Rwanda’s Foreign Affairs Minister Olivier Nduhungirehe publicly rebuked Germany’s Human Rights Commissioner Lars Castellucci on Saturday after Castellucci published a statement on the Congo crisis that made no mention of a drone attack by the Congolese army on a civilian market in Mushaki, North Kivu, which killed more than 20 people and wounded 60 others the day before.
Nduhungirehe’s message was blunt. He told Castellucci that if he could not bring himself to condemn the killing of civilians by the Congolese army, he should refrain entirely from commenting on or involving himself in the affairs of the Great Lakes region. Then he added a correction that carried more weight than it might appear.
The name of his country, he wrote, is Rwanda, not “Ruanda.” The spelling is not a minor typographical slip. “Ruanda” is the German colonial name for Rwanda, used during the period when Germany administered the territory as part of German East Africa from the 1880s until its defeat in the First World War, after which Belgium took control under a League of Nations mandate.
For a sitting German official to use that spelling in 2026, whether through carelessness or habit, touches a nerve that goes well beyond grammar.
It places a German human rights commissioner in the position of unconsciously reaching for the colonial nomenclature of a country his government once occupied and administered, while simultaneously lecturing its neighbour on sovereignty and international law.
Nduhungirehe’s correction, brief as it was, carried the full weight of that history. The immediate trigger for his rebuke was a lengthy post Castellucci published following a trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In it, the German commissioner called for Rwanda’s military withdrawal from Congolese territory, an end to Rwandan support for armed groups, and said future German cooperation with Rwanda must be tied to measurable peace efforts.
He also called for the suspension of plans to establish a refugee return centre in Rwanda and warned against cuts to Germany’s international cooperation budget, describing such reductions as a strategic mistake at a time of shifting global order.
His statement was framed around accountability and international law, but it said nothing about the Mushaki market attack carried out the previous day by the very government whose territory he had just visited.
That silence did not go unnoticed. Online, the reaction to Castellucci’s statement was sharp and largely hostile. Critics argued that his framing placed disproportionate blame on Rwanda while ignoring the conduct of the Congolese state, which has been widely documented as backing dozens of armed militias, some with roots in genocidal movements, while its own military carried out the drone strike Castellucci declined to address.
One commentator noted the contradiction directly, pointing out that in a country with more than 100 armed groups, where the government arms and enables militia forces and its commander in chief has spoken openly of attacking a neighbouring state, it was perverse to treat Rwanda’s defensive posture as the primary obstacle to peace.
Others went further. Several voices drew a comparison between the international community’s current misreading of the Great Lakes crisis and historical failures to correctly read early warning signs of catastrophic violence before it fully unfolds, an analogy intended to illustrate the danger of prioritising diplomatic comfort over honest analysis.
Another commentator argued that the Democratic Republic of Congo’s fundamental problem is not Rwanda but decades of institutional collapse, endemic corruption, and a political culture that has used Rwanda as a permanent distraction from its own failures.
The DRC, they noted, is one of the most resource-rich countries on earth, yet its population remains among the poorest. European powers competing for access to Congo’s strategic minerals, the argument went, have a vested interest in flattering rather than confronting a government that has consistently outsourced accountability for its internal chaos to a much smaller neighbour.
The deeper tension running beneath these responses is one that rarely surfaces in Western diplomatic framing of the Congo crisis.
Rwanda, a country of roughly 14 million people, is regularly positioned as the destabilising force in a conflict that has claimed millions of lives over three decades.
Critics of that framing argue it inverts the actual sequence of events and relieves a failing, militia-sponsoring state of responsibility by focusing international pressure on the country reacting to cross-border threats rather than the one generating them.
There is also an uncomfortable irony in Germany’s role in this particular diplomatic moment. Germany was Rwanda’s first colonial ruler. It was German administrators and missionaries who began the process of formalising and hardening ethnic distinctions between Hutu and Tutsi, distinctions that Belgian colonial rule later institutionalised with ID cards and that ultimately fed into the conditions for the 1994 genocide.
For a German official to arrive in the region, use the colonial name for Rwanda, and issue a statement that holds Rwanda primarily responsible for regional instability while remaining silent on Congolese army attacks on civilians is, to many observers in the region, not merely a diplomatic misstep. It is a pattern.
Castellucci’s office had not responded to the criticism or addressed the Mushaki attack at the time of publication. The attack itself, carried out by drones attributed to the Congolese army against a civilian market in Masisi Territory, has received little attention in Western media relative to the sustained coverage given to Rwanda’s military activities inside Congo.
The exchange between Nduhungirehe and Castellucci is unlikely to be the last of its kind.
As international powers deepen their interest in Congo’s vast mineral wealth and position themselves across a region in chronic crisis, the gap between the language of European diplomacy and the reality on the ground in the Great Lakes is becoming harder to ignore, and harder to forgive.