Congo's Exiled Ex-President Takes Up Arms, Raising Fears for Fragile Peace Talks

Fear is spreading among residents of Goma, the eastern Congolese city under rebel control since last year, after former President Joseph Kabila stepped forward this month as the political and military leader of a new armed coalition seeking to topple the government of his successor, Félix Tshisekedi. The move, confirmed in a formal announcement at Kabila's Goma residence, has hardened battle lines in a conflict that has already displaced millions of people, and has thrown new uncertainty over a Qatar-brokered peace framework that was supposed to be winding the war down.

The new coalition, called the Front pour la Refondation de la Nation, or FRN, absorbs the political and military structures of the Alliance Fleuve Congo and the March 23 Movement, known as M23, the Rwandan-linked force that has held Goma since January 2025. Kabila now sits atop a movement whose deputy posts are filled by men who have led the rebellion on the ground, among them Bertrand Bisimwa, Corneille Nangaa and the M23 commander Gen. Sultani Makenga. A spokesman for the group, Claude Ibalanky, said its purpose was to "put an end to tyranny by any means necessary, including the use of force," a declaration Kinshasa has treated as an open threat.

The numbers

The conflict Kabila has now joined as a combatant has already produced a humanitarian emergency on a vast scale. The United Nations refugee agency's regional tracking describes a deepening displacement crisis across the eastern provinces, with internal displacement continuing to outpace returns through the middle of this year; earlier UN humanitarian figures put the number of people driven from their homes in the east at more than 6 million, with aid officials warning the total could keep climbing. Separately, the UN has said more than 7.8 million people are displaced nationwide because of the fighting and that roughly 28 million face food shortages. The battle for Goma alone, when the city fell to the AFC-M23 alliance in January 2025, killed nearly 3,000 civilians, according to UN estimates cited at the time.

Kabila's new role follows two earlier legal and diplomatic blows. A Congolese military court sentenced him to death in absentia last year on charges including treason and war crimes tied to his alleged backing of the rebellion, a conviction his family has called politically motivated. In April, the US Treasury's sanctions office designated Kabila for allegedly providing financial and logistical support to M23 and the Congo River Alliance, freezing any assets he holds under American jurisdiction. The Security Council, meanwhile, renewed the mandate of the UN peacekeeping mission in Congo, MONUSCO, through December 20, 2026, as it tries to shore up a ceasefire process that predates this month's realignment.

How a former president became a rebel chief

Kabila, 55, took power in January 2001 at age 29 after his father, Laurent Kabila, was assassinated by a bodyguard. He was elected in 2006 in Congo's first free vote since independence from Belgium and won re-election in 2011 in a contest marred by violence and allegations of fraud. His second term was due to end in 2016, but he delayed elections for two years, citing logistical problems, as security forces killed protesters demanding he step down. A negotiated compromise finally produced a vote in December 2018, and Tshisekedi's inauguration the following January marked Congo's first peaceful transfer of power between elected presidents.

Kabila largely disappeared from public view after leaving office, then fell further out of favor with the government: corruption investigations opened against members of his inner circle in 2023 coincided with his decision to leave for self-imposed exile in South Africa. Kinshasa has long accused him of maintaining ties to the rebellion in the east, a charge he has consistently denied. His emergence this month as the declared leader of the force that controls Goma, a city his own father once fought to hold during Congo's civil wars of the 1990s, confirms years of suspicion that Kinshasa officials had voiced but could not previously prove.

The rebellion itself traces back to 2012, when a group of mostly ethnic Tutsi officers mutinied from the Congolese army, saying they were defending minority Congolese Tutsis from discrimination. The movement collapsed within a year but resurfaced in 2022 with what UN and Western officials describe as covert backing from neighboring Rwanda, a charge Kigali has repeatedly denied, saying its own security is threatened by armed groups sheltering in Congolese territory. Corneille Nangaa, a former head of Congo's electoral commission who broke with Tshisekedi in 2023, built the Alliance Fleuve Congo as the rebellion's political wing before folding it into Kabila's new coalition this month.

Reaction and what comes next

In interviews conducted in Goma, residents described a mood of resignation rather than relief. Basa Juhudi, who lives in the city, said he had believed a year ago that the fighting might soon be over, but Kabila's move "means the war is far from over." Willo Riziki, another resident, argued that officials in the capital had misjudged the strength of the movement arrayed against them.

"If Kinshasa thought it was dealing with puppets, that is no longer the case," Willo Riziki, a Goma resident, told Al Jazeera.

Congo's government has moved quickly to discredit Kabila rather than negotiate with him. Government spokesman Patrick Muyaya said the former president had "nothing to offer but chaos," and described him on social media as "a man of the past, nostalgic for anti-democratic methods." Vital Kamerhe, a former speaker of the National Assembly and leader of the UNC party, took a similar line while appealing for the new coalition to disarm, saying of Kabila that "nothing, absolutely nothing, can justify us taking up weapons against our own country" and that "you cannot erase your own record by accusing your successor." As of this weekend, Kinshasa had not issued a formal government response to the FRN's launch itself.

The people most immediately affected are civilians across North and South Kivu provinces, where the rebel coalition and Congolese forces continue to face off along front lines that have barely moved in months, and the diplomats trying to keep the peace process alive. The FRN says it is bound by the obligations the AFC previously signed onto, including those from the Doha Framework the Security Council welcomed after it was signed in Qatar last November, a pledge that will be tested as talks over troop withdrawals, prisoner releases and humanitarian access resume. Human rights activist Josue Akuzwe Walayi said his greatest worry was that the realignment would strand the Doha process and a parallel Washington-led initiative on Rwandan troop withdrawals without producing a real peace. "The danger would be to normalize the war whilst the people pay the price," he said.

Analysts tracking the conflict say Kinshasa is likely to harden its posture now that its longtime nemesis has an open military role, making the Doha track the most immediate casualty of the realignment. Much will depend on whether Kabila can convert his lingering political networks, built over nearly two decades in power, into organized support beyond the Kivu provinces the rebels already hold, and whether army defections materialize as some in Kinshasa fear. Mediators have not given up: Qatar, the United States, the African Union and Togo were all credited by the Security Council for pushing the November framework through, and diplomats involved in the process say the remaining protocols on troop disengagement and detainee releases are still meant to be finalized in the coming weeks, regardless of who is now nominally in charge of the rebel side. For now, the FRN controls territory stretching from Goma to Bukavu and the border crossings with Rwanda and Uganda, leaving millions of displaced Congolese waiting to see whether a coalition built around a disgraced former head of state brings the war closer to an end or simply gives it a new face.