Rwanda Classified: The Kagame regime has maintained its disinformation habit
As violence escalates in the DRC, Paul Kagame’s disinformation networks remain quite active. Forbidden Stories and its partners had first uncovered some of their methods during the Rwanda Classified investigation last year. Now, the war in North-Kivu and mineral trafficking that stems from it remain taboo in Rwanda.
By Magdalena Hervada
February 18th, 2025
“I don’t know.” Paul Kagame’s gaze was unflinching as he answered CNN’s questions about Rwandan military presence in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) on February 3. “You are the commander-in-chief”, answered the journalist after a brief silence, with a hint of bewilderment. The Rwandan president doubled down : “Yeah. There are many things I don’t know. But if you want to ask me ‘is there a problem in Congo that concerns Rwanda, and that Rwanda would do anything to protect itself’, I’d say 100%.”
A few days earlier, rebels from the March 23 Movement (M23), backed by Rwandan troops as evidenced by on-the-ground photographs, seized Goma, the capital of the mineral-rich North Kivu province in eastern DRC. Since then, clashes with Congolese forces have escalated, reigniting violence in a war that has been active since 2021.
Today, Kagame claims not to know whether his troops are present in the DRC, but his government has long denied providing military support to M23. In the Rwanda Classified project published in May 2024, Forbidden Stories and its partners were able to prove this wrong by identifying several Rwandan soldiers killed in the DRC. This investigation continued the work of exiled Rwandan journalist Samuel Baker Byansi, whose colleague John Williams Ntwali died in a suspicious car accident.
“It has been so well documented, I believe we have reached a stage where Paul Kagame is just ashamed to keep denying it,” said Byansi, contacted by Forbidden Stories. “He can’t say his troops are there, and he can’t say they aren’t anymore because that would put him in a lying position, so he just says ‘I don’t know'”.
The regime’s narrative is also undermined by a number of UN Security Council reports, published every six months. Last June, one of them estimated that “3,000 to 4,000” Rwandan soldiers were present on Congolese territory. According to the report, Rwandan forces were “de facto” exercising “control and direction over M23 operations,” making Rwanda responsible for the rebels’ actions. It also said that all armed groups involved in the conflict resorted to the recruitment of children, rape and attacks on civilians.
Blood minerals
Officially, the only goal of Rwanda’s involvement in North Kivu is combatting the ‘Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda’ (FDLR), an armed group founded by former culprits of the 1994 Tutsi genocide. The FDLR have been present in the DRC for 30 years, and regularly commit “summary executions, abductions, forced displacement and conflict-related sexual violence,” according to the UN. Rwanda has accused the DRC of supporting the FDLR and calls for the militia’s neutralization. But in Byansi’s eyes, there’s more to the story.
“It’s a big part of Rwandan disinformation,” the journalist said. “They have been selling this idea that this conflict is only about ethnicity and tribalism. But now we have objective reports that show that the main cause is these minerals.”
North Kivu is rich in coltan, nickel, tin, and gold, often called “blood minerals” because they cause conflicts regularly. Robert Higiro, a former Rwandan army major now exiled in Belgium, told Rwanda Classified last year that Kagame is “obsessed with controlling the Kivu, the Eastern DRC, for reasons we all know: the minerals, the money. It’s not because he’s fighting for the Tutsi.”
Coltan, in particular, has been at the heart of the clash. This rare metal is essential in manufacturing capacitors for smartphones and other electronic devices. Some 60 percent of global coltan reserves are found in the Kivu province. The Rubaya mine alone, seized in the spring of 2024 by M23, produces 20 to 30 percent of all coltan, according to our Rwanda Classified partners at Le Monde.
Before seizing Rubaya, M23 already controlled a majority of the trade routes around the mine for several months. According to the UN, “At least a portion of the Rubaya minerals was then smuggled across the Rwandan border.” This clandestine trade was profitable for Rwanda, which recorded an “unprecedented” 50 percent increase in coltan exports in 2023 compared with 2022.
Since Rubaya’s capture, a bona fide mining administration has developed around M23’s monopoly. According to the latest UN estimates, a staggering 120 tons of coltan are now being brought into neighboring Rwanda each month. The UN further calculates that M23 reaps at least $800,000 a month from its new taxes on Rubaya’s minerals. After the mine’s capture, coltan exports from Rwanda increased even more, with the Rwandan government claiming to have recorded a 42 percent year-on-year increase in the third quarter of 2024.
More than half of Rwanda’s coltan and gold exports are destined for China and the United Arab Emirates. However, the European Union is also a major buyer of these resources that play a vital role in its autonomy. In February 2024, the EU signed a memorandum of understanding with Rwanda to strengthen commercial cooperation in the mining sector. Its signature triggered outrage in the DRC. The country’s president, Félix Tshisekedi, described it as a “provocation in very poor taste,” and claimed that the agreement “encourages Rwanda to plunder the DRC’s natural resources.”
