Hundreds of thousands have fled the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) ahead of rebels who have reportedly seized the strategic city of Goma in the country’s north east. The streets of the city are littered with bodies, its hospitals overflowing with wounded. This long-running and particularly brutal war has now displaced more than 4.6 million people in the eastern provinces of South and North Kivu in what is a major humanitarian crisis.
In starving Goma food stocks have been looted. More than 15 peacekeeping troops from the UN and African nations have already been killed in the most recent fighting, while demands from the UN, the African Union and the new US government for rebels to leave the city have fallen on deaf ears. The rebels are now advancing towards Bukavu, another of the DRC’s key eastern cities, according to report.
Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame insists that Congolese rebels of the M23 group, widely accused of war crimes, are there purely to safeguard fellow Tutsis from genocidal militias. He denies international complaints that there are some 4,000 Rwanda troops in the DRC backing and arming M23, that his country is systematically looting and exporting for its own benefit rare earth minerals, or that he has any intention of incorporating the region permanently into Rwanda. Few believe him.
Goma, a city of more than a million people sits on the border with Rwanda. It is a vital trading hub within reach of mining towns supplying metals and minerals in high demand such as gold, tin and coltan, a key component of mobile phones and batteries for electric vehicles. UN experts have said that significant amounts of coltan have already been illegally exported to Rwanda.
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It is vital that the UN, the African Union and the international community now moves fast to restore sanctions against Rwanda, imposed when the M23 previously briefly seized Goma. Efforts to broker talks to end the fighting, so far unsuccessful, also need to be stepped up.
