Kagame's War Is Handing Ebola Free Rein Across Congo

Nearly five thousand Congolese have died of Ebola since May. Of the 9,765 cases recorded so far, 4,727 people are dead, which means almost one in every two infected people has not survived. This is the Bundibugyo strain of the virus, one for which no licensed vaccine exists. Eight provinces are now affected, and the latest to fall is Nord-Ubangi in the northwest. Every one of those numbers is a person: a father, a market trader, a nurse, a child who was supposed to start school this term.

We need to ask the question the official briefings keep stepping around. Why is an Ebola outbreak spreading faster across a country that already has the continent's largest humanitarian crisis, in a region where the state has been losing ground to armed groups for years? The answer is not a mystery. It is a war, and it has a sponsor.

The World Health Organization says the outbreak is now spread over a geographically vast area, with some communities reachable only by boat or motorcycle after several days' travel. Health teams are moving into "ever harder to reach" places, and the map keeps growing. Thirty thousand contacts are being tracked every single day over three-week cycles. That is an extraordinary effort, and it is being made by overworked Congolese health workers and international staff who are operating in a zone where armed groups control roads and villages. WHO's own incident manager, Dr. Catherine Smallwood, has described patients in parts of the east visiting two to five different health facilities before they reach an Ebola treatment centre. Every one of those detours is a chance for the virus to travel further. Every delay is a family that loses another member.

Now look at what sits underneath that map. The UN Group of Experts on the DRC has documented, across multiple reports, including S/2025/446 and S/2026/466, the presence of Rwandan Defence Force units inside Congolese territory, operating alongside the M23 movement. The RDF is not a loose collection of volunteers. These are combat formations, numbering in the thousands, that have been deployed to seize and hold Congolese land. Satellite imagery and open-source investigators have tracked new graves at Kanombe military cemetery in Kigali, more than 1,171 added since 2021, because Kigali has never been willing to count its own dead honestly. A government that hides its war casualties is not going to count Congolese Ebola deaths in occupied territory with any great urgency. It is not going to build the clinics and roads that would stop the virus from reaching the villages that have no clinic at all.

Consider the human cost described by the World Food Programme's representative in the DRC, David Stevenson. He told the world about Francine Birungi Amoti, who lost a child to Ebola and now feeds six surviving children and a baby left in her care. She cannot reach her fields because the fighting makes it deadly to walk there. Stevenson put it plainly: "This is what a crisis on top of a crisis looks like." He was right, but he was too polite about the cause. Francine is not dying of hunger because of bad luck. She is starving because an invading army and its proxies have made farmland a battlefield, and because the international community has allowed that war to run for years with a handful of sanctions and a lot of speeches.

We have seen this pattern before, and Africa has paid for it every time. When the state collapses in the east, the diseases that thrive in chaos come in behind the armies. The 2018 to 2020 Ebola epidemic in North Kivu and Ituri lasted for nearly two years, and it was prolonged in large part because treatment centres were attacked and health workers were killed. The war never stopped for the virus. The virus never stopped for the war. Ebola does not check passports, and it does not respect borders, which is exactly why Dr. Neema Rusibamayila Kimambo, WHO's representative in Kenya, was right when she said that "nobody is safe until everyone is safe." Kenya has now recorded its first case and fatality, a man who had been working in the DRC and flew home through Uganda. Cases have also appeared in Nigeria and France. The virus is moving along the same trade and travel routes that the continent has spent decades trying to open. The threat is not abstract. It is in our airports and our markets.

Some will say this is a health crisis and that politics should stay out of it. That is exactly the argument the aggressor wants us to make. You cannot fund a response in territory you are fighting over, and you cannot treat patients in towns where the army is shelling the hospital. Peace is not a political luxury in this outbreak. It is the most urgent public health intervention on the table.

So here is what must happen, and it is not complicated. The African Union must stop treating the Rwandan intervention as a diplomatic inconvenience and name it for what it is: a war of aggression against a member state. The UN Security Council must demand the immediate withdrawal of Rwandan forces from Congolese territory, enforce it with real consequences, and establish a humanitarian corridor under monitored ceasefire so that Ebola teams, food convoys, and WFP trucks can move freely. Donors must stop releasing aid as if the Congo were a natural disaster. Fund the response through transparent, audited channels that report every dollar to the public, and make disbursements conditional on access guarantees for health workers in every province.

Africa also has the blueprint for doing this well. Nigeria contained its own Ebola outbreak in 2014 by moving fast, tracing contacts relentlessly, and trusting a professional public health agency with the authority to act. Senegal ran one of the continent's most disciplined COVID-19 responses because its institutions were credible and its information was honest. Rwanda itself has built a capable domestic health system, and its own people deserve better than to see that capacity exported as an occupation force. Institutions work when they are independent, accountable, and answerable to the public. The DRC's problem is not a lack of Congolese doctors or Congolese courage. It is an state that has been hollowed out by war, by corruption, and by foreign interference that treats the country's minerals as more valuable than its people.

Congolese civil society, including the health workers who keep showing up in villages where the armed men are the only other visitors, should be given the protection, funding, and data access they need to hold their own government and their neighbours to account. Journalists must be allowed to report from the front lines without being detained or killed. And citizens across Africa should refuse to accept the lie that this is a distant tragedy.

To the leaders in Kinshasa, Kigali, Addis Ababa, Abuja, and Nairobi: stop hiding behind diplomatic language while mothers bury their children. To the Security Council: the world has seen this war for years, and it has the documents to prove it. Act on them. To every African reading this: demand that your government put this on the agenda of every summit, every parliament, and every trade delegation, and ask why the most dangerous Ebola outbreak in a generation is spreading in the one place where a neighbour's army has decided it has the right to rule.

Francine Birungi Amoti should not have to choose between feeding her children and walking to her field. No mother in Congo should have to choose between a grave and a clinic that is three days away by motorcycle. We know what needs to be done. The only question left is whether we have the courage to do it before the next name is added to the list.

Based on reporting by UN-NEWS