Britain will introduce sanctions soon against Rwanda over fighting in neighbouring Congo, a minister in the UK Foreign Office told Reuters on Monday.
Asked if Britain would impose sanctions on Rwanda, Ray Collins, who covers Africa policy as a junior minister in the foreign office, replied "Yes". Asked when, he said "Soon".
The "UK has made its position clear to Rwanda and will act soon," he added, speaking to Reuters on the sidelines of a UN Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva.
M23 rebels supervise the exit of mercenary troops in the streets of Goma, eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo on January 29, 2025.
Photo credit: Reuters
Rwanda is facing global pressure over allegations it supports the M23 group which, since January, has captured swathes of eastern Congo including the cities of Goma and Bukavu, and valuable mineral deposits.
Kigali denies backing the group but says its own troops are acting in self-defence against hostile groups based in Congo.
On Thursday, the US Treasury imposed sanctions on James Kabarebe, a high-profile ally of Rwandan President Paul Kagame, accused by Washington of serving as "a Rwandan government liaison" to M23. Rwanda said the sanctions were unjustified.
When Rwanda's ex-spy chief Patrick Karegeya was murdered in South Africa in 2014, his former brother-in-arms James Kabarebe was blunt: "When you choose to be a dog, you die like a dog."
The line, quoted in Rwandan media, illustrated two notable characteristics of then-defence minister Kabarebe: his unvarnished talk and unswerving loyalty to President Kagame.
Kabarebe's comment was "one of those moments when you got a glimpse of what Kagame himself really thought," said journalist Michela Wrong, who wrote a book about the killing, which South African prosecutors linked to the Rwandan government, denied by Kigali.
Kabarebe has "been for decades Kagame's co-conspirator, key enabler and hatchet man," Wrong said.
Their bond was propelled into the spotlight last Thursday when the United States Treasury announced sanctions against Kabarebe, identifying him as "a Rwandan government liaison" to M23, the latest Kigali-backed rebellion in neighbouring Congo.
Rwanda denies directly supporting the M23 rebellion, and says its own forces are acting in self defence in the region against Congolese troops and militia that have joined forces with ethnic Hutu perpetrators of Rwanda's 1994 genocide.
Rwanda's government spokesperson Yolande Makolo called the sanctions on Kabarebe unjustified: "If sanctions could resolve conflict in eastern DRC, we would have had peace in the region decades ago."
Makolo did not respond to repeated requests for comment on Kabarebe's role or military record. Calls to a number listed on the website of the foreign affairs ministry, where Kabarebe is now state minister for regional integration, went unanswered.
In imposing sanctions on Kabarebe, the U.S. Treasury did not discuss President Kagame's own level of involvement in the war in Congo.
But David Himbara, a former Kagame advisor now turned critic, based in Canada, said criticism of Kabarebe implies criticism of Kagame himself, as the two men are "attached at the hip".
Rwandan army chief James Kabarebe addresses soldiers pulling out of eastern Congo on September 27, 2002.
Photo credit: Reuters
Serving at Kagame's right hand since the early 1990s, Kabarebe's fealty helped him rise from personal bodyguard to cabinet minister and to remain in Kagame's favour when so many others, like Karegeya, fell out.
It has also seen him play a central part in a string of Rwanda-backed insurgencies in Democratic Republic of Congo in which millions of people died, some in massacres, most from hunger and disease.
The latest rebel incarnation, the ethnic Tutsi-led M23, re-emerged in 2021, and has recently captured eastern Congo's two largest cities, sharply aggravating a humanitarian crisis and stoking fears of another regional war.
The United Nations and US Treasury say Kabarebe is a key architect of the uprising, having "designed and coordinated" M23's operations, according to a 2023 UN report.
Kabarebe grew up as an ethnic Tutsi Rwandan refugee in Uganda, taking part in President Yoweri Museveni's seizure of power in 1986, before returning to his home country Rwanda as part of the Tutsi-led force that halted the 1994 genocide there.
Two years later, he helped lead the revolt that toppled dictator Mobutu Sese Seko in Congo, then known as Zaire.
Former President of Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo) Mobutu Sese Seko. Critics of Mr Sese Seko (and you might have seen it in some of the many documentaries on his excesses) allege that it was a crime to show up at a state event where he was in attendance without your wife – particularly if she was reputed to be beautiful.
Photo credit: AFP
He served briefly in Congo as head of the military under President Laurent Kabila, a Rwandan ally at the time. After Kabila pushed him aside, he led an assault with hijacked airplanes at a Congolese air base in an unsuccessful attempt to dislodge Kabila.
He is celebrated at home for having helped end the genocide in which some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were massacred by the army and Hutu extremist militias.
"James is very disciplined, never drinks or goes to bars," said a former Rwandan soldier who worked under him. "He is a very good joker, even if he is very shy ... He's not a politician, he is a technician."
But across the border in Congo, however, he is almost universally reviled for his role in two bloody Congo wars that sucked in armies from across Africa.
The U.N. and others have documented multiple examples of bloodletting by forces under Kabarebe's command. In 1996 Kabarebe led a mixed force of rubber boot-wearing Rwandans and ragged Congolese recruits 1,500 km (900 miles) across Congo.
That campaign left a trail of tens of thousands of massacred Rwandan Hutu refugees in its wake, according to a 2010 UN mapping report.
Rwanda's government said at the time the report used flawed methodology, and that Hutu fighters, often posing as civilians, had used the refugee camps as cover.
"There are decades of crimes that have gone unpunished. We have never had justice for these atrocities committed against Rwandan refugees," said Norman Ishimwe Sinamenye, a Rwandan activist and former Hutu refugee living in Congo.
Members of the M23 rebel group ride on a pickup truck as they leave their position for patrols amid conflict between them and the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (FARDC), in Goma, eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, January 29, 2025.
Photo credit: Reuters
In addition to supporting the M23, Kabarebe manages much of Rwanda's and M23's revenue generation from Congo's mineral resources, the U.S. Treasury said, referring to the trade of tin and tantalum which UN experts say nets the group $800,000 (Sh102.9 million) per month.
For ex-Rwandan army chief Kayumba Nyamwasa, once a close friend who shared a flat with Kabarebe in Uganda's capital Kampala before they attacked Rwanda in the early 1990s, the sanctions are an overdue comeuppance.
After the Congo wars of 1996-2003, Nyamwasa fell out of Kagame's inner circle and fled to South Africa, where he joined forces with Karegeya to form an opposition group. He narrowly survived an assassination attempt in 2010.
"I have no vendetta with anyone, but there is a saying that a thief lasts for 40 days," Nyamwasa told Reuters by text message.
Kabarebe "has lasted for 28 years!" he wrote. The US sanctions mean "he has been grouped together with similar murderous drug cartels. You reap what you sow."
