A month with no dial tone
Since July 3, 2026, mobile networks and internet access have been dead across Fizi Territory and the city of Baraka in South Kivu, in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The Committee to Protect Journalists reported on August 17 that the blackout had passed a month; as of today it has run 48 days (CPJ, Aug. 17, 2026). On July 8, government soldiers went further, confiscating Starlink satellite kits from Radio Communautaire Kivu, Radio Ngoma ya Amani, Radio Télévision Ngyùku, and the Community Radio Consortium — the last independent link several outlets had to the outside world — with soldiers telling them the equipment would be returned "when the war ends." DRC Communications Minister Patrick Muyaya did not respond to CPJ's request for comment, and local authorities could not be reached because, of course, they have no connectivity either.
The steelman: this is a real war zone
It would be dishonest to pretend the security situation is manufactured. Fizi sits adjacent to the Minembwe highlands, where Twirwaneho fighters allied with Rwandan forces and the M23 have been fighting Congolese army units and Wazalendo militias since early 2026. Human Rights Watch documented in April that humanitarian agencies have had "little to no access" to the Hauts Plateaux for over a year, that phone networks in Minembwe have been down for a comparable stretch, and that a community radio station in Madegu was hit in a drone strike in March (HRW, Apr. 14, 2026). Militaries fighting an active insurgency have a legitimate interest in denying adversaries the ability to coordinate ambushes, direct drones, or geolocate troop movements over commercial networks — and Starlink terminals, in particular, have shown up in conflict zones worldwide as tools combatants use for exactly that kind of coordination. A total blackout is the crudest way to deny that capability, but it is not an irrational one from a purely tactical standpoint.
Where the justification runs out
The problem is that a tactical rationale for degrading military-relevant traffic does not license an indefinite, blanket shutdown of civilian communications for an entire territory and a city — nor does it explain seizing the equipment of community radio stations, which are not combatants and whose broadcasts are precisely the kind of independent information channel a besieged population needs most. The HRW reporting that documents the security emergency also documents its civilian cost: Wazalendo militias operate more than ten checkpoints between Baraka and Fizi charging 1,000–2,000 Congolese francs per crossing, and staple goods like sugar and salt cost five times the price found elsewhere in South Kivu — a cut-off population paying a premium precisely because it cannot coordinate supply, price information, or aid delivery. A blackout that lasts 48 days and counting, with no published end date and no published legal order, is not a tactical measure. It is a policy, and policies deserve scrutiny.
That scrutiny starts with the legal basis, because there barely is one. DRC's Constitution guarantees a right to information and press freedom "under reserve of respect for public order" (DRC Constitution, Art. 24, WIPO Lex) — a broad public-order carve-out that does the same work authoritarian-adjacent shutdown laws do elsewhere: constitutionalize the right, then hollow it out in the same clause. The operative mechanism sits in the telecommunications framework law, whose Article 46 empowers the state to prohibit, wholly or partially, "for reasons of public security or territorial defense... or for any other reason," the use of telecommunications installations, for a duration the state itself determines (DRC telecom law, Art. 46, Leganet.cd). No judicial authorization. No parliamentary notification. No published sunset clause. No proportionality test distinguishing a rural radio tower from a command-and-control node. The executive branch is simultaneously the party ordering the shutdown, the party evaluating whether it remains necessary, and the party accountable for ending it — and 48 days in, it has not published so much as a rationale.
Congo is not an outlier — that's the point
Access Now's #KeepItOn coalition counted at least 313 government-ordered shutdowns across 52 countries in 2025, the worst year on record, with armed conflict the single largest trigger for the third consecutive year (Access Now, 2026). DRC's Fizi-Baraka blackout is not an aberration; it is a template being reused because the legal cost of using it is close to zero. The UN Human Rights Council has said since 2016 that measures blocking or disrupting internet access violate international human rights law, and reaffirmed it again in resolution 47/16 — but a Council resolution has no enforcement teeth against a government mid-war (UN HRC Res. 47/16).
What proportionate looks like
A pro-security, pro-innovation position does not require pretending eastern DRC is calm. It requires insisting that emergency telecom powers come with the features every other emergency power in a functioning state has: a published order citing the specific threat, a fixed and renewable time limit subject to review, a carve-out for humanitarian and press communications, and restitution — not indefinite confiscation — of equipment seized from non-combatant broadcasters. None of that would meaningfully help Twirwaneho or M23 coordinate an attack. All of it would meaningfully help the roughly 300,000 residents of Fizi Territory locate family, receive mobile-money transfers, or reach a doctor. Congo's parliament, not its army, should be the body that decides when "until the war ends" ends.