The macabre toll of the recent fighting between the Congolese army and the Rwandan armed forces and their M23 auxiliaries in the city of Goma is slowly emerging. According to the World Health Organization report, as of January 31, 2025, 773 lifeless bodies have been counted and others are still strewn along the avenues in an advanced state of decomposition. In addition to these deaths, there are approximately 3,000 injured, without sufficient or effective assistance. 

This horrible human butchery adds to the statistics of more than six million men, women and children killed over three decades in these endless wars imposed on the Congolese people. 

Once again, the international community will not say that it did not know. For years, UN reports have pointed out Rwanda’s responsibility in organizing and conducting these wars, but to date, nothing significant has been done to stop these serious violations of international and humanitarian law . On the contrary, the European Union and several Western countries have maintained their cooperation with Rwanda and continue to indirectly finance, with millions of dollars, its warlike and deadly expeditions in the DR Congo as well as the plundering of its mineral resources. 

For decades and again in recent weeks, I have continued to alert and mobilize international opinion on the urgency of imposing peace in the DR Congo and in the African Great Lakes region, but in vain. Compared to the intervention of the West in the war in Ukraine, that of Congo is a neglected war and Congolese lives do not objectively have sufficient value to merit attention. 

It is the policy of double standards and two-speed humanism that we have decried and denounced on several occasions. 

And yet solutions exist to permanently stop this catastrophe. 

First of all, there is an urgent need to cut military and financial aid to Rwanda and impose economic sanctions. 

Then, the Peace, Security and Cooperation Framework Agreement for the DRC and the region, known as the Addis Ababa Framework Agreement, signed on February 24, 2013 by 11 countries (DR Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Angola, Tanzania, Zambia, South Sudan, Central African Republic) joined by Kenya and Sudan on January 31, 2014 as well as the UN, the African Union, the ICGLR, the SADC and sponsored by the European Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, Belgium and France, had already marked the path to a just and lasting peace in the African Great Lakes sub-region. It is more than urgent to implement its recommendations. 

Finally, since the exploitation of natural resources is the real crux of the matter, for weeks and right now, I have been in Europe to raise awareness among governments, international institutions, businesses and civil society organizations about the importance of the legal, peaceful and win-win supply of these resources with a view to ” Business for Peace ” which promotes the sustainable interest of the Congolese people at the same time as that of businesses that want the strategic raw materials that the Congolese subsoil abounds in. This is why, in response to and in support of the initiative of the Peace Pact of the Catholic and Protestant Churches of Congo (CENCO-ECC), I renew my call for the organization of an ” International Conference on Sustainable Peace in the DR Congo and the African Great Lakes Region “. 

I strongly condemn this new attack by Rwanda-M23 and the massacres that followed, 

I strongly condemn the complicit silence and inaction of the international community in the face of the serious violations of human rights and humanitarian rights committed in the DR Congo, 

I call on the Congolese people to unite around peace through the initiatives of CENCO-ECC and an international Conference on Peace, 

I express my compassion to the people of North Kivu and Goma in the painful ordeal they are going through, 

I extend my deepest condolences to the families of our fallen soldiers and to all those who have lost a loved one in this war, 

I express my full support to the people of South Kivu and Bukavu who live in fear, haunted by the spectre of a war that is dangerously approaching. 

I am committed to relentlessly continuing my national and international advocacy for Peace in the DR Congo and in the African Great Lakes region. 

Hold on my dear compatriots, GOD IS FOR US. 

Oslo, February 2, 2025 

Dr. Denis Mukwege