Members of the M23 rebel group ride into Goma. Photo by Sylvain Liechti/UN.

On the night of October 6, 1996, fighters loyal to Paul Kagame entered Lemera Hospital in eastern Congo and used bayonets and guns to kill patients in their beds. To inflict maximum misery, the attackers shot many of the patients through the mouth. Others managed to flee into surrounding forests with IV drips still dangling in their arms, only to be chased down, caught and massacred. Three nurses barricaded themselves in their living quarters on the compound when the attack began, but the killers smashed through the doors and executed two of them on the spot. A third nurse was forced by the attackers to drive all the medical supplies to a nearby village. The nurse was then murdered in cold blood.

It just so happened that Lemera’s chief doctor, Denis Mukwege, was not on site at the time of the attack, but his photograph and white doctor’s coat hanging in his office were riddled with bullets. Earlier in the day, he had taken a Swedish engineer with an infected foot to Bukavu, further north, to be evacuated to Stockholm to avoid amputation. As they descended into the main valley in Bukavu, Rwandan troops peppered their Toyota Land Cruiser with gunfire. It was a miracle they survived and made it to their destination.

“I could not have imagined that this was only the beginning,” Dr. Mukwege said as he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018 for treating thousands of Congolese women and girls who have been raped and mutilated in a gruesome war that has grinded on for decades and left millions of people dead.

“I have come to see [Lemera] as the beginning of an era of impunity for mass atrocities, and also as a symbol of the international community’s indifference in the face of such crimes,” the doctor, who has survived numerous assassination attempts over the years, said in a separate interview.

It defies imagination that the perpetrators of the heinous acts in Lemera were never prosecuted, that the victims were never truly honoured. It is even more astounding that Kagame, whose commanders ordered the operation against the hospital, has remained untouchable to this day.

Rwanda’s leader is the godfather of a succession of rebellions that have ravaged Congo—the biggest and........

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