On July 9, the government of Rwanda said<\/a>\u00a0that it had deployed 1,000 troops to Mozambique to battle al-Shabaab fighters, who had seized the northern province of Cabo Delgado. A month later, on August 8, Rwandan troops\u00a0captured<\/a>\u00a0the port city of Moc\u00edmboa da Praia, where just off the coast sits a massive natural gas concession held by the French energy company TotalEnergies SE and the U.S. energy company ExxonMobil. These new developments in the region led to the African Development Bank\u2019s President M. Akinwumi Adesina\u00a0announcing<\/a>\u00a0on August 27 that TotalEnergies SE will restart the Cabo Delgado liquefied natural gas project by the end of 2022.<\/p>\n Militants from al-Shabaab (or ISIS-Mozambique, as the US State Department prefers<\/a>\u00a0to call it) did not fight to the last man; they disappeared across the border into Tanzania or into their villages in the hinterland. The energy companies will, meanwhile, soon start to recoup their investments and profit handsomely, thanks in large part to the Rwandan military intervention.<\/p>\n Why did Rwanda intervene in Mozambique in July 2021 to defend, essentially, two major energy companies? The answer lies in a very peculiar set of events that took place in the months before the troops left Kigali, the capital city of Rwanda.<\/p>\n Al-Shabaab fighters first made their appearance<\/a>\u00a0in Cabo Delgado in October 2017. For three years, the group played a cat-and-mouse game with Mozambique\u2019s army before\u00a0taking<\/a>\u00a0control of Moc\u00edmboa da Praia in August 2020. At no point did it seem possible for Mozambique\u2019s army to thwart al-Shabaab and allow TotalEnergies SE and ExxonMobil to restart operations in the Rovuma Basin, off the coast of northern Mozambique, where a massive natural gas field was\u00a0discovered<\/a>\u00a0in February 2010.<\/p>\n The Mozambican Ministry of Interior had\u00a0hired<\/a>\u00a0a range of mercenaries such as\u00a0Dyck Advisory Group<\/a>\u00a0(South Africa),\u00a0Frontier Services Group<\/a>\u00a0(Hong Kong), and the\u00a0Wagner Group<\/a>\u00a0(Russia). In late August 2020, TotalEnergies SE and the government of Mozambique signed an\u00a0agreement<\/a>\u00a0to create a joint security force to defend the company\u2019s investments against al-Shabaab. None of these armed groups succeeded. The investments were stuck underwater.<\/p>\n At this point, Mozambique\u2019s President Filipe Nyusi indicated, as I was told by a source in Maputo, that TotalEnergies SE might ask the French government to send a detachment to assist in securing the area. This discussion went on into 2021. On January 18, 2021, French Defense Minister Florence Parly and her counterpart in Portugal, Jo\u00e3o Gomes Cravinho, talked on the phone, during which\u2014it was suggested<\/a>\u00a0in Maputo\u2014they discussed the possibility of a Western intervention in Cabo Delgado. On that day, TotalEnergies SE CEO Patrick Pouyann\u00e9 met with President Nyusi and his ministers of defense (Jaime Bessa Neto) and interior (Amade Miquidade) to\u00a0discuss<\/a>\u00a0the joint \u201caction plan to strengthen security of the area.\u201d Nothing came of it. The French government was not interested in a direct intervention.<\/p>\n A senior official in Maputo told me that it is strongly believed in Mozambique that French President Emmanuel Macron suggested the Rwandan force, rather than French forces, be deployed to secure Cabo Delgado. Indeed, Rwanda\u2019s armies\u2014highly trained, well-armed by the Western countries, and given impunity to act outside the bounds of international law\u2014have proved their mettle in the interventions carried out in South Sudan and the Central African Republic.<\/p>\n Paul Kagame has ruled Rwanda since 1994, first as vice-president and minister of defense and then since 2000 as the president. Under Kagame, democratic norms have been flouted within the country, while Rwandan troops have operated ruthlessly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A 2010 UN Mapping Project report on serious human rights violations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo showed<\/a>\u00a0that the Rwandan troops killed \u201chundreds of thousands if not millions\u201d of Congolese civilians and Rwandan refugees between 1993 and 2003. Kagame rejected the UN report,\u00a0suggesting<\/a>\u00a0that this \u201cdouble genocide\u201d theory denied the Rwandan genocide of 1994. He has wanted the French to accept responsibility for the genocide of 1994 and has hoped that the international community will ignore the massacres in the eastern Congo.