The EU stressed that the agreement aims precisely at improving the mineral’s traceability. The Rwandan government also flaunts this goal on its mining office’s website. However, according to Byansi, this achievement is unlikely unless Brussels tackles the source of these minerals directly, in the DRC. “This trade blatantly violates European standards, but it does so strategically,” he said. “Western countries aren’t taking enough of a stand against Kagame. Implicitly, they allow him to continue his actions in Kivu.”
X: Kagame’s disinformation machine
In that same interview with CNN, Kagame denied profiting from Kivu’s minerals. “The people who are benefitting from Congo’s minerals, more than anyone else, are South Africa and those Europeans who are making noise about it,” he said.
Diplomatic relations with Cyril Ramaphosa, President of South Africa, grew strained in January after the death of 13 South African soldiers affiliated to the Southern African Development Community, a peacekeeping mission deployed in the DRC. Kagame considers the mission illegitimate and believes that the South African soldiers’ backing of the Congolese army is linked to the country’s economic interests. This rhetoric has been widely relayed on X, by accounts displaying their support for Kagame’s regime.
On February 3, for example, an account with the username Ndagije_sam tagged Ramaphosa, calling for his resignation. In his profile picture, the account owner shares a smiling handshake with Kagame. Among the four photos in the post, three were generated by X’s built-in artificial intelligence, Grok. They depict Ramaphosa and Tshisekedi perched above piles of minerals, smiling or seemingly whispering. One of these images was posted by other X accounts at least five times in four days, targeting Ramaphosa every time.
In June 2024, Ndagije_sam’s account was identified by researchers at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub as belonging to a major online disinformation network linked to the Kagame regime. “This is one of their methods we saw often : AI generated images posted across the network’s accounts in a very short time range,” said Morgan Wack, one of the researchers who led the study.
Screenshots of @Ndagjie_sam’s post on X.com calling for Cyril Ramaphosa’s resignation.
Following Forbidden Stories’ revelations last May, the Media Forensics Hub noticed a wave of posts using the hashtag #RwandaClassified and attacking the results of the investigation on X. They were able to identify 464 accounts and over 650,000 posts used “for promotion and/or demotion of narratives,” in order to “harass and intimidate critics,” and making “extensive use of AI” software, such as ChatGPT.
“Our method for spotting AI was quite simple, because they made several mistakes,” said Wack. “The posts’ structure was almost always the same across accounts, with one or two sentences always ending with a hashtag.”
On a given subject, hundreds of posts may contain exactly the same information, but with slightly different wording. “[The use of AI] becomes quite obvious at this volume of posts,” Wack continued. “There aren’t 1,000 ways of wording a single idea, so they end up being very repetitive.”
The study also identified dozens of identical posts, posted almost simultaneously, but by different accounts. Some accounts even forgot to remove the prompt that ChatGPT includes at the beginning of every response to a request.
Screenshots of tweets with evidence of AI use collected by the Media Forensics Lab (Property of Clemson University).
From #RwandaClassified to #SanctionDRC
OpenAI, the company that owns ChatGPT, corroborated the Media Forensics Lab study last October in a report on misinformation. “We banned a set of ChatGPT accounts that originated in Rwanda and generated partisan tweets,” it read. OpenAI also claims to have identified and subsequently banned new accounts that were creating similar content.
Despite OpenAI’s actions, there has been an uptick in activity in the disinformation network in the past weeks, which keeps using generative AI. The posts now focus mostly on the conflict in the DRC, using hashtags such as #SanctionDRC. Amahoro66, one of the accounts identified by Wack in 2024, has posted hundreds of tweets with this hashtag.
“Corruption, illegal mining, and the trafficking of drugs and resources continue to fund violence and instability in the DRC. The world must hold the DRC accountable by imposing sanctions to stop this exploitation! #SanctionDRC,” read one of its 40 tweets on the topic posted in just 11 minutes on February 5th.
The original photo on Instagram (left), compared to the profile picture of Amahoro66 (right)
The account’s profile picture of a young woman leaning against a balcony is fake. It was taken from the Instagram post of an Algerian actress dated February 2023, two months prior to the creation of the fake Rwandan account. Apart from the face, which has been altered, the two photos are identical.
Forbidden Stories has also found dozens of identical posts on X, published within hours or even minutes of each other with the hashtag #SanctionDRC. Some posts included a number at the beginning of their text, indicating they were part of a list of artificially generated tweets.
Screenshot of a post with a number at the beginning of its text, indicating it originated from a list of AI-generated tweets.
According to OpenAI, the mass of AI-generated content posted by the disinformation network ultimately reached very few people. “None of the posts that we identified online during our investigation received more than single-digit replies, likes or shares, and many received none at all,” their report stated.
However, making a post go viral is not necessarily the goal of some of these campaigns, as Wack pointed out. “For #RwandaClassified, for example, the apparent aim was to post a massive amount of content to discredit the investigation, and also to muddy the waters so the relevant information would be harder to find.” The Media Forensics Hub study showed that 44 percent of tweets containing #RwandaClassified in the days following our publication came from the 464 accounts they identified.
Byansi has been on the receiving end of such attacks on a daily basis for several years.
“I’m used to it by now, we even laugh about it with my wife,” he said, smiling. “Such petty tactics will not silence me.”
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