A war in Congo? Where’s the news? The dramatic humanitarian situation in the Eastern and North-eastern provinces

Andrea Pontiroli

Head of media relations at Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), Italy

 

A forgotten crisis

Over the years, among the most dramatic and most neglected humanitarian crises around the globe, there is always the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the humanitarian consequences for the civilian population of the conflict and the violence that have ravaged the country appallingly.

The situation is far from ameliorating, on the contrary, over the last two years, the population in the East and the Northeast of the country has suffered continuous violence from different armed groups. In 2008 a full scale war, which included many armed groups but mainly between the Congolese Army (FARDC), the rebel group of the National Congress for the People’s Defense (CNDP) and the rebel group of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), ravaged North Kivu (and partly South Kivu), displacing hundreds of thousands of people. In 2009, the full scale war in North Kivu was replaced by guerrilla warfare, this time opposing the Congolese Army, supported by the UN Mission in DRC (MONUC) and the Rwandan Army, against the FDLR in North and South Kivu. At the end of 2008, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a Ugandan rebel group, began a series of attacks in Haut-Uélé, and since then the civilian population has had to endure extreme levels of violence, caused by attacks perpetrated by the LRA that were further exacerbated by the military operations against the LRA by the Congolese, the Ugandan and the South Sudan Army; all this lead to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people. (...)

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