# FDLR Formed in 2000, the organisational descendant of the *ex-FAR* army and *Interahamwe* militia that carried out the 1994 Rwandan genocide, still operating in eastern Congo more than three decades later — and the stated reason [[Rwanda]] gives for everything it does across the border. The lineage is the point. Roughly 1.2 million Hutu refugees crossed into eastern Zaire in 1994, and the génocidaires among them militarised the UNHCR camps around Goma and Bukavu. That is what triggered the [[First Congo War]]; the FDLR is what remained after the camps were broken. UN-listed on 31 December 2012, the group's Security Council narrative summary documents 106 incidents of sexual violence in a ten-month period and the forced recruitment of at least 83 Congolese children, some as young as fourteen. **Economically** it has long financed through artisanal mining — cassiterite and gold — and roadblock taxation, and it has repeatedly collaborated with **Congolese army units** against Tutsi-aligned rebels, documented by [[Global Witness]] in 2009 and formalised in a "Patriotic Coalition" with Nyatura militias in May 2022. A national army fighting alongside a genocidal remnant against a neighbouring state's proxy is not an aberration in this conflict; it is the ordinary shape of it. ## The sequencing deadlock FDLR neutralisation is the DRC's core commitment under the [[Washington Accords for Peace and Prosperity]], and Rwandan withdrawal is conditioned on it. The DRC insists the two must happen simultaneously. At the Joint Oversight Committee in Paris on **24 July 2026**, the DRC presented a negotiated demobilisation plan conditioned on secure sites and no forced extradition to Rwanda; **Rwanda formally rejected it**, its foreign minister calling it "crude manipulation" and a delaying tactic. That exchange is, in miniature, why the peace process has produced signatures and no withdrawal. Each side's precondition is the other side's deliverable. ## See also [[M23]] · [[Rwanda]] · [[First Congo War]] · [[Washington Accords for Peace and Prosperity]] · [[Conflict Minerals Ecosystem]]