Friends of the Congo

� EBOLA IN THE CONGO: What They're Not Telling You
The WHO Director Writes. Kenya Refuses. Tshisekedi Stays Silent.

As of May 29, 2026 — more than 1,000 suspected Ebola cases. Over 246 suspected dead. No approved vaccine. No approved treatment. And the President of the Democratic Republic of Congo has not addressed his people.

This is Congo Unfiltered. And today we are going unfiltered on all of it.

In this episode:
▸ The 17th Ebola outbreak in DRC history — what makes the Bundibugyo strain different, why it went undetected for weeks, and why standard Ebola tests couldn't catch it
▸ WHO Director-General Tedros arrives in Kinshasa and publishes a rare personal letter to the Congolese people — signed "Paluku." We read it carefully. We praise what deserves praise. We challenge what demands to be challenged.
▸ The Trump administration tried to build a 50-bed Ebola quarantine facility in Kenya — for Americans only — while routing treatment to Europe. Kenya's doctors called it what it was: a containment colony. A Kenyan court blocked it. Today. On the day it was supposed to open.
▸ Félix Tshisekedi has the precedent, the platform, and the political capital to lead this response. He has done it before. The question is why he isn't doing it now — and what his silence communicates to the people of Ituri.

"If it is too dangerous for America, it is too dangerous for Kenya."
— Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Union, May 2026

The virus is real. The silence is political. The accountability is ours to demand.

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� Congo Unfiltered is a political analysis show produced by Friends of the Congo
Host: Gaëtan-Dauphin Nzowo | Free Congo Campaign Coordinator
Website: friendsofthecongo.org
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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Cold Open — The Numbers
02:00 The Outbreak: Bundibugyo, Ituri & Why This Is Different
10:00 The Tedros Letter — Reading It Carefully
20:00 Kenya Says No — The Quarantine Facility Story
31:00 The Silence of Félix Tshisekedi
41:00 Why Seventeen? The Structural Argument
44:00 Close
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Join us and listen to one of our frontline journalists, Akilimali as he updates us on the Ebola outbreak in DR Congo.

Part 2 of 2 — The Allied Democratic Forces Series.
Part 1 aired May 16, 2026, with Kate Hixon, Advocacy Director for Africa, Amnesty International.
In March 2020, the U.S. State Department announced that the Allied Democratic Forces — a Ugandan-origin armed group operating in eastern Congo for two decades — would henceforth be called ISIS-DRC. A new name. A new legal category. A new policy regime.
Months later, the UN Group of Experts on the DRC found no conclusive evidence of Islamic State command, control, or financial support of the ADF.
The designation is still in place.
Tonight, professor and investigative journalist Helen Epstein joins Congo Unfiltered to examine who authored that name, who profits from it, and what it has cost the Congolese people. We go through the documented record on the ADF's origins under Jamil Mukulu and its transformation under Musa Baluku. We examine the 2015 Mavivi ambush — in which two Kinyarwanda-speaking former officers, one with documented ties to Rwanda's army, were killed while participating in an attack attributed solely to the ADF. We discuss General Muhindo Akili Mundos — the Congolese army's former local commander, named by both the UN Group of Experts and the Congo Research Group in connection with the organization of some of the Beni massacres. We discuss Father Vincent Machozi — the Nande chief and priest who began naming Congolese army officers loyal to Rwanda, and was killed at his parish in 2016. And we examine Bridgeway Capital Management — a Texas-based hedge fund whose philanthropic arm has moved from documenting atrocities in central Africa to pushing for U.S. military intervention as the solution to them.
We close on Ituri. Where 177 people are dead and 750 suspected cases of Ebola have been reported this week — in the same province, on the same land, among the same displaced communities this series has documented. Where treatment tents were burned in Rwampara on May 21st by a community that has every historical reason to distrust the international system arriving to help them. And where the WHO Director-General, who flew personally to Tenerife to oversee the evacuation of a cruise ship carrying three hantavirus deaths, has written no personal letter.
The contrast is not incidental. The contrast is the argument.

Join us for African Liberation Day in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo