Furaha Kadakala and Neema Kasongo never had a chance to run.
On the morning of 5 March this year, armed men believed to belong to the M23-allied AFC rebel movement swept into Murangu, a Batwa village in Kalehe territory, South Kivu.
The two women were raped, then shot dead. Three children — Tabeni Mandanda, Mitume Malibuko and Maliyetu Malibuko — were killed alongside them. Four rights organisations that documented the massacre, Minority Rights Group, the Forest Peoples Programme, ERND and CEDH, called it part of "a pattern of targeted violence against Batwa in order to gain control of their land and natural resources," adding that Batwa women are "often singled out for extreme sexual violence due to superstitious beliefs".
It is a scene that has played out in these same forests before, against the same people.
Years earlier, in the village of Chombo, on the south eastern edge of Kahuzi-Biega National Park, I watched Ndongo Kaganda, a Bambuti man in his early 20s, try to placate a soldier who stood at the edge of the village pointing his machete at a pile of banana leaves.
The soldier wanted a "mule" to carry the load over the hills to an army camp. Indigenous groups here have been exploited by the region's armed groups for decades, with little improvement since the wars of the 1990s.
Kaganda sliced strips of bark from nearby trees and bound the leaves into a pack; only my presence, as an outside witness, made the soldier shoulder the load himself, muttering that the army would expect more help next time. "They are totally exploited and marginalised," said Pacifique Nukumba, who ran a local organisation trying to protect the Bambuti. "Everyone takes advantage of them."
The Bambuti — one of several Central African peoples often, and incorrectly, lumped under the colonial-era term "Pygmy" — are believed to be the original inhabitants of the equatorial forests that once stretched unbroken across the DRC. For generations, Congolese society treated them as subhuman — an attitude that left them singularly exposed when war engulfed the region.
Two decades of conflict that killed an estimated 3.8 million people never saw the Batwa take up arms, yet virtually every militia in the east used and abused them: their skills prized, their villages raided, their women assaulted. In Chombo, Feza Ndamuso, then about 25, described being abducted by Mai-Mai fighters and "used" for two days before she escaped, only to be thrown out by her husband when she returned home, accused of having become "the wife of the Mai-Mai".
That war never really ended.
Murangu lies in Kalehe, still a front line: as this piece went to press, government and M23 forces were clashing in villages across the district. M23 fights under a political umbrella, the Alliance Fleuve Congo (AFC), widely reported to receive Rwandan backing, which Kigali denies.
Rwanda cites the continued presence, in these same forests, of the FDLR — successor to the Interahamwe militia that fled here after the 1994 genocide and has preyed on civilians and funded itself through mineral smuggling ever since.
The Batwa were never party to any of it, yet have always been caught between it, hunted for their forest knowledge by one armed group and punished for it by the next. A Washington-brokered accord in June 2025 and a Doha framework last November raised hopes the cycle might finally break; both have stalled repeatedly but negotiators were still meeting in Geneva this August, with fresh talks due next month. Will diplomacy outlast the fighting in Kalehe? That is, for now, the open question.
The New Lines Institute notes that Batwa villages are "frequently caught in fighting among multiple armed factions" and that because so few hold formal citizenship documents, they have almost no legal recourse when violence is done to them.
Losing legal recognition, it argues, is not incidental to the killing — it is what makes the killing possible.
War is one front on which the Batwa are besieged; conservation is the other and it runs through Chombo's own doorstep. Kahuzi-Biega National Park, whose edge the village abuts, was carved out of Batwa ancestral land in the 1970s and the eviction that created it has generated grievance ever since.
In 2024 the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights ruled the expulsion had violated Batwa rights, ordering a public apology, compensation, collective land titles inside the park and the removal of non-Batwa settlers.
"While we were hunting, state agents invaded our community and burned down our homes, leaving us homeless and destitute," said Joséphine M'Cibalida, a Batwa woman who gave testimony to the case.
"We lost everything, including our dignity as human beings. This ruling brings us hope that we will receive justice for the harm done to us."
Samuel Ade Ndasi of Minority Rights Group called it "a huge win for the climate justice movement," that "negates the idea that solving the climate crisis requires displacing indigenous communities". The ruling is not binding and Kinshasa has published no timeline — but Batwa families who returned to the park in 2018 remain there still, a foothold campaigners hope will be harder to reverse the longer it holds.
Virunga National Park tells a harsher version of the same story. In 2022, rangers from the Congolese Institute for Nature Conservation forcibly cleared Batwa and Bambuti families who had returned there; they now scrape by in a makeshift settlement called Muja, cut off from the forest medicine that once treated their children.
"We don't know any other life than the forest," said community leader Bonane Muhindo. "We ask the authorities to let us live peacefully in our forest because it is our home."
Similar abuses, including beatings and torture by park guards funded in part by international conservation groups, have been documented across the wider Congo Basin.
On paper, the Congolese state has begun to move. In 2022, after 14 years of advocacy, President Félix Tshisékedi signed a landmark law protecting indigenous peoples' rights, the first of its kind in Central Africa.
Last April the government launched a 118-member framework to implement it, bringing officials and Batwa representatives to the same table for the first time.
"Having the text is one thing — enjoying the rights it contains is another," said Rubin Rashidi, an MP who has championed Batwa causes. "The proper implementation of the law will take longer, perhaps a year or more."
Discrimination, campaigners say, remains "a widespread reality" regardless — but the framework itself, however slow, is more than existed a decade ago.
Back in Chombo, little has structurally changed for the 120 families who live there: no basic amenities, the nearest water two miles' walk away, many farming land they do not own in exchange for a sliver of the harvest. "When we ask for the food," one elderly woman said, "they say we are thieves and chase us away".
None of this is inevitable. The 2024 ruling exists; the 2022 law exists; a peace process, however fragile, is still meeting in Geneva next month. What has been missing is enforcement, funding and attention — and the small, stubborn organisations, like Pacifique Nukumba's, that keep insisting the Batwa be counted.
Rights organisations are calling for an independent investigation into the Kalehe killings, for conservation funders to make indigenous rights protections a condition rather than an afterthought and for MONUSCO to treat Batwa protection as a stated priority, not an incidental one.
Whether South Kivu's forests finally change for people like Ndongo Kaganda's children is not yet decided — which, after decades of being told it wasn't, is itself a kind of hope.
Clayton is a veteran journalist, now retired in the UK.