It’s not what you think it is. It’s not a rare earth mineral. It’s fake reports. Fake news. It sells like hot cake. Foreign NGOs are making a kill.
This is how it works. Craft a script; a predictable story. A clash erupts in North Kivu, civilians are displaced, and before the dust settles, a flood of reports appears.
Headlines in western media read like this: “M23 Rebels Accused of Killing Hutus”. Stories run in every major outlet.
They quote polished reports, dramatic, full of shaky audio, blurred photos, and scripted testimonies; to the untrained eye, it looks like truth; to those who know the terrain, it reeks of fabrication.
Human rights activists, once a moral compass, has been commodified; it is no longer a vocation; it is an industry; it’s commerce, one that thrives on producing atrocity.
Félix Tshisekedi has mastered this industry. He pays NGOs, commissions “independent researchers,” and greases journalists’ palms so the same story repeats endlessly; M23 is the villain, Rwanda the puppeteer, Kinshasa the victim.
He has found the best weapon. It’s lethal and effective than guns. Fake it until the world believes it.
Reality on the ground doesn’t matter. Reports that should protect the vulnerable instead distort it. Technology has made the deception effortless; AI generates charred huts, trembling “survivor” audio, and scripted testimonies that look authentic; the material is unleashed online, amplified through blogs and newsrooms, packaged as “independent journalism”; bought, polished, and sold as outrage.
Meanwhile, the real victims are erased; on the hills of Masisi, in the valleys of Uvira, in the forests of Itombwe, it is the Banyamulenge who are hunted; villages torched, thousands massacred, millions scattered into exile.
FARDC has killed thousands of civilians in the last decade; FDLR militias, Wazalendo groups, thousands more; Burundian forces, hundreds. And two weeks ago in Ituri, dozens of villagers were slaughtered in one night; raw footage shows bodies strewn across fields, homes ablaze, machetes beside corpses; MONUSCO piled unrecognized bodies into white body bags; a word; none; not in reports; not in headlines; not in Geneva, New York, London or Brussels.
From Minembwe, raw footage was shared by killers laughing as they set homes alight, calling out the names of the families they murdered. Human rights reports ignored it; NGOs repeated the line: M23 killing Hutus; even with killers on camera, their crimes vanished because they did not serve the script.
In Uvira a woman was hiding her baby under a blanket while militia guns roared outside; when she emerged, her entire family was gone.
A young man who fled Minembwe spent three nights in the bush eating raw cassava, watching his village burn; these are not statistics; they are lives snuffed out; stories silenced; yet the world hears only what Tshisekedi pays for.
This is for victims to know: If you want your story told in the western media or European embassies in Kinshasa, Kampala, Nairobi or Kigali, don’t say your village was burned by FARDC or Mai-Mai; say M23 did it, and they’ll fly you to Geneva. Human rights has become a weapon wielded selectively; a performance for Western audiences; a business thriving on outrage.
Reports are now commodities; outrage is currency; victims are raw material; Tshisekedi pays; NGOs deliver; journalists amplify; donors reward; killers can boast on camera; survivors can scream until their throats break; yet truth is irrelevant; it is not what happened that matters; it is who pays for the story.
Human rights in Congo is no longer about rights; it is a commodity; its a new mineral in the Kivus; it’s about money and propaganda; truth itself is now a casualty; the world applauds outrage it can buy, while real victims are quietly buried, unseen, uncounted, and unremembered.
M23 should disband all of them immediately. Kick them out and start afresh; proper accreditation and thorough scrutiny.