The Crisis in the Congo

Jon Roberts

The most powerful thing I learnt from my Shared Planet weekend was at a workshop entitled ‘The Forgotten Crisis’. This aptly named forgotten crisis is the current situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), one of the largest and richest countries in Africa.
The workshop was given by Sarah Hughes, Director of the International Rescue Committee UK (IRC). The IRC is actively working in 25 countries, mainly in Africa and Asia, providing emergency relief, relocating refugees, and helping to rebuild millions of lives in the wake of disaster. 
They focus solely on war-torn countries and, unlike emergency aid agencies, stay on after the fighting has finished, helping people to recover their lives and rebuild their communities. They do this in six core areas; health, community-driven reconstruction, civil society development, the prevention of gender-based violence, educational support and emergency response.
The people of the DRC have been devastated by an ongoing complex war. A complex war where nearly four million people have died from war-related causes in the DRC since 1998, the largest documented death toll in a conflict since World War II. In provinces such as North Kivu there are several rebel groups in a constant struggle with government forces, displacing as many as 370,000 people in 2007 alone. They employ a series of brutal tactics, waging a war against women and girls, designed to create fear, and, unfortunately, wherever the conflict escalates, so do the accounts of violence.

“It was not uncommon to hear accounts of armed groups seizing young women from farms or water points and enslaving them and raping them for one to three months,”
“Now women in North Kivu talk more about gunmen breaking into their homes and brutally raping them in front of their families.”
North Kivu, Congo 31 Oct 2007
The IRC is aiming to change this. They aim to meet urgent humanitarian needs and to aid communities in generating ongoing solutions to the devastating problems of poverty and violence.

For more information and to give your support please go to www.ircuk.org.