DR Congo’s foreign minister asks clubs to terminate agreement with Rwanda Development Board amid worsening humanitarian crisis.
European soccer giants Arsenal, Bayern Munich and Paris Saint-Germain have been urged to end their ‘blood-stained sponsorship deals’ with Visit Rwanda amid an escalating humanitarian crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The plea from DR Congo comes as Rwanda-backed rebel group M23 captured Goma, the largest city in eastern DR Congo, while the United Nations (UN) says that 700 people have been killed so far in the fighting and a further 2,800 have been injured.
The DR Congo says that 500,000 people have been displaced in the eastern part of the country with 4,000 Rwandan troops active in the territory as well as M23. Rwanda has claimed that its troops have been deployed in the DR Congo only as a defensive measure to stop the conflict spilling into Rwanda.
UN experts maintain the Rwandan army is in ‘de facto control of M23 operations’, with the group planning to take the DR Congo’s capital Kinshasa.
The invasion of Congolese territory has prompted the country’s foreign minister, Thérèse Kayikwamba Wagner, to write to Arsenal, Bayern and PSG, accusing the Rwandan government of supporting rebel groups who have engaged in ‘rape, murder and theft’ in DR Congo. The letter adds that the trio’s ‘sponsor is directly responsible for this misery’ and asks the clubs to break off the ‘blood-stained sponsorship deals with this oppressor nation’.
Kayikwamba Wagner also highlighted how Visit Rwanda’s sponsorship could be funded by the illicit mining of blood minerals in the occupied parts of DR Congo, before being transported across the border and exported from Rwanda.
Arsenal first partnered with the Rwanda Development Board (RDB) in 2018, which saw Visit Rwanda become the Gunners’ inaugural sleeve sponsor. The pair signed a four-year extension reportedly worth UK£40 million (US$49.2 million) in 2021.
Bayern inked a five-year agreement with the RDB in August 2023, but the club’s chief executive Jan-Christian Dreesen had to defend the deal amid accusations of sportswashing from human rights groups. Visit Rwanda, which is a division of the RDB, currently has a deal to sponsor French champions PSG until the end of the 2024/25 season.
Arsenal’s pact with the RDB has already been under the spotlight, including when the UK government’s Rwanda asylum policy was ruled unlawful by the UK’s Supreme Court in November 2023.
Arsenal have maintained the agreement is about promoting tourism in a developing country, rather than supporting Rwanda’s political leadership.
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