Hundreds of thousands of people are crammed into miserable displacement camps around the city, hastily erected on fields of mud.
Patricia, who was displaced by conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, had a hard look in her eye.
Similar to thousands of other women and girls, armed men raped the 15-year old when she left her displacement camp, near the city of Goma, in search of food.
They are victims of a vast humanitarian crisis triggered by M23 rebels, who have captured swathes of North Kivu province since launching an offensive in late 2021.
Rwanda backs the Tutsi-led M23, according to several western countries such as the United States and France, although Kigali denies it.
Most of residents of the displacement camps fled with nothing, and despite humanitarian efforts, food remains scarce.
Patricia — whose name has been changed to protect her identity — turned up again in late September, pregnant.
Sitting in a Médecins sans Frontières tent with a scarf to hid her face while her mother speaks. “Because of hunger, I sent her to look for potatoes in our village”, then “neighbors said she had been captured, I thought she was dead…”
She said ethnic Hutu fighters had captured her. And one raped her over the course of several weeks. Patricia managed to escape one morning after pretending to fetch water.
Sexual violence has long plagued eastern DRC, where armed groups have sown chaos for 30 years.
Sandra Kavira, a Congolese social worker with the charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF), listened as Patricia’s mother told the tale.
Kavira, 28, said she’d heard hundreds of similar stories since she started working at the Rusayo camp in July.”We get 10 new cases a day, even little four-year-old girls or grandmothers over 80,” she said.
Armelle Zadi, her supervisor at MSF, recalled one bedridden woman who could no longer walk after being subjected to her third gang rape.”Her daughter had no other choice but to prostitute herself to feed the family,Women are prisoners of a cycle of misery.” Zadi said.
If stories of extreme violence are numerous, the scale of sexual assaults around Goma is also massive.
Brian Moller, an MSF emergency coordinator in Goma, said about 70 victims seek treatment at the charity’s facilities every day — or about 2,000 women and girls a month.
“These numbers represent only a part of the reality,” Moller said, explaining that they have figures only for areas where MSF works.
Charmante, 18, dandled a newborn baby on her knee, explained that a man in army uniform had raped her when she left Rusayo. She had intended to gather wood and sell it in order to feed her siblings.”When he’d finished I couldn’t walk, my friends brought me be back to camp,” said Charmante.
All the women interviewed at Rusayo said they had faced a choice, at one moment or another, between hunger and leaving the camp at the risk of rape.
Rose, 43, had walked for three days with her seven children to reach Rusayo, last November.She was alive to dangers of leaving the camp — she had been gang-raped once before in 2017 — but was forced to in June, with three female friends.”We were all raped,” she said, explaining that the attackers were four men in military fatigues.When she returned to the camp, Rose said her husband had beat her for getting raped, and then disappeared.
Clinging to her four-year-old son with tears in hear eyes, she told her story.“In the camp, it’s difficult to talk about,” she said. “But here, we see our neighbours, girls we know, and we say: oh, you too?”
AFP
