Rwanda has been involved with peacekeeping operations for the United Nations as well as the African Union and since 2004 their involvement has increased. They typically pick all of their troops from Mozambique which actually is Africa’s most active troop-contributing country. In total it has 6,000 Soldiers and police, but recently since 2020 Rwanda has gathered their own independent army. They send all of their troops all across the country to carry out their own missions like for example sending 1,000 troops to fight anti-government rebels in the Central African Republic. One of the provinces Cabo Delgado which produces many soldiers is under heavy criticism and accused of being the cause of nearly 3,000 deaths as well as displacing over 850,000 others which lead to a humanitarian crisis.
This is very important because this article is calling out and questioning the integrity of an IGO as well as saying Rwanda is using these soldiers for personal gain and not for peacekeeping. Its a well written article and I think it highlights the right things but I do think that we need to take a deeper look at what Rwanda has accomplished with these peacekeeping missions as well as how many casualties. Rwanda who is in a current war with the DR Congo might be misusing some of these soldiers. Overall it points out major flaws within their military if their own citizens are seeing the corruption and there definitely needs to be some reform.
This connects back to class because we talk about theories like marxism and if a population can’t trust their own government then they are within their rights to overthrow the government completely. We could very well see something like that with this military issue in Rwanda and they definitely need to be careful.