Congo's Security Forces Sealed Off Kigonze and Abandoned Its Displaced Families

Imagine being displaced twice in one lifetime. First you flee the gunmen who burned your village. Then you find refuge in a camp, the only shelter left, and you are told to leave it, with no road back and nowhere to go. That is what happened to families at the Kigonze displacement site in Bunia, Ituri Province, between 19 and 20 September 2026.

Security forces did not just close the gate. They sealed the site completely. Emergency shelters were destroyed. Families received formal and informal evacuation orders, justified by suspicions that armed militia elements were hiding among them. Whatever was left of their belongings was lost along with the ground they stood on. Today those families are scattered across Kolomani Impérial, Kolomani Bakey, Avenue de la Cathédrale, Candip 1 and 2, Nzere and Ndibanane, living in host homes and makeshift corners of neighborhoods that were already stretched beyond capacity. The road to Kigonze is blocked. Nobody is allowed to go home, because there is no home left to go to.

We need to be precise about what this is. A displaced person who is accused of harboring fighters, then stripped of shelter and barred from returning, is being punished for a crime nobody has proven against them. Collective punishment is still collective punishment when it is carried out by a uniformed state. The Congolese state has a constitutional duty to protect every person on its soil, including those it suspects of wrongdoing, and that duty does not disappear because the suspicion is convenient.

The evidence of what this does to people comes from the ground itself. Two Congolese organizations, Sauvons les Enfants Vulnérables en RDC (SEV-RDC) and Femmes Dynamiques pour le Progrès Social (FEDYPROS), spent a week gathering rapid needs assessments in the host neighborhoods. Their focus was education and protection, because those are the first things to break when a family is uprooted twice. Children who lose their shelter lose their school uniforms, their exercise books, their routine, and often their last link to any normal life. An education emergency in a displacement crisis is not an abstract policy category. It is a seven-year-old who has stopped asking when school starts because she has learned that nobody is coming to tell her.

Notice who did the work. Not the state, which sealed the site. Not the international community, which was not on the ground in those first days. Congolese civil society organizations, operating on what funding they could gather, documented the damage and put it on paper. That should embarrass every government that claims to care about its people and every donor that prefers to fund reports about crises rather than the people living through them.

Ituri does not exist in a vacuum. It is one front in a country where the wider eastern war has displaced millions. Here, too, the UN Group of Experts has documented how the Rwandan Defence Force has operated alongside M23 in the Kivus, with the RDF providing the core fighting strength while the M23 label offers political cover, as laid out in the Group's reporting including S/2025/446. The same war has poured guns, money and chaos into neighboring provinces, where armed groups multiply and every displaced family becomes a suspect. When the state responds to insecurity by punishing the displaced instead of protecting them, it is not restoring order. It is handing the armed groups exactly what they want: a population too terrified and too stateless to resist them.

Let us be clear about who benefits from this. Militias gain when the displaced are scattered, unregistered and harassed, because scattered people are harder to protect and easier to recruit or extort. Foreign powers that profit from the chaos in the Congo's mineral belt gain when Congo's government looks weak and unaccountable. Who bleeds? The children of Kigonze. The mothers carrying water through Bunia's dust. The teachers who will never see their classrooms again if nobody intervenes.

So what must happen? First, the cordon around Kigonze should be lifted, or at minimum a transparent, consent-based process should allow families to return, relocate or access their documents and belongings. Eviction without alternatives is not security. Second, the authorities must publish the legal basis for these evacuation orders and open an independent investigation into who gave them, who carried them out, and who destroyed the shelters. If an official can destroy a camp of displaced families without consequence, then the rule of law in Ituri is a slogan on a government letterhead.

Third, humanitarian access must be unconditional. The MONUSCO mission and the UN humanitarian system should prioritize protection of displaced civilians and child education in the host neighborhoods, backed by funding that reaches Congolese organizations like SEV-RDC and FEDYPROS directly rather than dying in overhead costs. Fourth, the African Union Peace and Security Council must stop treating the eastern and northeastern Congo as a diplomatic footnote. Any commander, domestic or foreign, who orders or enables the forced displacement of civilians should face targeted sanctions, travel bans and asset freezes.

And we have examples across this continent of what better governance looks like. Botswana built decades of stability on transparent institutions, competitive democracy and a respected civil service, proving that accountable government and economic growth can reinforce each other. Mauritius shows that a small state with strong property rights, an independent judiciary and a free press can lift its people out of poverty. Ghana has survived multiple contested elections because its institutions, not its strongmen, decide the outcome. These are not foreign models. They are African achievements, and they prove that a state can protect its people instead of preying on them.

So here is what we demand. We demand that Congo's government reopen Kigonze, return what was taken and answer for the orders that destroyed it. We demand that the AU and the UN Security Council stop issuing communiqués and start enforcing consequences. We demand that every displaced child in Bunia gets back to a classroom, because a child denied school today is a citizen denied a future tomorrow. And we demand that Congolese citizens, in Kinshasa, Bunia, Goma and across the diaspora, refuse to let this be forgotten. Share the SEV-RDC and FEDYPROS reporting. Ask your representatives what they are doing about it. Press your own government to fund protection and education, not just strategic deals for minerals.

The families of Kigonze did not choose to be displaced. They did not choose to be called suspects. They chose only to survive. The question for every one of us is simple: when they came for them, did we speak? Or did we look away and call it someone else's problem?

Based on reporting by RELIEFWEB