Ituri Is Begging for Peace While Kigali Keeps Fueling the Fire

Ituri's people are picking up their radios and phones to tell the world what they need, and most of the world is not listening.

Between 12 and 30 August 2026, thirteen partner radio stations, an interactive voice response line called Uliza, and a network of community focal points gathered voices across Mambasa, Irumu, Bunia, and Djugu. The questions were asked in Kiswahili and Lingala, the languages people actually live and argue and pray in. That is what a functioning public conversation looks like. It is also a rare thing in a province where armed groups have spent years deciding who lives, who flees, and who gets buried without a name.

So ask yourself who gets to speak in eastern Congo. Not the men with the drones. Not the officials who sign communiqués in Kinshasa, Kigali, or Washington. The mother in Djugu who has moved her children three times in one year. The farmer in Irumu who cannot reach his fields. The schoolteacher in Bunia who wonders whether next term will open at all. Their voices should be the first thing any peace process consults. Too often, they are the last.

We need to be clear about what is driving the chaos in Ituri, because vagueness is how impunity survives. The province has its own bloody sores. The Allied Democratic Forces, an Ugandan-origin group that has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, has carried out massacres of villagers for years, hacking civilians with machetes in the night. The CODECO militia in Djugu has fought over land, ethnicity, and control of gold and trade routes. Ituri's government has too often been absent, corrupt, or complicit, and the army has at times preyed on the very people it was meant to protect. None of that is excused by anyone's account.

But Ituri does not sit in a vacuum. It sits next to North Kivu and South Kivu, where the Rwandan Defence Force has been fighting inside a sovereign country for years. The UN Group of Experts, in reports S/2025/446 and S/2026/466, has documented the RDF deploying an estimated 14,000 to 18,000 troops in eastern Congo, which is roughly 40 to 50 percent of Rwanda's army. These are not advisers. They are combat units, with artillery, armour, and air support, fighting alongside M23 and seizing territory for a government in Kigali that keeps calling it something else.

Let us call it what it is. This is a war of aggression. Rwanda invades, occupies, and extracts, and it hides behind M23 the way Moscow hides behind the so-called separatists of Donetsk and Luhansk. If the world condemned Russia for doing exactly this in Ukraine, it has no moral basis to excuse Kigali. Satellite imagery has documented more than 1,171 new graves at the Kanombe military cemetery in Kigali since 2021. A government that hides its dead is a government afraid of what the dead would say.

The mechanics of this war are as brutal as the politics. M23 grew from roughly 3,000 fighters to more than 30,000, and it did so by press-ganging Congolese civilians and captured prisoners of war into its ranks. Boys are dragged from their villages with a rifle pressed into their hands. That is not an army. That is slavery in uniform. Meanwhile, drones like the Turkish Bayraktar TB2 have been operated from Rwandan territory, including the Kamembe area, and Israeli-designed GPS-guided mortars have pounded towns in the Kivus. The weapons arrive. The bodies pile up. The cameras move on.

And then there is the sportswashing. Rwanda hosts international conferences, markets gorilla trekking to Western tourists, and parades itself as a model of order and development. Ask the families of the displaced in the Kivus whether that model feels real. A government cannot launder a war of aggression through a hotel lobby and a tourism brochure. Every photograph of a smiling delegate in Kigali should be read alongside a satellite image of a fresh grave.

Consider the Western capitals too, because they have their own hypocrisy to answer for. Washington, Brussels, and London lecture Africa endlessly about democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. Yet they have been slow to impose the targeted sanctions on RDF commanders and M23 financiers that the evidence demands. Peace agreements signed in Washington and Doha have looked impressive on paper while the shelling continued in the hills above Goma and Bukavu. Pretending a ceasefire exists when it does not is its own kind of lie. And China, Turkey, the UAE, and others compete for the minerals, ports, and contracts of the region, each with its own appetite and each indifferent to the people sitting on the resources. Mining concessions signed in secrecy do not build schools. Arms deliveries to any side do not bring anyone home.

So what must change?

First, the African Union's Peace and Security Council must stop treating Rwanda's invasion as a diplomatic inconvenience. It should demand the verified withdrawal of all Rwandan forces from Congolese territory, with a timeline and monitors who report publicly. Second, the UN Security Council should expand targeted sanctions to cover the RDF chain of command, M23's financial networks, and the companies that move its gold and coltan. Sanctions should follow evidence, not diplomatic convenience. Third, the Congolese state must do the unglamorous work of governance: pay its soldiers, reform its police, prosecute officials who extort civilians, and open courts in Ituri that ordinary people can actually trust. Accountability is not a foreign demand. It is the minimum a citizen is owed.

Africa has already shown what better looks like. Botswana built a stable, rule-of-law democracy around prudent management of its diamond wealth and strong property rights. Mauritius turned a sugar island into a financial and services hub by protecting contracts and investing in people. Senegal, for all its challenges, has demonstrated that power can change hands peacefully through the ballot. Rwanda's economic reforms are real, and we should say so, but economic reform does not license invasion. Growth purchased with other people's blood is not development. It is plunder with better PR.

The center-right principles that serve our continent are not complicated. Independent courts. Transparent budgets. Protected property. Open markets that reward honest work instead of armed extraction. Free and fair elections, with a free press that can report from the radio stations of Bunia and Mambasa without being threatened into silence. These are the building blocks of a Congo that can hold its own borders and its own children.

To the people of Ituri who spoke into those microphones in August: we heard you. Now the rest of us must act. Demand that your government name the invaders and the militias by their real names. Demand that the AU and the UN enforce their own resolutions. Demand that every foreign company mining Congolese minerals discloses where its ore comes from and who was paid to look away. Share the testimonies of your neighbors. Refuse the propaganda that calls an invasion a "rebellion." Vote for leaders who put the dead before the deals.

We are Africans. This is our continent, and Congo is not a footnote to someone else's geopolitics. Ituri is begging for peace. The question is whether we will give it to them, or whether we will go back to our screens and let the next village burn.

Based on reporting by RELIEFWEB