Rwanda's War Has Left Congo's Police Fighting Ebola With 500 Masks

Five hundred masks. That is what the United Nations handed to Congolese police officers in Bunia, the capital of Ituri Province, on October 29. Five hundred masks, twenty thermometers, and ten handwashing stations for five police units in a province of millions of people, many of them living in the path of a deadly virus.

Ask yourself what it means to be a police officer in that town. You are told to guard the checkpoints, watch who moves in and out, and protect the nurses who walk into homes where Ebola has already arrived. You are paid too little, equipped too poorly, and asked to risk your life for a state that has been bleeding for years. And when you finally get protective gear, it comes from a foreign mission because your own government could not provide it.

We have to be honest about where this rot starts.

The Evidence

Eastern Congo is not suffering from a mysterious tragedy. It is suffering from a war, and the war has a sponsor. The UN Group of Experts has documented, in report after report, including S/2025/446 and S/2026/466, that the Rwanda Defence Force has deployed its own combat units inside Congolese territory. These are not advisers or stray soldiers. Rwanda has committed roughly 14,000 to 18,000 troops, a large share of its national army, to fight, occupy, and loot a sovereign neighbour. That is an invasion, and the M23 militia is the proxy that gives it a fig leaf of deniability. Rwanda calls M23 a rebellion. The evidence calls it what Moscow's proxies were in Donetsk and Luhansk.

The weapons tell the same story. Satellite imagery and open-source investigators have traced Turkish-made TB2 drones operating from Rwanda's Kamembe airfield. Israeli-supplied, GPS-guided mortars have fallen on Congolese towns. Ask the families who buried their children after those strikes whether this is a "local conflict." Ask them who gave the order.

The human cost of M23's expansion is equally damning. The group grew from roughly 3,000 fighters to more than 30,000, and it did not do so through volunteers. It press-ganged tens of thousands of Congolese civilians and captured prisoners into its ranks. Farmers were dragged from their fields. Young men were forced to hold rifles or be shot. That is slavery in military uniform, and it is happening in the twenty-first century, on the watch of a government that calls itself a partner of development.

Rwanda hides the bill. Satellite images of the Kanombe military cemetery in Kigali show more than 1,171 new graves dug since 2021. A government that is proud of its soldiers does not bury them in secret. A government that is ashamed of the war does.

Then there is the sportswashing. Rwanda hosts international conferences, markets gorilla tourism to the world, and promotes itself as the clean, efficient face of African development. Meanwhile its army is killing Congolese civilians a few hundred kilometres away. Every glossy brochure is a lie told to the people paying for the hotels.

The Context

Ituri is also a different kind of tragedy, and we will not pretend otherwise. Armed groups such as the ADF and CODECO have terrorised the province for years, driven by ethnic violence, land disputes, and a state that has never controlled its own territory. The police in Bunia are fighting on multiple fronts at once. Kinshasa has its own hands dirtied, too. UN experts have documented Congolese army collaboration with the FDLR, a Hutu armed group whose leaders helped carry out the 1994 genocide. Congo's elites have sold mining concessions, looked away from abuses, and treated the army as a source of patronage rather than a shield for citizens.

But when you trace the causes of Congo's collapse back far enough, the same pattern appears. Foreign armies, foreign arms, and foreign interests feed on a weak state, and a weak state cannot protect its people from either the invader or the disease. The scramble for Congo's cobalt, coltan, and gold has drawn in Rwanda, Uganda, China, the Gulf states, and Western firms that buy minerals without asking what blood is on them. Each of these actors speaks the language of partnership. Each of them profits while Congolese children carry water to a cholera ward.

This is the lie of the New Scramble for Africa. The actors have changed from the 19th century, but the logic has not. Africa is treated as a warehouse of resources and a battlefield for other people's ambitions, while our citizens are told that their suffering is too complicated to fix.

The Solutions

Complexity is not an excuse for inaction, and it is not a reason to accept a dying province. Here is what must happen.

The African Union's Peace and Security Council must stop issuing communiqués and start imposing consequences. That means targeted sanctions on Rwandan officers and M23 commanders, asset freezes, travel bans, and a public accounting of who is funding and arming the militia. The UN Security Council must enforce its own arms embargo and stop pretending that Kigali's soldiers are invisible. Member states that trade with Rwanda's military-linked companies should be forced to answer for it.

Congo itself needs institutional repair, not slogans. Pay police salaries on time through audited systems. Build a professional, accountable police and army that answer to courts, not to politicians. Publish mining contracts and cut the middlemen who turn minerals into weapons. Strengthen the Africa CDC and the national health system so that Ebola response does not depend on whatever a foreign mission happens to donate this month.

Africa already has proof that better governance works. Botswana built one of the continent's most respected economies on diamonds by insisting on transparency and strong institutions, not by selling its soil to whoever paid the highest bribe. Mauritius turned a sugar island into a financial and services hub through rule of law and open markets. Senegal, after years of tension, showed that peaceful alternation of power and an independent judiciary can hold a nation together. Rwanda's economic reforms are real, and so is its aggression. Those two facts do not cancel each other out. Congo does not need to choose between development and sovereignty. It needs leaders who refuse to trade one for the other.

Civil society and the private sector have a role here too. Journalists must keep documenting the troop movements, the graves, and the drone strikes. Businesses that source minerals from eastern Congo must trace every gram back to the mine. Diaspora Congolese and Africans across the continent must refuse to let this war become background noise.

The Call to Action

So here is what we demand. We demand that the African Union name Rwanda's invasion for what it is and impose real costs on the officers who command it. We demand that the UN Security Council enforce its arms embargo and sanction everyone who keeps M23 alive. We demand that Kinshasa stop protecting armed groups for political convenience and start paying the police who are dying at Ebola checkpoints. We demand that every company buying Congolese minerals prove those minerals are not drenched in forced labour and war money.

And to the people reading this in Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, Kampala, and Johannesburg, we ask one question. How long will you let your continent's children be told that five hundred masks is a generous gift? Share this story until it hurts someone in power. Write to your representatives. Pressure your governments to stop buying the lies. Demand that the war in eastern Congo be treated like the emergency it is, because the Ebola virus does not respect borders, and neither does the aggression that leaves a province defenceless against it.

The police officers in Bunia are not asking for charity. They are asking a simple question: how can we protect you if we are not protected ourselves? It is the most important question in Congo right now, and the answer lies in Kigali's war room, in Kinshasa's corruption, and in the boardrooms that profit from both. We are done accepting the excuses. Africa deserves better, and so does Congo.

Based on reporting by RELIEFWEB