During a Zoom meeting organized during his last presidential campaign, Martin Fayulu one of the opposition leaders in the Democratic Republic of Congo was confronted with a simple yet heart breaking question: “Do you have a plan to end the ethnic cleansing of Congolese Tutsis?”
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His response, cold and devoid of substance, was an admission of powerlessness. He acknowledged that it was happening… but confessed he had no solution.
How can a man who aspires to lead a country recognize the existence of such a grave crime as ethnic cleansing and yet fail to even suggest a way forward? This wasn’t just a moment of political weakness, but a moral slap to an entire community that has been abandoned for far too long.
What we saw that day was not a leader. It was an empty shell. A figure who speaks but carries no dreams, no vision, no urgency for the children massacred in Rutshuru, the women raped in Masisi, the families torn from their land for no other reason than being Tutsi.
For years, the Congolese Tutsi people have been victims of systemic persecution: dehumanization, exclusion, massacres. Entire villages are wiped off the map while Kinshasa looks the other way or worse, fuels the hatred with inflammatory speeches. Yet, when a movement like M23 rises to defend its people, to demand justice, to remind everyone that we are also children of this country, we are immediately demonized, labelled as “rebels,” “terrorists,” “Rwandans.”
But who is more of a terrorist? The one who defends a population threatened with extermination, or the one who watches the massacres and says, “I have no solution”?
M23 is no perfect. No resistance movement is. But we have a cause, a voice, a cry borne from years of marginalization. We have graves, widows, orphans to testify to our struggle. And most importantly, we have what too few Congolese politicians dare to carry: a desire to live together in a country where no child should grow up in fear because of their name or appearance.
To those who aspire to lead Congo, know this: dignity cannot be bought in a campaign. It is earned on the ground, in the face of truth, with courage. And as long as our dead do not find justice, your speeches will remain empty shells.
