DR Congo sentences 66 soldiers to death for cowardice

Sixty-six soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo have been sentenced to death for cowardice, the Daily Mail reports. The verdicts continue a practice adopted in 2024, when the country's military courts began reading out death sentences in batches for cowardice and desertion as the army lost ground in the east.

An army that cannot reliably pay or supply its soldiers can still shoot them, and a death sentence is the one item the treasury never runs short of. Whether the threat works is a separate question. The retreats have continued through the same years that produced the verdicts, and armies that punish flight with execution have tended to collect deserters rather than victories; men who expect neither wages nor rescue calculate survival the way anyone does. Cowardice, in the tribunal's reading, is a moral failure. On the front line it is more often arithmetic.

The sentences land on a state that is losing more than territory. The Ebola outbreak in the east — the fastest-spreading on record — has passed ten thousand cases with a death rate approaching half, has reached a fourth country, and has seen mobs kill health workers on suspicion of spreading the virus through toilets and rivers. The government's writ in the east now runs about as far as its disease maps.

What functions, functions at scale. The military courts convene, the verdicts are read, the batches are processed. In the same provinces where nurses are lynched and soldiers refuse the front, the court-martial is the one institution that reliably delivers.

Kinshasa has sentenced 66 men to death for not standing their ground. The ground has continued to change hands.