Fraught start for school year in eastern DRC where conflict causes clashes

BRANDISHING sticks, parents and children blocked the path of other parents with children trying to get to classrooms for the start of the school year. Police were deployed to prevent the angry confrontation from getting out of hand.

Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is no stranger to conflict, but this year even just going back to school has been freighted with recrimination and division.

This scene played out this week in Rutshuru territory in North Kivu province, the epicentre of clashes pitching government forces and UN peacekeepers against a militia called the M23.

The conflict has forced tens of thousands of people to flee their homes, creating a crisis that now ricochets across many sectors, especially lodging and education.

Rugabo school had been used to house displaced families during the long school break. Now that September had come, those people were under pressure to vacate the classrooms so local children could go back to school. Yet at the same time, their own children were unable to enrol for class, a double grievance that prompted the bitter protest.

“They are turfing us out of the schools so that children who live in central Rutshuru can go to class, while our children are deprived of education,” said Mapendo Ruziki, a 40-year-old displaced mother of three, who joined the protest. “What makes their children so special?” she asked.

Inside the school, the desks had been broken up to provide frames for mosquito nets for bedroom areas for displaced families.

Efforts to resume classes were put on hold as the local authorities attempted to figure out a solution.

“We are looking at ways by which schoolchildren from central Rutshuru attend class in the morning and displaced schoolchildren go in the afternoon,” said Luc Bakole Nyengeke, the territory’s military administrator.

But a big problem, he admitted, was getting displaced families to leave the schools during daytime so the classrooms could be used.

A Congolese Tutsi group, the M23, is one of scores of armed groups that roam eastern DRC, many a legacy of two wars in the region in the last decade of the 20th century. The group leapt to prominence in 2012 when it briefly captured the city of Goma before a joint Congolese-UN offensive drove it out.