On August 10, at least 18 were killed near the city of Beni, in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) near the border with Uganda. Two months earlier, on June 7, a massacre had left 80 dead, and another one on June 13 had killed 40 people. Such attacks have become all too common in recent years.

The intense violence in this part of eastern DRC has been generally attributed to the Allied Democratic Forces, a Ugandan-origin rebel group that pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in 2019. As with previous massacres, none of the nearby military forces – including the Congolese army, invited Ugandan military or UN peacekeeping troops – intervened to stop the killing.

This inaction reflects a broader politics of agony that has turned eastern DRC into a graveyard for thousands of civilians. At its roots is the failure of the mantra of good intentions professed by a divided and distracted “international community”. So, where did it all go wrong?

For the better part of the last three decades, the DRC has topped international counts of conflict-induced internal displacement – currently peaking at nearly 7 million, according to the International Organization for Migration. Meanwhile, human rights violations by both armed groups and government forces have cascaded. More often than not, concomitant cycles of violence and displacement have gone unnoticed.

It was only with the resurgence of the March 23 Movement (M23) nearly three years ago that the conflict attracted renewed international attention. While the ensuing fighting contributed to burgeoning displacement figures, the exclusive political and media framing focusing on M23 has ignored the proliferation of armed groups causing mayhem in the region.

The government has used nationalist rhetoric to rally various militias to join the........

© Al Jazeera