Peace seems inaccessible and help is lacking. In the camps for displaced people in Ituri, a torn province in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, despair feeds on the horror of the violence suffered and the feeling of abandonment.
“I had six children, three were killed with machetes by the ADF,” said Henriette Lofaku, 60, who found refuge in Komanda, 75 km from Bunia, the provincial capital.
The ADF (Allied Democratic Forces), affiliated with the Islamic State group, have been raging since the mid-1990s in the north of the neighboring province of North Kivu and have more recently extended their abuses to Ituri.
They compete there in barbarism with community militias, including the Codeco (Cooperative for the development of Congo), accused of having killed at least 15 people at the end of August in a fishing camp.
Henriette and her family lived in the village of Walense-Vokutu, on the border between the two provinces, when, one evening in April 2021, the ADF attacked. “We fled and abandoned everything… They burned everything behind us…”, continues the sixty-year-old.
Like her, Justine has tears in her eyes when she recounts the death of her sister, killed with her son while the family was on the run. “Bombs were exploding everywhere,” she recalls, sitting in front of her clay-walled shack.
The locality of Komanda, one of the terminus of those fleeing the violence, hosts around 40,000 displaced people who, according to the local humanitarian community, live with very little assistance.
“We are in a lot of pain… Under these tarpaulins, we have no medicine, no food, nothing. The authorities need to know we exist!” gets carried away Christine Dida, mother of eight children, who fled the territory of Djugu three years ago.
Bahati Letakamba, who has nine children, has also been there for three years.
“We have to make do and work in indigenous fields to live,” he says, pointing to the little cassava flour left over to feed his family.
“The situation of the displaced is really critical,” admits Komanda Serge Mahunga, of the NGO Solidarités Internationales.
In Bunia, another site installed in the city since 2019 hosts more than 14,000 people whose situation, already worrying, is further deteriorating with the continuation of attacks in many villages.
According to the United Nations, 1.7 million people are displaced in Ituri.
“This represents 40% of the population of the province. It is a truly shocking figure”, declared on August 30 Bruno Lemarquis, coordinator of UN humanitarian agencies in the DRC, after a field visit.
“This humanitarian crisis in the DRC has been going on for 25 years, it is one of the most serious, most complex and longest in the world, but also the most neglected…”, he told AFP.
Clashes between community militias claimed thousands of lives in Ituri between 1999 and 2003 and, after more than a decade of lull, resumed in 2017.
For a year, according to Mr. Lemarquis, humanitarian needs have further increased “due to new conflicts or the resurgence of others”, such as the M23 rebellion in North Kivu. Soldiers have left neighboring provinces, including Ituri, to intervene in this conflict, creating a “security vacuum into which other armed groups have engulfed themselves”.
The displaced accuse the government of doing nothing for them. The governor of the province, General Johnny Luboya N’kashama, assures the contrary, while evoking the “limited means” of the State.
Humanitarian actors for their part “do everything possible”, underlines Bruno Lemarquis. But the response plan is “for the moment funded at less than 30%”, he laments, calling on the international community to mobilize.
The DRC has more than 6 million internally displaced people, the majority of whom are concentrated in Ituri, North and South Kivu. Of the $2.25 billion needed to help them, only $747 million was available as of August 16, according to the UN Humanitarian Coordination Office.
09/04/2023 12:02:29 – Bunia (DR Congo) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
