It is around 3 p.m. on Tuesday, February 18, when a woman's scream echoes across the parking lot of the general hospital in Bukavu, the capital of South Kivu, in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). A mother has just recognized her 23-year-old son at the morgue. Malame's body was found that very morning, shot twice, on a sidewalk in the Botte neighborhood, not far from the governorate.

Standing back, the eldest of the family, Emmanuel, watches his mother collapse on the asphalt. "My little brother went out to clear his head in a bar around 8 p.m. He was shot dead around 11 p.m.," he says. The reason for this tragedy, according to him: having worn an armband of the Alliance of Democratic Forces of Congo (AFDC), a political party chaired by Modeste Bahati Lukwebo, former president of the Senate and close to President Félix Tshisekedi.

After the entry into the city of the rebels of the March 23 Movement (M23) supported by several thousand Rwandan soldiers on Friday, the inhabitants remain worried. After Goma, the capital of North Kivu, at the end of January, Bukavu is the second large city in the East to fall into the hands of the M23.

This time, the capture of the city was accompanied by much looting, but fighting was almost non-existent. While in Goma, several days of fighting had left some 3,000 dead – including many civilians – here the soldiers of the Armed Forces of the DRC (FARDC) preferred to flee before the arrival of their enemies, as did the Burundians who came to support them – Bujumbura having deployed 10,000 soldiers on Congolese soil to confront the armed groups.

Daniel Makutano, the administrator of the Bukavu general hospital, has recorded two deaths and 44 new injuries in his facility since February 13, the date the M23 resumed its advance in the Kalehe territory, about sixty kilometers north of Bukavu. Here, five people say they are FARDC soldiers, who have been fighting the M23 since its creation in 2012. Martin, 21, prefers not to give his name for fear of sanctions. He was shot three weeks ago while fighting around Beni, in North Kivu. “If I have to die, I will die here,” says the young soldier. “But I will not obey the M23. I will not betray my country.”

"The authorities are too weak"

Others in this dormitory do not have Martin's fierce courage. Further back, an old FARDC soldier, seriously injured during the fighting in Kalehe on Thursday, confesses his fear of knowing that the M23 soldiers are in the same town as him. "If the M23 learns that I am FARDC, they will look for me and kill me. Yes, I am afraid that they will find me," whispers the fifty-year-old.

Joseph is on a stretcher a little further away, at the back of the dormitory. The 33-year-old was hit by a bullet on Saturday. “I was walking home when I came across M23 soldiers on Feu Vert Square,” the mechanic says. “I started running in the opposite direction. I remember hearing gunfire, then nothing.” A bullet pierced his chest just below the right pectoral muscle. Joseph no longer believes in his government’s help: “Today, the authorities are too weak, they can’t fight their adversaries?”

From Bukavu to Kinshasa, the capital, located 1,500 km to the west, criticism of President Tshisekedi is becoming increasingly loud in the face of his impotence. More than two years after the start of the M23 offensive, the sudden advance of the rebels and their Rwandan supporters raises questions about their final intentions. Will they go so far as to try to seize power in Kinshasa, as one of their leaders, Corneille Nangaa, claimed after the capture of Goma?

Despite its repeated calls for international sanctions, Kinshasa has not yet managed to obtain retaliatory measures at the United Nations and Brussels against the M23 and Kigali. On the diplomatic front, negotiations are at a standstill. Félix Tshisekedi's trip to a security summit in Munich on 14 February, rather than to Addis Ababa, where an African Union (AU) summit was held on 15 and 16 February, left no chance for talks to resume.