Inside the SADC deal to send troops to DRC
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A report from Africa Intelligence has illuminated the process behind the deployment of Southern African Development Community (SADC) forces to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The report stated that there were two options to combat the M23 rebel group. One plan was send a force to the DRC under the SADC banner. The other option was to provide support for the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC).
On the 8th of May 2023, SADC made a commitment to send troops to the eastern region of DRC. Two days prior to that, SADC had called an extraordinary meeting of the defence subcommittee to be held in Windhoek, Namibia, chaired by Namibian Defence Force Chief, Martin Pinehas. It is at this meeting that the two options were presented.
The report stated that the force would be empowered with significant resources and materiel, including fighter jets, intel gathering capacity, artillery support, combat helicopters and light utility helicopters.
Deteriorating security situation
There are factors that had to be taken into account for the action plan: the war against M23, the upcoming elections in DRC in December, and the lapsing of MONUSCO, the peacekeeping mission in DRC that had been ongoing since 2010. There has been much criticism from the architects of the military intervention against what it perceives to be the East African Community (EAC) regional force which has refused to fight the M23 rebels.
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After the DRC relied on the EAC regional force to resolve the security crisis of 2022, SADC has consistently planned on interventions that would resolve the issue. Plans for military deployment have been regularly updated since 2014. Recently SADC has sent a team to assess the situation in DRC with aircraft supplied by Angola. The assessment of the team was of a deteriorating security situation, displacements of nearly 1,6 million people, and a loss of control of the situation. This lack of control is despite the presence of EAC troops and the deployment of 20,000 FARDC soldiers in North Kivu and South Kivu. DRC has suffered massive losses in those areas, losing positions to M23 in the territories of Rutshuru, Nyiragongo, and Masisi.
The “RDF / M23 coalition”
There are indications of co-operation between the Rwandan Defence Force and M23. According to the SACD Rwanda provides support for M23 in the form of military equipment and logistics. This confirms a view held by a UN group of experts on the region, as well as MONUSCO intelligence. The SADC military command has demanded the cessation of support for M23 by “known foreign aggressors”, possibly an allusion to Kigali.
The report further states that the defence subcomittee noted the “passive attitude of the EAC and its former commander Kenyan Major General Jeff Nyagah who, according to Kinshasa, allowed 378 RDF elements to enter the DRC from 18 February 2023 to 23 February 2023.
Tensions
The report also noted that SADC’s highest ranking military officials were disparaging of the UN mission. They pointed to a burgeoning feeling of hostility among locals towards the peacekeepers, whose safety requires the intervention of the FARDC. It pointed to the failure of the mission command under Bintou Keita, who the SADC see as being unable to act efficiently. The report highlights being given sight of a document that states “the FARDC have been conducting operations alone for years, while MONUSCO was bogged down in its bureaucracy”.
Tensions have also been growing between SADC and MONUSCU over the Force Intervention Brigade (FIB), which was formed in 2013 with three battalions from South Africa, Malawi, and Tanzania. FIB is an offensive combat force that has been primarily of SADC personnel that were attached to MONUSCU. FIB had integrated a quick reaction force from Nepal in 2021, and another one from Kenya in 2022. This led to tensions with the SADC command, which had been critical of FIB’s drop in personnel and materiel, which had been redeployed to Ukraine at the start of the Russia / Ukraine crisis.
Pakistani heavy artillery
The defence subcommittee of SADC was also put off when MONUSCU approached Pakistan for the acquisition of heavy artillery, when such acquisition was supposed to be made from SADC member countries. There is a feeling that this could “compromise the command control of the theatre of operations”
The defence subcommittee of SADC has written to the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres of the need to improve FIB’s operational capacity, as this force would be the last to leave the DRC after the scheduled withdrawal of MONUSCU.
