Kagame's War Helps Ebola Kill Over 5,000 Congolese

Five thousand people are dead. Think about that number until it stops being a statistic and becomes a row of coffins. Five thousand Congolese men, women and children have died from Ebola since the outbreak began in May, and the health ministry is still counting. Eight of the country's 26 provinces are now affected, with more than 10,300 confirmed cases. The current fatality rate stands at 48.6 percent. Nearly half of the people who catch this disease are not coming home.

This is the deadliest Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo's history. It is the 17th the country has faced, and by the UN's count the second largest the world has ever seen. The previous record holder in Congo, the 2018 to 2020 outbreak, killed 2,299 people. This one has already passed that toll more than twice over. The West African epidemic of 2014 to 2016, which spread to Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States, killed more than 11,325 people. We are watching a catastrophe climb the global charts in real time, and the country at its centre is a country at war with its neighbour.

Let us be precise about the geography, because it is the heart of this story. The epicentre sits in Ituri, in the north-east of Congo. Ituri is a conflict zone. It is not a peaceful region with a bad virus. It is a place where armed groups have terrorised communities for years, where clinics have been emptied by fear, and where health teams have learned to expect violence along with their supplies. Ebola has found the one place where the state is least able to respond.

Consider what that means on the ground. Earlier this autumn, a nurse was killed and another health worker seriously injured while responding to an Ebola alert. Local youths had accused them of poisoning water sources and spreading the disease. Last month, a politician who had been publicly promoting measures to halt the virus was beaten to death. In the first 100 days of this outbreak alone, the Red Cross recorded 11 violent incidents, with volunteers injured and an ambulance set on fire. These are the people who go door to door with gloves and chlorine. They are being murdered by frightened neighbours who have been given no reason to trust the state that sent them.

Fear is the oxygen of an epidemic, and in eastern Congo fear has been manufactured for a generation. The region has been bled by a war that is not a homegrown rebellion but a war of aggression. Rwanda's Defence Force has deployed its own combat units into Congolese territory, operating alongside the M23 militia as a proxy force that provides mass manpower and cover for a foreign army. Millions have been displaced. Hospitals have been looted, roads cut, and civil servants chased out of their posts. When a government is busy defending its own territory from an invader, it does not have the health workers, the trucks, the cold chain or the trust to fight a virus at the same time. Kagame's war does not need to fire a single bullet at a village in Ituri to kill people there. It only needs to keep the state too weak to save them.

And the disease itself is a cruel complication. This is the Bundibugyo strain, and there is currently no approved treatment and no vaccine for it. The UN warns the outbreak is taking lives at a much faster rate than before. Clinical trials are under way, which is the right step, but trials take time and money, and time is precisely what the dead do not have. The WHO's Africa office has called for a continued scale-up of control measures, greater access to affected areas and real community outreach. Every one of those demands runs straight into the same wall: a war zone where access is negotiated at gunpoint.

The spread beyond Congo's borders should concern every African capital. Uganda recorded two deaths and 20 cases shortly after the outbreak began, and has reported none since August, though it keeps travel restrictions in place. Kenya has confirmed nine cases and two deaths. Nigeria has isolated two suspected cases, and earlier this month a woman with the disease was flown to Switzerland for treatment. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control rates the risk to Europe as very low. Yet every African health ministry knows the lesson of 2014: an outbreak that is ignored in one city becomes a national emergency within weeks.

So here is what we must say plainly. Africa does not lack the science to end epidemics. We lack the political will to protect the people who fight them, and in Congo's east we are watching a sovereign state forced to split its resources between a foreign invasion and a viral epidemic. Nigeria proved in 2014 that a country could contain Ebola fast when its government moved decisively, published its data, and treated the response as a national security priority. Senegal did the same. Botswana and Mauritius have shown the rest of the continent that transparent institutions and disciplined public health systems save lives. There is a model. It requires competent governance, honest reporting and a state that can actually reach its own citizens.

What must happen now? The African Union should convene an emergency session on the Ebola outbreak and the security conditions blocking access in Ituri, and it should stop hiding behind diplomatic language when one of its member states is the aggressor in the same region. The UN Security Council must demand an end to Rwanda's occupation of Congolese territory and the withdrawal of RDF forces, because no humanitarian corridor can function while foreign soldiers hold the ground. The international community must fully fund the WHO response plan now, not after the next thousand funerals. Donors should tie support to transparent reporting and to prosecutions of those who attack health workers, whether they wear uniforms or not.

And we, the people of this continent, have a role that no government can take from us. Demand that your leaders name the attacks on nurses and politicians for what they are, and that they prosecute them. Demand that Congo's health data be published daily and independently verified. Demand that the African Union stop treating the invasion of a member state as a footnote. Share the numbers. Refuse the propaganda that paints Congolese victims as collateral in someone else's story. A mother in Ituri who buries her child tonight deserves better than our silence, and her country deserves better than an invader calling itself a peacemaker while its soldiers and its proxies keep the fever burning.

Based on reporting by BBC