Geneva, this is Goma. Do you read me? Over.
Monday morning, the first messages arrive via WhatsApp:
Good morning, Claudia.
The bombs are falling again. There are gunshots everywhere around us. The M23 has taken Goma. Their troops have just marched past our house.
We are hiding under the bed.
A series of graphic videos follow: uniformed men in movement, injured bodies, bloody limbs. My friend’s children are safe (for now). They have stockpiled enough food and water (for a while). In the following days, we continue our exchange: his updates from the frontline, my (futile) words of solidarity. Then silence. Connection lost.
I turn to the news media—Congolese, Rwandan, international, each with their own accounts of this new phase of violence—but, having followed Congo closely for more than 20 years, I find little information that is actually new. Instead, just variations on repeating themes: tens of thousands displaced, scores killed, hospitals overwhelmed, clean water and food in short supply. Survival at stake.
I was already a “recovering” humanitarian when I wrote The Myth of International Protection: War and Survival in Congo. By then, I had experienced enough of the hypocrisies and denials of the aid industry to quit it, but I still held on to the belief that if only people knew more about life in eastern DRC, about the world’s implication in the daily violences survived there, that things might change. If only I could tell the story about how centuries-old violence (used to govern the extraction of rubber, copper, cobalt, etc.) has been fuelled by international consumer demands (for tires, phones, car batteries, etc.), that then—finally—we might begin to shift global systems so that Congolese people might at last know peace and justice. That Congolese people might live—at last—in dignity.
Yet here we are, in 2025, with Goma again engulfed in violence. We should be asking ourselves: What has been achieved with all of these decades of aid? Counter-factual claims that “it would be so much worse without us” mean nothing to people fleeing the fighting today. For them, the reports, the appeals, the indicators, the infographics, the meetings, and all the claims of self-justifying bureaucracies are little more than far-away distractions that have nothing at all to do with their survival today.
This is so much more than a story about Congo. We are in a moment of global reckoning, which also makes so much possible. We could do things so differently. Instead, from these safe and comfortable places of privilege, so many of us are retreating into defeat or denial.
WAKE UP!
Do you read me? We could achieve the conditions for peace and justice and dignity, for all, if only we were ready to ask ourselves the hard questions and to be truthful in our accounting. Only then would we be ready to channel the tremendous power and transformative potential of the true humanitarian heart.