Red Cross personnel load bodies of victims of the fighting between Congolese government forces and M23 rebels in a truck in Goma, Monday, Feb. 3, 2025, as the U.N. health agency said 900 died in the fight. (Moses Sawasawa/AP)
The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights urged “all those with influence” to move quickly to end the deadly violence in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and stop it from exploding into a regional war.
In the past two weeks alone, more than 3,000 people were killed as Rwanda-backed rebels wrested control of Goma city from the Congolese army and peacekeepers deployed by the UN and the Southern African Development Community.
Thousands of people escaped from a prison in the city during the fighting and at least 165 female prisoners were raped - most of whom subsequently died in a fire, the “circumstances of which remain unclear,” Volker Türk, the head the rights agency, said at an emergency session of the commission in Geneva on Friday.
“If nothing is done, then the worst could still be yet to come for the inhabitants of the eastern part of the country, but also for people living beyond DRC’s borders,” he said. “The risk of violence escalating throughout the subregion has never been higher.”
Rwanda has denied backing the M23 group that’s now heading toward Bukavu, a second city on Lake Kivu in the mineral-rich east of the country. The Congolese army, supported by local militias and Burundian soldiers, has been unable to halt the advance.
More than 500,000 people have fled their homes since the beginning of the year, worsening an already dire humanitarian crisis in the region.
African leaders from the east and south are congregating in Tanzania from Friday to try and broker a ceasefire. Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi and his Rwandan counterpart Paul Kagame are both expected to participate.
The conflict also poses a heath risk, according to the World Health Organization. Almost all of the 143 patients in Mpox isolation units in Goma fled for safety, “making it nearly impossible to provide them with care, and increasing the risk of spread,” the agency said in a separate statement Friday.
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With assistance from Janice Kew.
