Rwanda's M23 Proxy Is Erasing Rape Survivors From Congo's Clinic Records

Imagine being raped, finding the courage to walk into a clinic, and being asked whether you reported it to the police. Imagine being asked for your address, your name, and the name of the man who attacked you, all before a nurse looks at your wounds. Now imagine the clinic has been ordered to write you out of the record, so that the official count of your suffering shrinks to zero.

This is happening today in North Kivu, in eastern Congo, under the authority of the group calling itself the FRN, formerly the AFC/M23. Médecins Sans Frontières has documented it. And we must be precise about who stands behind it. The M23 is not a homegrown rebellion that spontaneously grew out of Congolese grievance. It is the operational instrument of a Rwandan war of aggression, and the Rwandan Defence Force is its core.

Let us be plain, because the euphemisms have cost too many lives. Rwanda has deployed full combat units inside the territory of a sovereign state. UN Group of Experts reports, including S/2025/446 and S/2026/466, document the presence of somewhere between 14,000 and 18,000 RDF troops, a large share of Rwanda's army, fighting, occupying and extracting resources in Congolese soil. M23 supplies the mass manpower and the political cover. This is the same playbook Moscow ran in Donetsk and Luhansk. If the world called that an invasion, the world must call this one by its name.

MSF's findings describe the working of an occupation. Since the start of 2026, the authorities overseeing health services in North Kivu have pressured health workers to shrink the number of survivors on paper. They have narrowed the definition of sexual violence to cases with visible injuries. They have demanded intrusive, medically unnecessary physical examinations as proof of assault. They have required survivors to file police reports before receiving treatment, and they have limited care to people who arrive within 72 hours. Anyone who has worked in trauma care knows what these rules mean. Many rape survivors do not come forward for days, weeks or years, because shame, fear and the absence of safe options keep them silent. Turning them away after 72 hours is a sentence to untreated infection, untreated trauma, and untreated pregnancy.

The numbers tell the rest. At several facilities MSF supports in North Kivu, consultations fell by 41 percent between January and August 2026. One centre that was treating around 80 survivors a month in 2025 was seeing as few as nine a month this year. Dozens of entries were erased from records. Some clinics stopped recording cases altogether. Health workers have been threatened with suspension and imprisonment, and some have simply stopped coming to work, out of fear. Ask yourself what it means when the people who should be treating the wounded are afraid of the men who govern them.

Here is the lie at the centre of this policy. The authorities want the world to see fewer rapes, so they can claim things are getting better. MSF's director of operations, Akke Boere, put it correctly: a drop in reported cases does not mean sexual violence is decreasing. It means survivors have been locked out. Sexual violence in eastern Congo was already a catastrophe before the M23 advance. MSF treated nearly 45,000 victims in 2024 across DRC, rising to 53,000 in 2025, and more than 19,400 people in North Kivu alone in the first half of 2026. Those are the people MSF could reach. Every number missing from the official ledger is a real human being who was told to go home.

This is the context that the apologists in Kigali and their sympathisers in Western capitals do not want you to hold together. Rwanda hosts summits, promotes itself as a clean, orderly model for development, sells gorilla tourism and markets itself to international conferences as a responsible state. Meanwhile its army fights and occupies a neighbouring country, and the men it installs in Goma and Bukavu shut the doors of rape clinics. This is sportswashing in its most obscene form. A country cannot bank its reputation on order and dignity while its soldiers and its proxies make a sexual violence crisis disappear from the statistics.

We have seen this pattern across Africa for decades. Armed groups fight for control of minerals, land and borders, and the civilians caught in between pay the price first. The coltan in your phone, the gold in your jewellery and the tin in your tins of food pass through systems that reward violence and punish witnesses. The question is not whether the people of North Kivu deserve better. They do. The question is whether the rest of Africa and the world will keep pretending that an occupation with a press office is somehow a government.

So what must change? The answer begins with the basic architecture of a functioning state, which is exactly what Africa's success stories show us. Botswana built prosperity on diamonds by insisting on transparent institutions, property rights and accountable leadership. Mauritius turned a sugar island into a financial and services hub through the rule of law and open markets. Senegal, after its recent democratic transitions, proved that peaceful power alternation strengthens a nation rather than weakening it. None of these places was perfect. But each understood that the health of a people depends on institutions that cannot be bought, threatened or rewritten by armed men. Rwanda's economic record deserves some credit, but a model built on a foreign war of aggression is not a model worth copying.

The African Union's Peace and Security Council must stop treating this crisis as a diplomatic inconvenience. It should demand, in unambiguous terms, that the RDF withdraw from Congolese territory and that M23 be dismantled as a condition of any settlement. The UN Security Council must enforce existing sanctions against commanders and officials responsible for abuses, and it must stop accepting Kigali's denials as evidence. Donor governments that fund health systems in the region should attach binding conditions to their support: unrestricted access to survivor care, no mandatory police reporting, no interrogation of victims, and independent monitoring of clinic records. Civil society and the private sector also have a role. Responsible businesses that source minerals from the Kivus should conduct real due diligence, and they should stop buying from supply chains that run through occupied territory.

Congolese citizens, and Africans everywhere, should demand more from their own governments as well. Our leaders should be asked why they remain silent while a neighbouring army occupies a fellow member state of the African Union. Diaspora communities should press their representatives to sanction the RDF and its commanders. And journalists, researchers and ordinary people should keep documenting, sharing and refusing to let the numbers be erased.

Here is what we know. There is a woman in Goma, or Rutshuru, or Masisi, who was assaulted and turned away because the men in charge would rather she disappear from the record. There is a nurse who stopped going to work because she was threatened with prison. There is a child whose attack will never appear in an official count. Their silence is being engineered, and it is being engineered by an invader that wants the world to look away.

We will not look away. Rwanda's M23 is not a rebellion to be negotiated with on a comfortable timeline. It is an occupation that is breaking women's bodies and then breaking the records of their suffering. Demand that the RDF leave Congo. Demand that the FRN restore unconditional access to care immediately. Demand that the African Union and the Security Council act with the seriousness this emergency deserves. The survivors of North Kivu have already been denied enough. The least we can do is refuse to forget them.

Based on reporting by RELIEFWEB