Rwanda threatened to withdraw its counterinsurgency troops from Mozambique unless foreign backers maintain “sustainable funding,” the country’s foreign minister said Saturday.
Olivier Nduhungirehe said the Rwandan forces were “being constantly questioned, vilified, criticized, blamed or sanctioned by the very countries that benefit from our intervention in Mozambique,” in a post on X. He said it was “not that ‘Rwanda could withdraw,’” but that “Rwanda WILL withdraw” its troops from Mozambique if sustainable funding is not secured for Rwanda’s counter-terrorism operations in Cabo Delgado, a northern province of Mozambique.
The warning follows heightened international pressure on Rwanda after the U.S. State Department imposed visa restrictions on “several senior Rwandan officials” for “fueling instability” in eastern Congo, according to the report. The sanctions were part of an ongoing shift in U.S. policy toward Rwanda after earlier measures targeted the country’s military.
In the report, the officials were described as allegedly supporting Congo’s M23 rebel group, which the U.S. government said persists despite a U.S.-mediated peace agreement signed in December between the governments of Rwanda and Congo. Congo, the U.S. and U.N. experts also accuse Rwanda of backing M23, which the report said has grown from hundreds of members in 2021 to around 6,500 fighters.
Rwandan President Paul Kagame has described M23’s struggle as justified in defense of the rights of Congolese Tutsis, who he said have sought shelter in neighboring countries. Rwandan authorities have also criticized the U.S. sanctions, saying what they view as injustice is that Congo has not been targeted for its own alleged violations of the December agreement.
In Mozambique, the report said Rwandan troops are helping deter a jihadi insurgency launched in 2017 in Cabo Delgado. The insurgent group, described as Islamic State-Mozambique, drew global attention after a 12-day attack on the coastal town of Palma in 2021 that killed dozens of security officers, local civilians and foreign workers.
The report said the Palma attack led French energy company TotalEnergies to halt a $20 billion offshore liquified natural gas project nearby. It also said Mozambique authorities welcomed the deployment of Rwandan peacekeepers in July 2021, with the project described as key to the country’s development.
Nduhungirehe complained that Rwanda’s troops were being condemned despite what he described as their “ultimate sacrifice to stabilize this region” and allow internally displaced people to go back home.
Rwanda’s concerns about funding also surfaced in a separate post on X by government spokeswoman Yolande Makolo, who said the cost of deploying to Mozambique is at least 10 times more than the roughly 20 million euros (nearly $23 million) disbursed by the European Peace Facility. Makolo was responding to a Bloomberg report that European Union funding for the Rwandan deployment in Mozambique will expire in May.
Makolo said if Rwanda’s military authorities “assess that the work being done by Rwandan Security Forces in Cabo Delgado is not appreciated,” they would “be right to urge the government to end this bilateral counter-terrorism arrangement and pull out,” according to the report.