WHEN you ask Congolese activist Kambale Musavuli “What about Congo,” the great forgotten genocide of our time, while the world’s attention is directed almost exclusively toward Gaza, he stops you right there.

“It’s frustrating to me to hear that,” he says, “because in my whole advocacy, the people who have helped me the most have been the Palestinians. What about Congo? What about Sudan? I say, what about human rights?”

For Musavuli and others confronting the ongoing genocide in his home country of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the parallels between the atrocities there and what is happening in Gaza are marked.

As in Gaza, the perpetrator of the genocide in the Congo is a country, Rwanda, whose people endured their own genocide in 1994, as the Jewish people did under Nazi occupation in Europe, some of who eventually emigrated to Israel.

As in Gaza, the genocide in the Congo is sustained by the political, military and financial support of the US, whose allies — Israel in Gaza, and Rwanda and Uganda in the DRC — are the ones responsible for carrying out genocide.

“The Congolese are saying the nation that had genocide is committing genocide in the Congo,” said Musavuli, speaking on one of the weekly webinars hosted by Doctors Against Genocide (DAG), a US-based group of medical practitioners founded by two US-Palestinians, which focuses on Gaza but advocates for an end to genocide across the world.

“In the mass consciousness of the world, who have read the story, it is hard for them to actually believe that a country that has had genocide is also committing genocide,” Musavuli said.

The genocide in the Congo began long before the current turmoil and is rooted in its colonialist history. “We have been screaming justice since 1885,” said Musavuli.

“When the African continent was carved up and given to European countries, they took the Congo, a country the size of Western Europe, and they gave this land to King Leopold for the extraction of resources, principally rubber,” Musavuli said, referring to the reign of terror that ensued under the Belgian monarchy and beyond. “Back then, up to 10 to 15 million Congolese died, between 1885 to about 1908. And there was complete silence in the world.”

After the rush for rubber came the demand for uranium to fuel the atomic age. At least 80 per cent of the uranium contained in the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima came from a single mine in the Congo at Shinkolobwe. Today, the rush is on for cobalt, copper and lithium to sustain our computers, mobile phones and batteries.

The death toll from the present-day genocide in the Congo, which began in 1996, could well have reached the levels of barbarity seen during Belgian control. Today’s official tally is six million dead, but the actual number is likely far higher.

“The last mortality study in the Congo was released in 2008 by the International Rescue Committee,” Musavuli said on the webinar. “They did a study from 1998 to 2007, and 5.4 million Congolese have died, half of them being children under the age of five and at the rate of 25,000 people dying every month.”

Since 2008, however, no-one has been counting Congo’s dead. “So scientifically, if you say 10 million people have died, the first thing they’ll ask you is what is your source?”

That undercount is something else that connects the genocides in the Congo and Gaza. The official Gaza fatality figures, produced by the Gaza Health Ministry, almost certainly undercount the true toll. The Lancet medical journal published a peer-reviewed study in January 2025, analysing figures from October 7 2023, to June 30 2024 that estimated the official death toll was being undercounted by approximately 41 per cent.

A June 2025 journal article in the Lancet confirmed that “the number of reported deaths is likely an underestimate,” citing the challenges faced given the massive destruction of infrastructure.

“The Ministry has had to augment its usual reporting, based on people dying in its hospitals or brought in dead, with information from reliable media sources and first responders,” the Lancet authors wrote. “This change has inevitably degraded the detailed data recorded previously.”

Many bodies are buried under rubble, and people are unaccounted for or simply uncounted. And as Israel’s bloody occupation turns ever more brutal and its annihilation campaign continues, soon, who in Gaza will be left to do the counting?

To assess both the toll on human life due to war crimes in the Congo and who was responsible, the UN initiated a mapping exercise there in June 2008, looking at violations of human rights and international humanitarian law committed in the DRC between March 1993 and June 2003. The UN released the report in 2010.

“The report concludes that the majority of the crimes documented qualify as crimes against humanity and war crimes,” reported Human Rights Watch at the time of the report’s release.

“With reference to one particular series of events between 1996 and 1997, the report raises the question of whether certain crimes committed by the Rwandan army and its Congolese ally, the Alliance des forces democratiques pour la liberation du Congo-Zaire (AFDL) rebel group, against Rwandan Hutu refugees and Congolese Hutu citizens could be classified as crimes of genocide. The report specifies that it would be up to a competent court to make such a judgment.”

That “competent court” has never been created, despite calls for it to happen from Dr Denis Mukwege, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018 and director of the Panzi Hospital in the DRC, who has worked tirelessly to heal women, children and babies in the Congo, often the victims of brutal and multiple rapes.

“I come from one of the richest countries on the planet. Yet the people of my country are among the poorest of the world,” Mukwege said in his Nobel prize acceptance speech.

“The troubling reality is that the abundance of our natural resources — gold, coltan, cobalt and other strategic minerals — is the root cause of war, extreme violence and abject poverty.”

Mukwege called for the then already long overdue tribunal recommended by the Mapping Project, while noting that the report “explicitly names the victims, the places and the dates, but leaves the perpetrators nameless.”

The tribunal was urgently needed, he said, because “this human tragedy will continue if those responsible are not prosecuted. Only the fight against impunity can break the spiral of violence.”

Much of that violence has targeted women and children, including unspeakable horrors that Mukwege just touched on in his Nobel speech. “Babies, girls, young women, mothers, grandmothers, and also men and boys, cruelly raped, often publicly and collectively, by inserting burning plastic or sharp objects in their genitals,” he said, then added: “I’ll spare you the details.”

Who specifically is carrying out the violence is also deliberately clouded in confusion, Musavuli says. It’s why justice is the essential first step, he argues, and also a simple one, because the perpetrators escaping justice remain the same people. They simply change their names. In 1996, it was the AFDL, in 1998 the RCD, in 2009 the CNDP.

“And then the same group in 2012 became what we are calling the M23,” Musavuli said. “So when you hear M23 — and the press will tell you there are hundreds of rebel groups and will confuse you — I say it’s the same actors.”

While circumstances on the ground may be different in the Congo and Gaza, what sustains both genocides stems from the same root cause: support from the US. In a first step toward justice, that needs to end, say Congolese activists and their allies.

“Just the same way the US is supporting Israel for its crimes in Palestine, the same way the US is supporting Rwanda for its crimes in DRC,” Musavuli said.

The path forward “is not just grounded in resistance, it’s grounded in liberation,” said Friends of the Congo executive director, Maurice Carney, during a recent discussion in Washington, DC.

“And liberation means reclaiming our stories, reclaiming our land, reclaiming our resources, reclaiming our wealth, reclaiming our affairs, for ultimate sovereignty.”

That means ending the reckless plunder of Congo’s minerals, a resource worth a reported $24 trillion, that sees none of the benefits trickle down to a majority of the Congolese population, still languishing in poverty.

Among the prime predators are US billionaires, including Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, who just signed a one billion dollar deal for a share in a lithium mine there.

“Congo is the collateral damage,” Musavuli said, while it is “US allies, Rwanda and Uganda, who are now the new colonial agents on the ground causing the mayhem.” Orchestrating it all behind the scenes are the Rwandan President Paul Kagame and his military elite who are serving Western interests.

Meanwhile, beleaguered Congo, a country that has the agricultural capacity to feed all of Africa and whose lush forests serve as the world’s largest carbon sink, was described during a screening of the new film about cobalt mining there, “Mikuba,” as “a nightmare in paradise.”

Musavuli will continue to fight for justice in the Congo. But for him, that cause knows no boundaries. “Yes, of course I am from the Congo,” he said as he concluded his remarks on the DAG webinar. “But I happened to be born on planet Earth. So I am just a human being like everyone else on this call.”

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland.