President Félix Tshisekedi and his regime officials have crossed every red line that should shock the conscience of the entire world. By actively backing Wazalendo militias, they are unleashing a terror machine that practices lynching, cannibalism, and genocide ideology. How long will the world turn a blind eye to this cynical support? When will the UN take action against the atrocities committed by these state-backed proxies against Banyamulenge and other Congolese Tutsi communities?
Tshisekedi’s regime has never hidden its support for the Wazalendo. The President himself has publicly embraced them. Through the Sango Ya Bomoko bulletin, Tshisekedi expressed his support for these so-called “patriotic volunteers,” affirming that they were true compatriots defending their country. And regime spokesperson Patrick Muyaya has doubled down on this endorsement. When concerns arose about Wazalendo fighters being drawn from violent, and at times UN-sactionned armed groups, Muyaya dismissed the criticism entirely.
Yet Wazalendo crimes are documented. In fact, these crimes are far worse than most people dare to imagine. In August 2024, in the Misisi area of South Kivu, Mai-Mai Wazalendo militiamen lynched a civilian, killed him, and then consumed his flesh. The reason was as simple as it is horrifying: he was Tutsi. Video evidence of the cannibalism circulated on social media, yet the world barely reacted. The M23 political spokesperson, Lawrence Kanyuka, confirmed that “dozens of lynchings and acts of cannibalism have been perpetrated in the DRC over the past two years.” These practices have become systematic. They are happening against Tutsi and Banyamulenge communities in North and South Kivu with total indifference from the very human rights organizations that claim to protect the vulnerable. Where is the outrage?
Beyond cannibalism, lynching has become a routine tool of ethnic cleansing. In February 2025, Wazalendo fighters killed a 25-year-old Munyamulenge man in Mulongwe, Uvira, after accusing him of being Rwandan. They shot him twice in the hip, and he bled to death, and his sole crime was his ethnicity.
On March 3, 2025, Wazalendo fighters attacked multiple Banyamulenge villages around Bibokoboko in Fizi territory. “They said we are not Congolese, that we are Rwandan,” a community leader told Human Rights Watch. “They said they came to Bibokoboko to ‘clean out’ the Banyamulenge.” They killed seven people and destroyed houses, health centers, and schools. This is extermination, and Tshisekedi armed the executioners.
Yet in February 2026, Muyaya met with members of the Banyamulenge community in Washington, D.C., in a pathetic attempt to show that the regime had no genocidal intention. That media-orchestrated meeting in Washington’s fine salons could not hide the reality on the ground, because even as he received them, the very militias the regime arms were slaughtering their relatives back home.
The United Nations has confirmed the scale of these crimes. Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, told the Human Rights Council that “Congolese soldiers and members of the DRC-backed Wazalendo militias have killed, raped, and looted.” The UN is actively investigating summary executions by Wazalendo members- many of which “may constitute war crimes.
” Amnesty International documented Wazalendo fighters tying a woman between two trees while six men gang-raped her. They told another victim: “Any women who come to the field, we will always rape them.” This is systematic sexual terrorism, and it has Tshisekedi’s fingerprints all over it.
Most recently, following the M23’s withdrawal from Uvira in January 2026, Wazalendo militias have prevented civilians from fleeing toward the Hauts Plateaux highlands, holding them hostage to violence. The Congolese army has deployed alongside these same militias, not to disarm them, but to enable them.
So let this be absolutely clear: Tshisekedi is an enabler of genocide ideology, cannibalism, lynching, and mass rape. His own words, and those of his spokesperson Patrick Muyaya, prove that support for Wazalendo is official state policy. The lynchings, the rapes, the acts of cannibalism documented by witnesses, the UN, and human rights organizations are the direct and intended consequences of that policy.
The world must stop listening to Tshisekedi’s speeches and start counting the bodies of the innocent including those whose flesh was consumed by the very militias Kinshasa armed. Sanctions are long overdue. And silence is no longer acceptable. It never was
ellenkampire