After Tshisekedi lost the East, he’s resorted to hamstringing its population
While DR Congo regime mouthpiece Patrick Muyaya scrambles to convince the international media that the regime “cares” about “Congolese citizens living under M23/AFC control”, the reality tells a different story.
Felix Tshisekedi’s regime, having lost all legitimacy in eastern Congo and facing a complete collapse of military control, has now launched a scorched-earth campaign against the very civilians they claim to care about.
Cut off from battlefield victories and losing the war of public opinion, Tshisekedi has turned to a strategy infamous among brutal counter-insurgency regimes: collective punishment.
The first thing the regime did was to order the closure of all financial institutions, banks, mobile money agents, and credit unions in the areas under M23 control.
The objective is to suffocate the local population economically and force them to turn against the armed Congolese resistance movement. Classic colonial-era doctrine: if you can’t kill the fish, poison the water. And in this case, the “water” is the people of eastern DRC who have long suffered under Tshisekedi’s neglect and are now being starved out for daring to live peacefully under M23 administration.
Let’s be clear: The Congolese political-military movement M23/AFC has restored basic services, reopened schools, hospitals, and ensured local security in its zones. What has the Tshisekedi regime done? They’ve punished the population. No money transfers. No banking. No trade. The intention is to create despair, to collapse local economies, to force the people to beg for the return of Tshisekedi’s corrupt chaos. It won’t work.
The decision to weaponise financial systems is a cynical tactic rooted in desperation. Tshisekedi knows he can’t beat the Congolese political-military movement M23/AFC on the battlefield. He’s been humiliated militarily, diplomatically, and morally. So now, with the help of loudmouth propagandists like Patrick Muyaya, the regime is executing a psychological war on its own people, using economic strangulation to try to dry up M23’s popular support.
But this isn’t just a political miscalculation. It’s a war crime. And history will remember that when given a choice between dialogue and dignity, Tshisekedi chose starvation of the Congolese people.
