CONGO-DRC – TRAUMATIC LIFE AFTER A REBEL TAKEOVER

By Caleb Kabanda and Ruth Maclean – Photographs by Guerchom Ndebo

Caleb Kabanda and Guerchom Ndebo reported from Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Ruth Maclean from Dakar, Senegal

February 1, 2025 – A commander of the 231st infantry battalion of the Congolese Army — known by its French acronym, F.A.R.D.C. — climbed down from the cabin of one of the trucks, where his seniority had earned him a comfortable spot. The captured commander, Lt. Col. John Asegi, explained that they had no choice but to surrender. M23 was taking them somewhere to give them some training, he said, adding that they would now do whatever their new masters commanded.

“If we are sent to fight the F.A.R.D.C.,” he said, “we will fight the F.A.R.D.C.”

As the M23 rebels strode around the yard preparing for the trucks’ departure, they looked more like an army with their rocket-propelled grenades, fatigues and helmets, while the Congolese soldiers looked like a tired, ragtag rebel group.

The rebels, who already control vast tracts of mineral-rich Congo, have said they plan to march to the capital, Kinshasa, nearly a thousand miles to the west, and take over the whole country.

A map of Africa highlights two countries: Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, along with two major Congolese cities, Kinshasa and Goma.

After a week of fighting, rebels backed by Rwanda have wrested almost full control over Goma, a city of two million in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

Hospitals are overflowing with the wounded, and the city morgue with the dead. Goma’s residents are beginning to emerge from their hiding places, desperately searching for water and food. And the Congolese military that was supposed to protect them has been vanquished.

On Thursday, in a yard outside Goma’s biggest stadium, rebels with the Rwanda-backed M23 militia loaded more than 1,000 soldiers they had captured into truck beds, where the men stood packed together. Most wore the uniforms they were captured in. Many of them were furious.

But the curses they spat were not directed at their captors; rather, at Felix Tshisekedi, the Congolese president, whom they accused of selling them out, and at the military commanders who had abandoned them. Their commanders, together with government officials, had left behind their vehicles, seen in videos and photographs, and boarded boats in the early hours of Monday morning as M23 arrived in the city, escaping across a moonlit lake while leaving their men to fight alone.

The rebels had already handed over to Rwanda hundreds of captured Romanian mercenaries who had been fighting alongside Congolese forces.

But the situation in Goma, a city built around black lava streams from a nearby live volcano, is far from normal.

Dead bodies lie in the streets. Stores, supermarkets, and humanitarian agencies’ warehouses have been looted. Cholera is breaking out. People with bullet wounds — those who survived — are finally managing to get to clinics for treatment, only to find a lack of medicine and of surgical staff.

And many families who were split up as they fled have yet to find each other.

Elysée Mopanda lost track of her two children in the chaos. The rebels were holding her husband, a soldier, prisoner. The events of the past week had left her family in ruins.

“I don’t know where to go,” she said.

Wounded, harrowed, hungry, thirsty or lost, many of Goma’s residents are in an extremely precarious situation.

Most vulnerable is Goma’s displaced population, which numbers in the hundreds of thousands.

For more than a year, people have fled the rebel advance through eastern Congo’s countryside and small towns, seeking refuge in and around Goma, in sprawling, unsanitary camps that are particularly dangerous for women and girls.

As M23 closed in on these camps last week, thousands of people who had been barely surviving there fled the clashes, carrying the little they had on their heads toward Goma, which would itself soon be overtaken.

Three families who fled one of the camps just outside Goma hid in an educational center, surviving on some beans and rice they were given.

Without that kindness, “I don’t know how we would have survived,” said Furaha Kabasele, a 34-year-old mother whose youngest child is only 5 months old.

WUNRN

Life in Goma After a Rebel Takeover – The New York Times

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