Pope, in Africa, urges an end to Congo's cycle of violence
KINSHASA, CONGO >> The thumping church music, booming choir and exuberant crowd of about 1 million people greeting Pope Francis for an open-air Mass on Wednesday in Kinshasa, capital of Congo, felt a world away from the violence ravaging the country's east, where scores of competing armed groups are pillaging villages, plundering resources and heightening tensions with neighboring Rwanda.
But Francis, who was forced to abandon his plan to visit the east because of the spike in fighting there, tried to touch the region's wounds by bringing some of its victims of violence to him.
“We continue to be shocked to hear of the inhumane violence that you have seen with your eyes and personally experienced,” Francis said after listening to the searing stories of survivors in a private meeting at the papal nunciature in Kinshasa on Wednesday.
“To you, dear inhabitants of the east,” Francis continued, “I want to say: I am close to you. Your tears are my tears; your pain is my pain. To every family that grieves or is displaced by the burning of villages and other war crimes, to the survivors of sexual violence and to every injured child and adult, I say: I am with you.”
On his second day in Congo, part of a six-day trip that will also take him to South Sudan, Pope Francis focused on that often-overlooked violence, seeking to bring a measure of peace to an overwhelmingly Christian country that has known little of it.
From cobalt to gold, Congo has a treasure trove of minerals that armed groups, and even neighboring countries like Uganda and Rwanda, continue to plunder and export, according to the United Nations.
Francis on Wednesday directly appealed to the warring groups to put down their weapons, and condemned “the massacres, the rapes, the destruction and occupation of villages, and the looting of fields and cattle.”
The pope already set an urgent, angry tone on Tuesday when he called the decades of horrors in Congo a “forgotten genocide” perpetrated by generations of exploiters, plunderers and power-hungry groups who had preyed on the country's roughly 100 million people, many of them members of his flock. “Never again violence, never again resentment, never again resignation!” Francis reiterated on Wednesday.
Sitting beside Francis in the National Palace on Tuesday, the country's president, Felix Tshisekedi, accused the world of forgetting Congo, of plundering its natural resources and of engaging in complicity in the atrocities of the east through “inaction and silence.”