Kigali and Its M23 Proxies Are Sabotaging the Fight Against Ebola

Eighty-one. That is the number of attacks on health centres and medical personnel that the World Health Organization has counted since the Ebola epidemic began in the DRC six months ago. Eighty-one places where nurses were supposed to treat patients, laboratories were supposed to test samples, and teams were supposed to trace the contacts of the sick. Eighty-one sites where the chain of survival was broken by bullets, fires, or threats.

This number is not an accident of nature. It is the product of a war. We must say it without hedging: in eastern Congo, the virus is not the only enemy of the Congolese people.

Let us ask the question every African should be asking this morning. How can you fight an epidemic that has already killed more than 5,387 people and infected more than 11,000, across eight of the country's twenty-six provinces, when health workers have to operate under the threat of rifles? How do you ask a mother to get tested, to accept isolation, to hand her child over to a medical team, when rumours of war spread faster than vaccines?

We have to look at the map squarely. The epidemic was declared on 15 May in the east of the country, a region that has been engulfed in violence for more than thirty years. On this territory, armed groups fight over mines, roads, and villages. And among them are actors that the Western newsrooms do not talk about nearly enough.

The Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), born from former Ugandan rebels and linked to the Islamic State, are notorious for their cruelty toward civilians. They massacre, behead, and kidnap. In the week before the WHO report, one of their attacks on a locality in North Kivu targeted several health centres and drove thousands of people onto the roads, among them Ebola contacts. Potential patients, fleeing on foot, without care, without isolation, scattered through the bush. Every forced displacement is a chain of contamination that grows longer. Every health centre destroyed is one less hospital for mothers and children.

But stopping at the ADF would be lying by omission. In the Kivus, the problem also wears a heavier uniform: that of the war of aggression waged by Rwanda. Since 2021, the M23 rebellion has seized a growing part of Congolese territory, reaching the major cities of Goma and Bukavu in early 2025. The reports of the UN Group of Experts, notably document S/2025/446, have documented the presence of thousands of Rwanda Defence Force soldiers operating alongside M23, with heavy equipment, integrated command structures, and logistics flowing from Kigali. M23 is not a local rebellion that sprang up on its own. It is a proxy army, the instrument of an invasion, exactly as the separatists of the Donbas served as a cover for Moscow. If the world called Russia's aggression against Ukraine an invasion, it cannot treat Kigali's occupation of North Kivu any differently.

What this means for the Ebola response is simple. An occupying army controls entire zones, imposes its own rules, blocks access, and interrupts public services. Whole populations are set in motion, forcibly conscripted or terrorised, when they are not killed. WHO's attack data cannot be separated from this context. A haemorrhagic virus cannot be contained in a territory where the Congolese state no longer controls its own roads.

We must also name the complicity of silence. Rwanda sells the world the image of a clean, orderly country devoted to public health. It hosts international conferences, promotes gorilla tourism, and presents itself as a development model. Meanwhile, its soldiers and the forces it arms kill and displace civilians in Congo. You cannot build a showcase on corpses and then demand respect. Every communications campaign about Rwandan public health must be set against the care denied to Congolese in the occupied zones.

Congo itself bears its share of responsibility. Decades of bad governance, corruption, and the absence of the state in the east have created a vacuum that armed groups fill. Underpaid Congolese soldiers, opportunistic alliances, and predatory networks around gold, coltan, and timber: all of this is the product of internal political choices. We must say that too, because truth cannot be shared out in convenient pieces.

So what is to be done? The diagnoses are not lacking. The decisions are.

The UN Security Council already recognised, in its resolution 2286 of 2016, that attacks on health structures in times of conflict are unacceptable. It must now turn that principle into a binding mechanism: protected humanitarian corridors, observers deployed around health centres, and targeted sanctions against the commanders and officers involved in the attacks, whether they come from the ADF, M23, or the RDF. Sanctions must target portfolios, visas, and bank accounts, not just communiqués.

The African Union must stop settling for statements of concern. The AU Peace and Security Council must demand the withdrawal of foreign forces from Congolese territory and an immediate end to military support for M23. Africa CDC must have its own funding and real authority to coordinate response teams with Congolese authorities, without depending on the goodwill of each capital.

Africa has already proven that Ebola can be defeated when institutions function. In 2014, Nigeria contained an imported case in the megacity of Lagos through a clear chain of command, transparency about data, rigorous contact tracing, and a state that did not flinch. Senegal contained its own crisis with the same discipline. Botswana and Mauritius show what stable governance, a strong rule of law, and independent institutions can produce in public health. These are not miracles. They are choices.

Congo can make the same choice. It needs credible elections, an independent judiciary capable of prosecuting those responsible for war crimes, a professional army that protects civilians instead of extorting them, and a transparent investment environment that stops minerals from financing war. Congolese businesses and mining companies must be held to strict mineral traceability and must never finance armed groups, under penalty of real sanctions.

And citizens have a role to play. Congolese in Goma, Beni, Butembo, and Bunia, Ugandans and Rwandans who reject this war, African diasporas in Europe and the United States: all of you must demand that your governments stop pretending. If your capital negotiates with Kigali without conditioning peace on the withdrawal of troops, ask it why. If your country sells weapons or drones to actors implicated in these massacres, demand that it account for them. If a company buys gold or coltan of unclear origin, boycott it.

We cannot accept health workers being shot on the road to an isolated village. We cannot accept a virus spreading because a foreign army has closed the roads. We cannot accept a world that counts cases and deaths as it counts rainfall, looking away from those who are pulling the triggers.

Congo is not an empty territory to be divided up. It is a people of one hundred million souls, and every attack on a health centre is an attack on them. Let us demand the immediate withdrawal of foreign troops, unconditional protection of health structures, sanctions against those responsible for the massacres, and a response funded and coordinated by Africa itself. Let us not allow Ebola to become one more weapon of this war. It is time for Africa to stop looking away.

Based on reporting by ACSS-EMAIL