AFRICA/DR CONGO - Testimony of the forgotten conflict in eastern DRC: The “100 days of liberated Goma”

Kinshasa (Agenzia Fides) – “Goma, capital of the North Kivu region, two million inhabitants. An occupied city, on its knees. Stretched along the shores of Lake Kivu, caressed by the heat of the Nyiragongo volcano, its beauty and the peace of some thirty years are turning into tears of fear and death.” These are the words that highlight the dramatic testimony sent to Fides from Goma, a city in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) that fell into the hands of the M23 rebels at the end of January. For security reasons, we are publishing it in full, omitting the author's name: On January 28, after two days of intense fighting between the regular Congolese army, supported by the “Wazalendo” (patriotic militias), against the AFC (Congo River Alliance) and M23 (March 23, an invading rebel group supported by the Rwandan army), the city was once again declared “liberated.” A liberation that left a tragic toll of thousands of innocent civilians dead, many of them in their own homes, built with precarious materials, incapable of offering any shelter. Looting, rape, and abuse perpetrated by armed men from various factions have left deep scars. More than 100 days after the fighting, the wounds remain open, both on the body and in the collective memory of the population. Freedom of expression, human dignity, and the right to life and peace have been brutally violated. Today, the law of terror is imposed at gunpoint and with the blows of batons. The judicial system has collapsed. Instead of courts, detention centers have been set up that, in practice, function as places of torture. Prisons have been emptied—some 3,000 prisoners disappeared during the city's capture—and trials, when they are held, are summary and improvised, even in the open air. The night has become a nightmare for the most vulnerable neighborhoods. Armed men break into homes to rob and sexually assault. These individuals include former prisoners, former military deserters, militia members, and others, operating anonymously under the cover of darkness. Sometimes, the attackers are captured by neighbors trying to defend the victims; their bodies often appear the next morning, abandoned or even burned. Fear, anger, and the absence of justice fuel a form of mob justice that is faceless and merciless. The search for alleged members of the FDLR (Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda), accused of participating in the 1994 genocide and now hiding in the neighborhoods of Goma, often serves as a pretext for personal vendettas or ethnic clashes, exacerbating already existing tensions. Arbitrary arrests and disappearances are part of a policy of repression aimed at silencing any dissenting voice. The economic situation is equally critical. The financial system is paralyzed: banks remain closed, preventing the payment of salaries, including those of teachers in affiliated schools. Commerce is at a standstill, and the international airport, vital to the city's economic life, was bombed during the fighting and is out of service. The promises to keep alive hope for a better future—occupation propaganda comparing the supposedly more effective new "liberation" regime with the corrupt and ineffective old regime in Kinshasa—are numerous; but they fade with each passing day. Many young people, disillusioned with life or desperate with rage, volunteer to enlist in the army of the new masters and fight the regular army of the central government. Solution or illusion? Dying for the sake of dying: it's worth a try. But the struggle for life has not been broken. The population helps each other in a thousand ways. The tens of thousands of displaced people, whose camps have been dismantled by the new authorities, have found refuge in the homes of friends, relatives, or people of good will. They share the same fears, the same suffering, but also the same hopes. The number of crosses increases, sometimes even invisible, because there is no trace left of the missing. But among the black lava rocks of the Nyiragongo volcano, scattered along the neighborhood roads, flowers are sprouting. With difficulty, because the earth is still soaked with blood. They are flowers with thin stems, but fragrant and colorful: red flowers, the color of the painful tears shed every day; green flowers, of hope and resistance, so that life does not die; flowers that symbolize a new society: the new society of Congo that is being born from the ashes of war. Yes, because life is like the sun: no matter how long and stormy the night, at dawn the sun reappears. (Agenzia Fides, 14/5/2025)

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