Militia ‘sect’ wreaks havoc in remote DR Congo region

BUNIA: With three fingers chopped off his left hand, Father Guy-Robert Mandro bears physical witness to a resurgence of violence in DR Congo that has gone widely unnoticed in a world fixated by the coronavirus pandemic. Since the start of the month, around 50 people have been killed in the eastern province of Ituri, 15 of them overnight Sunday alone, according to local sources. Bloodletting in this troubled region has already claimed some 700 lives since late 2017 - a tale of trauma and sexual violence blamed on a littleknown militia.

Mandro, the parish priest in Fataki, about 80 kilometers north of the provincial capital Bunia, said he

was attacked after mass about a week ago. “A group of young people came up to me. They hit me about the head with machetes. I protected myself and that’s how I lost three fingers,” he said. The injured man was flown by helicopter to Bunia, where he underwent lengthy surgery. A local priest gave him a room on the bishop’s premises to convalesce, with both hands bandaged.

Rape

Valerie, a Fataki woman of 44 going by an assumed name for her safety, said she cowered beneath a parish building as the priest was assaulted. But the young men found her. “Three of the attackers raped me, taking turns,” she said. One of Bunia’s many displaced people, Valerie spoke at the headquarters of the Sofepadi, a medical non-governmental organization that “repairs women” victims of sexual violence. It is modeled on the famous Panzi clinic in Bukavu, in South Kivu province, managed by gynaecologist Denis Mukwege, the 2018 Nobel Peace laureate.

The Bunia clinic, however, is so poorly equipped that it even lacks an operating theatre. Another rape victim, Tania, 34, said she gave birth on February 16, just a week after her eldest daughter Sofia, a schoolgirl of 17. Again the names have been changed. Tania said that she and her daughter were both made pregnant during a gang rape near Bunia. The assailants beheaded her nephew in front of their eyes. “Sofia wanted to kill herself when she was told that she was pregnant,” Tania said.

The young girl recovered the strength to resume her last year in school and gave birth to a boy “whom she looks after really well”, said her mother, who has four other children. Tania does not remember the precise day of the attack, but places it in late May or early June 2019, during a long spell of violence that resumed in December 2017. In addition to more than 700 dead, thousands of people have been displaced in the region, according to the United Nations, which has condemned a potential “crime against humanity”.—AFP