The humanitarian situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) continues to deteriorate. After two decades of almost uninterrupted conflict, with violent clashes seriously affecting several provinces, some 7 million people are now are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance. Of them, 4 million are displaced after fleeing for their lives, often leaving everything behind.
In 2016 alone, one million more people were displaced by the violence, mainly in Kasai province. Patricia Danzi, International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) director of operations for Africa, visited the area in mid-October to support the ICRC teams working on the ground. What she saw was communities and families scattered far from home and struggling to survive, villages that had been abandoned, looted and burnt to the ground, and a situation made worse by the lack of basic services, such as health care and sanitation.
After visiting a village where most of the houses had been burnt down, Patricia Danzi said: “It is a very sad scene when you see all the houses destroyed, no one left. And you can only hope that the majority of the people were unharmed, but this is unfortunately not the case. So many people also died either during the fighting, or then later during the difficult displacement in the forest.”
Some walked for miles. Many spent several months in the forest, living in extremely tough conditions, with no access to health care, food or shelter from the elements, waiting for the fighting to move on, hastily burying their dead.
Benjamin Tshibuabua has just returned to his village near the city of Kananga, after months spent in the bush. He describes his ordeal: “While we were in the bush, they looted everything. The goats… It was terrible. We spent five months in the bush. Five months. Such suffering. How we suffered! Sometimes we only ate once, twice or three times a week. The other days we went to bed hungry.”
There are still very few humanitarian organizations working on the ground here. Before the crisis, Kasai, though poor, had been calm and humanitarian efforts were obviously focused elsewhere in the country. Now we need to mobilize significant human and financial resources to meet people’s needs, the true scale of which is only gradually becoming apparent. And yet, in recent years, donors have increasingly lost interest in the DRC.
Today, millions of Congolese people need help to start over and rebuild their lives.