<\/p>\n On March 26, 2021, historian Vincent Duclert submitted a 992-page\u00a0report<\/a>\u00a0on France\u2019s role in the Rwandan genocide. The report makes it clear that France should accept\u2014as M\u00e9decins Sans Fronti\u00e8res put it\u2014\u201coverwhelming responsibility\u201d for the genocide. But the report does not say that the French state was complicit in the violence. Duclert traveled to Kigali on April 9 to\u00a0deliver<\/a>\u00a0the report in person to Kagame, who\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0that the report\u2019s publication \u201cmarks an important step toward a common understanding of what took place.\u201d<\/p>\n On April 19, the Rwandan government released a\u00a0report<\/a>\u00a0that it had commissioned from the U.S. law firm Levy Firestone Muse. This report\u2019s title says it all: \u201cA Foreseeable Genocide: The Role of the French Government in Connection with the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda.\u201d The French did not deny the strong words in this document, which argues that France armed the\u00a0g\u00e9nocidaires<\/i>\u00a0and then hastened to protect them from international scrutiny. Macron, who has been loath to\u00a0accept<\/a> France\u2019s brutality in the Algerian liberation war, did not dispute Kagame\u2019s version of history. This was a price he was willing to pay.<\/p>\n On April 28, 2021, Mozambique\u2019s President Nyusi visited<\/a>\u00a0Kagame in Rwanda. Nyusi\u00a0told<\/a>\u00a0Mozambique\u2019s news broadcasters that he had come to learn about Rwanda\u2019s interventions in the Central African Republic and to ascertain Rwanda\u2019s willingness to assist Mozambique in Cabo Delgado.<\/p>\n On May 18, Macron\u00a0hosted<\/a>\u00a0a summit in Paris, \u201cseeking to boost financing in Africa amid the COVID-19 pandemic,\u201d which was attended by several heads of government, including Kagame and Nyusi, the president of the African Union (Moussa Faki Mahamat), the president of the African Development Bank (Akinwumi Adesina), the president of the West African Development Bank (Serge Eku\u00e9), and the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (Kristalina Georgieva). Exit from \u201cfinancial asphyxiation\u201d was at the top of the\u00a0agenda<\/a>, although in private meetings there were discussions about Rwandan intervention in Mozambique.<\/p>\n A week later, Macron left for a\u00a0visit<\/a>\u00a0to Rwanda and South Africa, spending two days (May 26 and 27) in Kigali. He repeated the broad findings of the Duclert report,\u00a0brought<\/a>\u00a0along 100,000 COVID-19\u00a0vaccines<\/a>\u00a0to Rwanda (where only around 4 percent of the population had received the first dose by the time of his visit), and spent time in private talking to Kagame. On May 28, alongside South Africa\u2019s President Cyril Ramaphosa, Macron\u00a0talked<\/a>\u00a0about Mozambique, saying that France was prepared to \u201ctake part in operations on the maritime side,\u201d but would otherwise defer to the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and to other regional powers. He did not mention Rwanda specifically.<\/p>\n Rwanda entered Mozambique in July,\u00a0followed<\/a>\u00a0by SADC forces, which included South African troops. France got what it wanted: Its energy giant can now recoup its investment.<\/p>\n This article was produced by\u00a0Globetrotter<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Vijay Prashad<\/b>\u00a0is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is the director of\u00a0Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research<\/a>. He is a senior non-resident fellow at\u00a0Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies<\/a>, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including\u00a0The Darker Nations<\/i><\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0The Poorer Nations<\/i><\/a>. His latest book is\u00a0Washington Bullets<\/i><\/a>, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma.<\/p>\nBillions stuck underwater<\/h2>\n
What Kagame got for the intervention<\/h2>\n
What France wants<\/h2>\n
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