Armed Groups Are Turning Ituri Into a Killing Field During an Ebola Outbreak

Eight days into November, gunfire rang out near Plaine Savo, a displacement site in Djugu territory, Ituri province. At least five civilians were wounded. Shots were heard in the nearby town of Fataki, roughly 25 kilometres away. The people caught in the crossfire were not soldiers. They were mothers who had already fled their villages once, children who had already lost their schools, and old men who had already buried neighbours. They had fled to a camp. The camp is now a place where people are shot.

Let us say this plainly, because the language of "clashes" and "tensions" has been used for too long to hide who is dying. Ituri is not experiencing a mysterious wave of unrest. It is experiencing a sustained campaign of violence by armed groups that have turned entire villages into hunting grounds for years. The Coordinator of Humanitarian Affairs in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Alain Akpadji, put it in terms no one should need to be told: civilians are not targets. Every armed actor in this province knows that. Every one of them has chosen to ignore it.

Consider the numbers. Plaine Savo alone shelters more than 76,000 displaced people. Across Ituri, more than one million people have been driven from their homes. A million people is roughly the population of a mid-sized African capital, uprooted and crowded into camps, churches, and schools, sleeping on bare ground. Each of those displacements was a decision made by someone with a gun and an agenda. Behind every statistic is a family that once had a field, a goat, a roof, and a name on a school register, and now has none of them.

Then add the Ebola outbreak. Ituri is the epicentre of the current epidemic, accounting for roughly 70 percent of confirmed cases. This is the province where the 2018 to 2020 Ebola outbreak killed more than 2,200 people, and the lesson of that tragedy was supposed to be learned. It was not. Health teams cannot trace contacts through a war zone. Treatment centres cannot function when staff are afraid to drive to work. Vaccination campaigns cannot reach villages that are cut off by roadblocks and gunfire. When humanitarian movement was restricted from late October and an assessment mission was forced to suspend its work, the cost was not measured in logistics reports. It was measured in the people who will not be found, tested, and treated in time.

Ask yourself what it means when a disease that spreads through contact meets a conflict that destroys contact. Ask what it means when the people trying to stop a deadly virus are the same people being told to stay away for their own safety. The answer is that an outbreak in a war zone is never only a health crisis. It becomes a death sentence for those who cannot run and a silent bomb for everyone else.

This is not happening in isolation. The eastern Congo is a theatre of many wars, and the state has been stretched across them all. In North Kivu and South Kivu, the Rwanda-backed M23 is waging a war of aggression that has displaced millions and drained Kinshasa's army, budget, and attention. Ituri's militias, including CODECO and the Allied Democratic Forces, thrive in the gaps that this wider catastrophe leaves behind. Every soldier sent to the Kivus is a soldier not protecting Djugu. Every dollar spent on emergency responses to one front is a dollar not spent on clinics, roads, and courts on another. When a state is this overstretched, its citizens are the ones who vanish into the cracks.

Let us also be honest about the other side of the ledger. Land and cattle disputes between farming and pastoral communities in Djugu have been exploited, inflamed, and monetised for decades. Politicians have armed local militias for electoral and personal gain. Officials have looked away while mining and trafficking networks fund the guns. Foreign governments and firms that buy Congo's minerals and profit from its chaos have rarely asked where the money goes. Congo's own security forces have, at times, committed abuses against the same civilians they were meant to protect. If we only point at the militias and not at the men who arm them, we are doing the militias a favour.

So what should be done? Start with the basics that every functioning African state takes for granted. Ituri needs an independent judiciary willing to prosecute militia leaders, their financiers, and the officials who shield them. Lists of commanders should be published, sanctions enforced, and asset trails followed through the banks and mining companies that move the money. Land tenure in Djugu must be resolved through transparent, legally recognised titles and arbitration mechanisms, so that a dispute over grazing does not become a massacre. Local courts and police must be recruited, paid, and held accountable to the communities they serve, not to the militia commanders who win elections by intimidation.

Africa already has proof that better is possible. Botswana built one of the continent's most stable democracies by protecting property rights, managing its mineral revenues transparently, and keeping its institutions independent of any single faction. Mauritius shows what happens when rule of law and open markets are treated as non-negotiable. Senegal has repeatedly shown that peaceful transfers of power can be achieved when citizens and institutions refuse to accept violence as the price of politics. None of these countries is perfect. All of them prove that the choices made in Kinshasa, Addis Ababa, Abuja, and Pretoria are not predetermined by geography or history.

The African Union's Peace and Security Council must stop treating Ituri as a footnote to the Kivus. It should send a mandate-backed monitoring presence with the authority to report abuses publicly and push for accountability. The United Nations Security Council must renew its sanctions regime on armed groups in Ituri with real enforcement, not symbolic resolutions. Regional bodies must guarantee safe corridors for health workers and aid convoys, with the same urgency they would demand if this were happening on their own soil. And Western governments that lecture Africa about democracy must stop funding security assistance without conditions tied to civilian protection and human rights.

Now the question is put to us, the people of this continent. How many more camps must fill before we stop calling this a "situation"? How many more children must be shot at the edge of a displacement site before our governments treat this as an emergency rather than a background noise? A million displaced people in one province should be a national emergency in every capital in Africa. It is not, and that silence is a choice.

We demand that the Congolese government guarantee humanitarian access to Djugu immediately, lift every movement restriction that is blocking Ebola response, and open independent investigations into every attack on civilians, including those by its own forces. We demand that the African Union and the UN put names, sanctions, and prosecutions on the table. We demand that Africa's business and civil society leaders refuse to finance or buy minerals tied to armed groups. And we demand that the people of Ituri are not forgotten the moment the news cycle moves on. Their lives are not a side story to the continent's future. They are the continent's future, and they deserve to live through it.

Based on reporting by RELIEFWEB