Demokratische Republik Kongo

Democratic Republic of Congo declared a new Ebola epidemic on Monday in the western city of Mbandaka, more than 1,000 km (620 miles) away from an ongoing outbreak of the same deadly virus in the east.

Jean Bamanisa Saidi, the governor of Ituri Province in northeastern Congo, tells DW he has called for international troops to the troubled region. Thousands have been killed by militia in the past three years.

Widespread and systematic killings, beheadings, rape and other barbaric acts by militia mostly from the ethnic Lendu community in northeastern Congo may constitute crimes against humanity and war crimes, the United Nations said on Wednesday.

Dozens of civilians have been killed in eastern DR Congo in the latest of a string of massacres by the notorious ADF militia, a UN source and a local NGO told AFP on Wednesday. The Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) have killed hundreds in the region since late 2019, in apparent retaliation for a military offensive against their bases.

Police in the Democratic Republic of the Congo killed at least 55 people in April as part of a coordinated crackdown against a separatist religious group, according to a new Human Rights Watch (HRW) report released Tuesday.

In the last two months, the U.N. Refugee Agency reports more than 200,000 people have been forced to flee surging violence between the Lendu and Hema groups in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo’s Ituri Province. The U.N. Refugee Agency says 5 million people have been uprooted in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, including 1.2 million in Ituri province.

[…] 139 civil society organizations based in the Democratic Republic of Congo have called for a complete ceasefire across the whole of the country, which has to contend with the novel coronavirus and Ebola virus in stable regions such as Kinshasa, as well as in provinces affected by conflict, including Ituri, Nord-Kivu and Sud-Kivu.

[…] The new leader of the Cooperative for the Development of the Congo (CODECO), Ngabu Ngawi Olivier, called on the army to enact a ceasefire to allow talks with the government, a potential breakthrough for President Felix Tshisekedi who has promised to bring an end to decades of unrest in the region.

When hundreds of militiamen arrived in January at a government-run demobilisation camp in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s northeastern province of Ituri, there was a flicker of hope that more than two years of conflict might be abating. But a few weeks later, the fighters … deserted the camp … . Now violence is peaking again in a province where more than 1.2 million people have already been displaced by a two-year conflict that has divided communities and revived memories of past wars that rank among Congo’s bloodiest.

The Coronavirus outbreak has adversely affected efforts by the international community to neutralise negative forces in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo.