Sultani Makenga: The M23 leader whose career charts the turmoil in Rwanda and DR Congo
Published 10 February 2025
The Democratic Republic of Congo is in turmoil - fighters from the notorious M23 rebel group have been surging through the country's east, battling the national army and capturing key places as they go.
In just a fortnight, thousands of people are said to have been killed and the fighting has sparked an ominous war of words between DR Congo and its neighbour, Rwanda.
So how did DR Congo - the largest country in sub-Saharan Africa - get here?
The origins of this complex conflict can be understood through the story of one man - M23 leader Sultani Makenga, who is the subject of various war crime allegations.
He is sanctioned by the US of using child soldiers, which he has denied. The UN has accused him of being responsible for sexual violence.
To go back through Makenga's life so far is to look into decades of warfare, intermittent foreign intervention and the persistent lure of DR Congo's rich mineral resources.
His life began on Christmas Day in 1973, when he was born in the lush Congolese town of Masisi.
Raised by parents of the Tutsi ethnic group, Makenga quit school at the age of 17 to join a Tutsi rebel outfit across the border in Rwanda.
This group, named the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), were demanding greater Tutsi representation in Rwanda's government, which at the time was dominated by politicians from the Hutu majority.
They also wanted the hundreds and thousands of Tutsi refugees who had been forced from the country by ethnic violence to be able to return home.
For four years, Makenga and the RPF fought the Hutu-dominated army in Rwanda. Their battle was enmeshed with the 1994 genocide, when Hutu extremists killed 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
When looking back at this time in a rare 2013 interview, Makenga stated: "My life is war, my education is war, and my language is war... but I do respect peace."
The RPF gradually seized more and more land before marching into Rwanda's capital, Kigali, and overthrowing the extremist Hutu government - many of whom fled into what is now DR Congo.
With the RPF in power, Makenga was absorbed into the official Rwandan army and rose to the rank of sergeant and deputy platoon commander.
"He was very good at setting up ambushes," one of Makenga's fellow RPF fighters told the Rift Valley Institute non-profit research organisation.
His progress in the Rwandan army hit a ceiling however. The fact that he only had a basic education and spoke broken French and English was "an obstacle to his military career", the Rift Valley Institute said.