Joe ML retweetledi
Manzi didn’t understand everything. So let’s give him a lesson: There is ethnic cleansing when one implements a policy or practice (terror, for example) aimed at making a territory ethnically homogeneous by expelling, through force or intimidation, members of an ethnic, religious, or national group deemed undesirable.
However, the Human Rights Watch report published on April 14, 2026, says exactly the opposite.
The Twirwaneho — an armed group from the Banyamulenge community, allied with the M23 and Rwandan forces — blocked civilians in Minembwe, the main town in the highlands of South Kivu, to prevent them from fleeing despite the ongoing fighting.
Here is the key passage from the report:
“Sources indicated that the Twirwaneho had also blocked civilians leaving Minembwe, despite ongoing attacks in the area, in order to protect themselves from attack and to bolster their image as a ‘local defense’ group.”
HRW states that this information comes from residents of Minembwe, UN sources, and credible diplomatic sources.
This behavior clearly amounts to using civilians as human shields.
By preventing the population from leaving, the Twirwaneho are resorting to the classic “provocation” tactic: they complicate any military operation by the FARDC, the Wazalendo, and the Burundian army, which then risk hitting civilians, while at the same time positioning themselves as protectors of the local population.
Unlike the Wazalendo, who sometimes set up roadblocks to control territory and extort money (between 1,000 and 2,000 Congolese francs per passage), these practices — although harmful — do not aim to actively keep populations in combat zones to turn them into human shields, as HRW documents in Minembwe.
Following the example of the M23, the Twirwaneho also practice forced recruitment.
They threaten families and force them to provide a fighter or pay financial compensation, under threat of reprisals.
This taking of the population hostage — used both as a showcase of community proximity and as human shields — considerably aggravates the humanitarian crisis in Minembwe: humanitarian aid has been almost non-existent for over a year, food shortages are severe, the prices of basic goods have been multiplied by five, and medicines are cruelly lacking.
By stubbornly preventing civilians from fleeing, the Twirwaneho provide Kigali regime proxies with a ready-made argument to deceive international opinion by crying “genocide.”
The populations thus serve a double purpose: as human shields on the ground and as media banners, allowing the Rwanda/M23 axis to hope for political and diplomatic dividends — like the genocide of the Tutsi inside, sacrificed by Kagame in 1994, according in particular to Alan J. Kuperman.
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