Rwanda and M23 Are Running Forced Recruitment Camps in Eastern Congo. A New Report Says That Is a War Crime.

Human Rights Watch released a report on June 10, 2026 documenting a systematic campaign of forced recruitment and detention carried out by Rwandan military forces and the M23 armed group in North and South Kivu provinces of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, between mid-2024 and December 2025. The 78-page report, titled "Death Was Everywhere: Arbitrary Detention, Killings, and Forced Recruitment by the M23 and the Rwanda Defence Force," draws on interviews with 102 former detainees, witnesses, and military, intelligence, United Nations, and diplomatic sources, and is supported by satellite imagery, geolocated photographs, and three-dimensional reconstruction of two training camps at Rumangabo and Tshanzu in North Kivu.

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The report describes a sustained machinery of abduction. M23 fighters set up checkpoints and ambushes on roads, detained people at hospitals, churches, and schools, and summoned residents under false pretenses before transporting them in trucks to the two camps. Those transported included civilians, captured Congolese soldiers, Wazalendo militia fighters, and children as young as twelve. Once inside the camps, detainees were subjected to beatings, starvation, forced labor, and summary execution. Former detainees told Human Rights Watch that people who drank water, ate food, or attempted to escape without permission were beaten violently. The report estimates that hundreds, possibly more, died at the camps during 2025.

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The system behind these camps is not incidental to the conflict but central to it. Rwanda's backing of M23 has been documented for years by United Nations experts and Western governments, yet the formal denial has allowed Kigali to maintain diplomatic standing while the abuses continued. Human Rights Watch argues that the extent of Rwanda's military presence and command influence in eastern Congo meets the threshold for belligerent occupation under international humanitarian law, which would make Rwandan officials criminally liable for M23's conduct in the training centers. Former detainees identified Rwandan soldiers by their uniforms, equipment, and accents, as well as their inability to communicate in French or Kiswahili, languages not widely spoken in Rwanda. Military, intelligence, and United Nations sources separately confirmed Rwandan force involvement.

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The people who bear the cost are overwhelmingly Congolese civilians. Among the detainees documented in the report were students who had never witnessed violence, residents swept up at community gatherings, and children placed in positions of guard duty and made to beat fellow detainees. "I was just a student, I had never seen a dead body before. They made me bury bodies seven times, we put them in a big grave," one former detainee said. Congo's own conduct is not entirely clean: Human Rights Watch separately documented that Congolese military intelligence held and interrogated former M23 recruits who surrendered, including fourteen children, at Makala prison in Kinshasa without clear legal basis.

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What is not being said publicly is the degree to which this accountability gap has been sustained by strategic calculus. Rwanda remains a significant contributor to United Nations peacekeeping operations and a favored partner for Western governments in East Africa. The European Union, the United States, and African Union member states have long balanced human rights concerns in eastern Congo against security, development, and migration cooperation with Kigali. This balance has repeatedly produced condemnation without consequence. The Washington and Doha peace processes referenced in diplomatic statements have not produced meaningful changes in the conduct documented by Human Rights Watch.

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The report calls on Rwanda's international partners, including the United Nations, the African Union, the European Union, and the United States, to publicly confront Rwanda's role in eastern Congo and to review military assistance programs to ensure they are not supporting further violations. It also calls for targeted sanctions against M23 and Rwandan commanders responsible for abuses, for Congolese judicial authorities to preserve evidence at Rumangabo and Tshanzu, and for the International Criminal Court to investigate the forced recruitment campaign as part of its ongoing inquiry. Whether those calls will produce action depends on whether governments are willing to accept the costs of accountability with a partner that has so far proved too useful to pressure effectively.