Jan 17
Rutshuru Territory, North Kivu — In 2017 alone, more than 442,000 people were forced to leave their homes and livelihoods in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (DRC) eastern North Kivu due to clashes between militia, counter efforts to neutralize militia and atrocities against civilians.
Throughout 2017 humanitarian requirements in North Kivu grew at a rate much higher than anticipated. The province is home to more than one quarter of all of those displaced in the DRC. Moreover the security climate is considered one of the most hostile in the country, a factor that complicates access for aid agencies.
The roots of the conflicts that have plagued this region for the past two decades lie in land ownership, control of mineral resources and trading routes and the issue of what it means to be Congolese, as well as the legacy of invasions by neighbouring countries. With each year that goes by the armed groups active in the region have become more numerous and ever-more fragmented; the alliances between them are in a constant state of flux. Many of the groups spend more time preying on vulnerable civilians than fighting other armed men.
While infrastructure links the region to the DRC’s eastern neighbours of Rwanda and Uganda, getting to Kinshasa involves a two-and-a-half-hour flight, attempting the 1,600 kilometres trip overland from the capital would take weeks.
More than 130,000 other displaced Congolese have found shelter in formal camps and are receiving help. IOM, the UN Migration Agency, co-leads the Camp Coordination and Camp Management (CCCM) along with UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, and their Government counterpart the National Commission for Refugees (CNR). It currently coordinates and manages 28 displacement sites in North Kivu, but new spontaneous sites keep appearing as fresh waves of people flee and the displaced at the new spontaneous sites are not currently receiving any help. This is due in part to lack of funding.
IOM and other aid organizations have had to scale up their operations in new areas such as the Kasais and Tanganyika, while maintaining their assistance in areas of traditional need such as North Kivu.
Displaced people who have been sheltering at some of the sites here for the past several months did receive, but for a limited period of time, food, clean water, health care and other relief.
The new arrivals’ most pressing complaint is that they have no food to give their children. When these subsistence farmers had access to their land back home they were able to provide for their families; now reduced to looking for work as day labourers on other people’s land far from where they are sheltering, and with many households having lost one parent — most assumed dead — in the chaos of flight, many of them are destitute.