Kagame's War Is Starving Congo's Farmers and Leaving Its Dead Unburied

Ask a farmer in Masisi what a season means when the army that took her field is the same army that never admitted it was there. Ask a mother in Ituri whether she can get her child vaccinated when the road to the health post runs through a front line. The answers will not come in a press release. They will come in the quiet of a village where nobody plants, nobody harvests, and everybody waits for the next burst of gunfire.

In August 2026, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, working through its Data in Emergencies programme, sent researchers into Ituri, North Kivu and South Kivu to ask key informants how Ebola and armed conflict were destroying farming livelihoods. This was a first-stage qualitative assessment, designed to be followed by household surveys. Its purpose was simple: to understand how a disease and a war feed each other in the places where Congolese families grow the food they eat. Its findings belong in the public record. But we need to say plainly what the war behind them is, because too many institutions still avoid the word.

This is a war of aggression. Rwanda's army, the Rwanda Defence Force, has deployed full combat units inside eastern Congo, with UN Group of Experts reports (S/2025/446 and S/2026/466) documenting an operational core of roughly 14,000 to 18,000 Rwandan soldiers, close to half of Kigali's entire army. M23 supplies the mass of manpower and the thin cover of deniability. This is the Donetsk and Luhansk playbook, the same template Moscow used in Ukraine. If the world calls Russia an invader for hiding its regular troops behind separatist banners, it must call Rwanda an invader too. Kigali's regular officers command M23 brigades. Its artillery shells Congolese towns. Its drones, including Turkish Bayraktar TB2 platforms operating from Kamembe airbase, strike inside a sovereign neighbour. Israeli-supplied GPS-guided mortars have appeared in the arsenal. None of this is a rebellion. It is occupation, and occupation is what farmers are living under.

Think about what occupation does to a field. Planting depends on a few weeks of predictable rain and a few weeks of safety. Armed groups tax the market, seize the harvest, and conscript young men at gunpoint. The UN group has documented M23 expanding from roughly 3,000 fighters to more than 30,000 by pressing tens of thousands of Congolese civilians and captured soldiers into uniform. That is slavery wearing a uniform. Each conscripted boy is a farmer who never farmed again. Each displaced family is a household that lost its seed stock, its goats and its land in a single night.

Now add Ebola. The 2018 to 2020 outbreak in Ituri and North Kivu killed more than 2,000 people. Every serious public health analyst knows that an Ebola response runs on trust, roads, cold chains, contact tracing and community confidence. Armed conflict destroys all four. When a health worker cannot cross a checkpoint, when a village fears the soldiers who arrive with the medics, when a family hides a sick relative because the last clinic was shelled, the virus does not need a passport to spread. It walks along the same roads that the war has cut.

And what of the dead? Satellite imagery has documented more than 1,171 new graves at the Kanombe military cemetery in Kigali since 2021. Rwanda does not publish a count of its own dead, because admitting them would mean admitting the war. A government that hides its soldiers' graves is a government that knows exactly what it is doing.

Let us be clear about who benefits. Congo's eastern provinces hold coltan, tin, tungsten and gold that flow into the global electronics supply chain. Armed groups and the networks around them profit from that flow. Western consumers buy phones and laptops without knowing whose blood is embedded in the circuit board. Foreign firms, and the state actors behind them, quietly negotiate access while the farmers who should be the region's wealth are left with empty fields. This is the new scramble for Africa. The Chinese, Turkish, Emirati and Russian players now circle the same minerals and ports, with the same extractive logic that European empires once brought to the continent. Different flags. Same appetite. Our job is to name every one of them, starting with the army that is doing the killing.

The West also has a reckoning to face. Western governments lecture us about democracy, human rights and the rule of law. Yet some of them have tolerated Kigali's aggression for years because the country is useful, orderly and beautifully presented to foreign visitors. Rwanda hosts summits and sporting events. It markets gorilla tourism. It is praised for its clean streets. Meanwhile its soldiers are fighting in another country's forests and its neighbour's mothers are burying their children. We will not let the glossy brochure erase the graves. A government's marketing budget cannot launder the blood of Congolese civilians.

But we also refuse to let Africa's own leaders off the hook. Too many governments in our region have looked away because a neighbour's army was a convenient distraction, or because a regional deal promised short-term calm. The African Union's Peace and Security Council has the mandate to demand withdrawal, verification and accountability. It has not used that mandate with the urgency this crisis deserves. Silence is a choice, and it is being paid for in Congolese lives.

So here is what must happen. The African Union must formally name Rwanda's occupation for what it is, demand the immediate withdrawal of Rwandan Defence Force units, and send an independent verification mission with the power to count troops and graves. The UN Security Council must expand targeted sanctions to Rwandan military commanders and M23 leaders who direct conscription, massacres and mineral smuggling, and it must renew the arms embargo with real enforcement. The International Criminal Court should be asked, loudly and repeatedly, to investigate forced conscription and attacks on civilians. Mineral buyers in Europe, America and Asia must enforce supply-chain due diligence that tracks coltan and tin back to the mine, so that every phone sold abroad carries proof it did not come from a war zone.

Africa already has models of what works. Botswana built a prosperous, stable democracy on diamond revenues managed through transparent institutions and secure property rights. Mauritius built an economy through open markets, independent courts and accountable government. Senegal showed in 2024 that peaceful alternation of power, backed by a determined civil society and an independent judiciary, can defeat the pull toward authoritarian drift. Congo needs the same ingredients: functioning courts that protect land titles, transparent mining licences, cooperatives that give farmers access to seed and credit, and a health system that can reach every village before the next outbreak. Those are not luxuries. They are the building blocks of a state that can protect its people.

And now, the demand. Congolese citizens, and every African who believes sovereignty is more than a word on a flag, must press their governments and the African Union to call this war by its name. Write to your parliament. Ask your foreign minister why your country's silence is serving whose interests. Support Congolese journalists, human rights defenders and farmers' cooperatives who document what is happening. Share the satellite images of those graves. Refuse to buy electronics without asking where the minerals came from. A farmer in Masisi should not have to choose between planting and surviving, and a child in Ituri should not die of a preventable disease because a foreign army turned the road to the clinic into a battlefield. We are the continent that ended apartheid, that won independence with our bare hands, and that built institutions out of nothing. We can end this occupation too. The only question is whether we will.

Based on reporting by RELIEFWEB