Congolese authorities say they have found two mass graves containing at least 171 bodies on the outskirts of Uvira, a city in eastern Congo that the M23 rebel group recently vacated. The discovery, announced Thursday by South-Kivu province governor Jean-Jacques Purusi, lands squarely in the middle of a U.S.-brokered peace process that is supposed to be winding this conflict down.
It is not winding down.
Governor Purusi told the Associated Press that the graves were located in the Kiromoni and Kavimvira neighborhoods near the Burundian border:
"At this stage, we have identified two sites: one mass grave containing approximately 30 bodies in Kiromoni, not far from the Burundian border on the Congolese side, and another in Kavimvira where 141 bodies were found."
According to Newsmax, the governor and a local civil society group allege that M23 killed the victims because they suspected them of belonging to the Congolese army or a pro-government militia. The Associated Press could not independently verify the claim.
A withdrawal that left bodies behind
M23 seized Uvira in December during a rapid offensive that, according to regional authorities, killed more than 1,500 people and displaced roughly 300,000. The rebel group later announced it would pull out of the city, describing the move as a "unilateral trust-building measure" requested by the United States to facilitate the peace process.
Trust-building measures do not typically involve mass graves.
What the withdrawal revealed is a grim pattern familiar to anyone who has watched rebel groups cycle through territory in central Africa. The fighters leave. The evidence stays. And the international community expresses concern, issues statements, and moves on to the next crisis. Yves Ramadhani, vice president of the Local Network for the Protection of Civilians, said information gathered so far indicates the victims were killed by M23 rebels. That same civil society group reported Thursday that it attempted to visit the grave sites but was prevented from doing so by the Congolese military.
That detail deserves attention. The Congolese military blocked a civilian protection group from accessing mass graves in territory the military ostensibly controls. Whether that reflects operational security concerns, an effort to manage the narrative, or something worse, it is not the behavior of a government confident in what an investigation would find.
The broader collapse
Eastern Congo has been disintegrating for years, and the numbers reflect it. More than 100 armed groups vie for control across the region. The U.N. agency for refugees estimates that more than 7 million people have been displaced by the broader humanitarian crisis. M23 itself has ballooned from hundreds of fighters in 2021 to approximately 6,500, according to the U.N.
That kind of growth does not happen in a vacuum. Congo, the United States, and U.N. experts accuse Rwanda of backing M23, a charge that gives the conflict a state-sponsored dimension the international community has been reluctant to confront with any seriousness. Both the Congolese military and M23 have been accused of extrajudicial killings and abuses by rights groups.
A deal between the Congolese and Rwandan governments, brokered by the U.S., is technically in place. Negotiations between the rebels and Congo continue. And yet fighting persists on several fronts, claiming civilian and military casualties that no one seems to be counting with any precision.
What the world keeps missing
Stories like this one barely register in American political debate, and there is a reason for that. The foreign policy establishment loves to talk about "international norms" and "rules-based order" when it serves a domestic political argument. Central Africa, where those norms are violated on an industrial scale, rarely makes the cut. There are no cable news panels. No celebrity advocacy campaigns have staying power. No sanctions regimes that anyone enforces.
The result is a region where armed groups grow tenfold in four years, where a rebel withdrawal is branded a trust-building exercise while 171 bodies decompose in shallow graves, and where a civilian protection group cannot even access the evidence because its own country's military stands in the way.
This is what happens when the world's attention is a finite resource and central Africa never outbids the competition. Diplomacy without consequences produces withdrawals without accountability. Deals get signed. Bodies get found. And the cycle resets.
One hundred and seventy-one people were buried in those graves. Someone put them there. And right now, no one with the power to act seems particularly interested in finding out who.
