ACT for Congo gets several kinds of reports from AGIR every month. These include their program activities, photos, stories and financials. This is part of an activity report for the month of May 2023. Please check their website for more details.
The Power of the Word, A Hope, a Way for a Sustainable Peace in the DRC.
Since the beginning of the year, the war situation fueled by various clashes in the north and west of the city of Goma has changed the daily life of the inhabitants.
In January 2023 the President of the Republic, the Government and several opinion leaders multiplied their appeals to young people to join the army and defend "the fatherland". Visiting the province of North Kivu, the Minister of Higher Education even mentioned the reservists to whom the government should distribute arms to organize the resistance.
Since then it is still swarming with armed groups that have been created in the Province of North Kivu. It was once again like a legitimization of armed activism, as the legions of armed groups appeared in the years 1993, 1996, 1998,2002, 2006, 2011, 2014, and now 2023. If the new young people are called “Wazalendu": "patriots", they join the dozens of other groups called APSLS, Nyatura, FDLR, …
In Mujoga, where we operate TWA WEZA SHINDA for two years now, a framework of care for victims of the volcanic eruption and those displaced by war and insecurity. The situation has not changed. The fights this year were 18 km from this village. Several armed groups came to recruit in the village of Mujoga, Kibati wanting to strengthen their ranks. Their first target: young people.
AGIR RDC has been running a peace club in the village of Mujoga, with young people who were mostly ex-combattants or survivors of violence. For the past 18 months we have been working on education activities for peace, learning to live together… and learning innovative professions for an effective reintegration into the community in order to permanently bury the scars of war. In total 80 young people went through this program. During recruitment, no young member of the AGIR peace club DRC in Mujoga was recruited to these armed groups. To the great surprise, after evaluation, all abstained, as if to sufficiently demonstrate that the activities carried out with them and for them have had a great impact.
One of them, demobilized from his condition, gave us his testimony saying:
“When they came again, they promised to give us money and weapons. But often they come like this and we are quickly seduced. But this time, during the sessions with the facilitators of AGIR, they raised a lot of awareness and showed us how there is nothing positive to go there. Besides, now it's hard for me to be tempted to go, because I have already learned masonry and I am looking for myself small opportunities. Their dirty money can no longer seduce me”.
But all is not good news. As of March 14, one of girls from the club was taken to the bush. According to her friend, she was going to the field with women to look for wood when they met armed men who arrested them and demanded she stay with them.
Stalling, and saying they wanted to discuss, the armed men threatened these mothers. For fear of giving up their lives, they escaped. For nearly three months now, we have no news, nor have the local authorities for that matter.
Girls have often been abducted in this way and become wives or sex slaves of rebel leaders. Unfortunately, this is what some people think about her fate. She is 24 years old, and had her future in front of her… Since then, we have multiplied our efforts to find traces of her, but in vain. She had never had a taste for violence. And since then, her family and all her relatives are plunged into grief.
The other tragedy experienced by our beneficiaries is the disappearance of the secretary of the support group for displaced people in Mujoga, led every Saturday by AGIR. He has been missing since the beginning of April. His whole family and the members of the support group were of course thinking of forced recruitment into one of the popular armed groups in the region. But on the evening of June 6, 2023, the news of his death reached his relatives. His family learned that he and his friend were killed by an armed group operating in the surrounding Virunga National Park. Another tragedy in this village around Goma where the guns have not been silenced for many months.
