwanda, a lifeline for the city, had been re-opened. M23 officials said they had trained up hundreds of administrators who were ready to deploy.
"We are asking all Goma residents to go back to normal activities," said Corneille Nangaa, head of Alliance Fleuve Congo, the political coalition backing the M23, just two days after heavy fighting subsided, leaving bodies in the streets and the city cut off from the outside world.
Nangaa also pledged to get children back in school within 48 hours and open a humanitarian corridor so people displaced by fighting could return home.
How well M23 manage to maintain order and run services in Goma, a city of 2 million people, will be key to determining if they can expand elsewhere in eastern Congo or if their reign will be short-lived as it was in 2012.
At stake is a potential return to the situation that arose in the 1990s and 2000s, when Rwanda and Uganda and their proxy forces occupied and ran Congo's eastern borderlands, managing trade, communications and transport.
One U.N. official said a number of members of the RCD-Goma movement, a Rwanda-backed group dating back to the 1998-2003 war, were involved in the M23.
In the three years since reigniting their rebellion after a dormant decade, M23 has set up "parallel administrations" in areas they conquered, taxing civilians and businesses and rolling out intelligence networks, U.N. experts said last June.
But Goma, with its population size, international airport and role as a hub for one of the world's biggest humanitarian crises, is a far greater challenge.
TRAINING PROGRAMME
An M23 official said the movement had previously struggled to properly administer territories due to a lack of personnel and money, but since the collapse of peace talks in Angola last year, they had been preparing.
M23 is the latest in a string of ethnic Tutsi-led insurgencies that have simmered since a 2003 deal was meant to end wars in Congo that left some 6 million dead, mostly from hunger and disease.
The group and the Congolese army have both been accused of serious human rights abuses in the recent outbreak of fighting. Like other Congolese, Goma's residents have also frequently protested against Rwanda, which supports M23.
However, there is also anger against Congo's President Felix Tshisekedi, who came to power pledging to restore peace but has lost more territory than any previous administration. His policy of deploying military governors to the east was both unsuccessful and unpopular.
"A lot of people are sick and tired of the chaos. If they can trade, security improves, their daily lives improve, then M23 could be popular," a senior U.N. official told Reuters. "Tshisekedi’s management of the east has been catastrophic."
Tshisekedi has also marginalised many soldiers, officials or businessmen perceived to have had links with Rwanda, a move that has fuelled frustrations over his rule and may convince some of them to rally to M23, experts said.
The U.N. experts and three diplomatic sources said intelligence officers, police and political leaders had been trained alongside fighters at Tchanzu, the group’s main military base in North Kivu, to prepare for running areas seized by M23.
After taking control of Rubaya, the largest coltan mine in the Great Lakes region, in April last year, the group put in place a system to run the mining, trade, transport and taxation of the minerals, providing an income of $800,000 per month, the U.N. experts said in December.
Diplomatic pressure is ramping up on Kigali to cut any support to M23 or face sanctions such as suspension of aid. Tshisekedi said the Congolese military was planning a riposte to recover territories lost.
However, Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame has rejected any criticism and Nangaa said that his group was ready to work with officials that switched side to join their movement.
"We will not chase them out but of course they will have to undergo an ideological reset," he said. "We are going to show them that we are an alternative."
