Pope Francis yesterday began the second day of his visit to Africa with a direct appeal to the warring groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo to put down their weapons and forgive one another.
The thumping church music, booming choir and exuberant crowd of about a million people greeting Pope Francis for an open-air Mass yesterday, in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, felt a world away from the violence ravaging the country’s east, where scores of competing armed groups are pillaging villages, plundering resources and heightening tensions with neighboring Rwanda, the New York Times reported.
But Francis, who was forced to abandon his plan to visit the east because of the spike in fighting there, tried to touch the region’s wounds by bringing some of its victims of violence to him.
“We continue to be shocked to hear of the inhumane violence that you have seen with your eyes and personally experienced,” Francis said after listening to the searing stories of survivors in a private meeting at the papal nunciature in Kinshasa.
“To you, dear inhabitants of the east,” Francis continued, “I want to say: I am close to you. Your tears are my tears; your pain is my pain. To every family that grieves or is displaced by the burning of villages and other war crimes, to the survivors of sexual violence and to every injured child and adult, I say: I am with you.”
On his second day in Congo, part of a six-day trip that would also take him to South Sudan, Pope Francis focused on what he called a “forgotten genocide” in the Congo, seeking to bring a measure of peace to an overwhelmingly Christian country that has known little of it.
From cobalt to gold, Congo has a treasure trove of minerals that armed groups, and even neighboring countries like Uganda and Rwanda, continue to plunder and export, according to the United Nations.
Francis on Wednesday directly appealed to the warring groups to put down their weapons, and condemned “the massacres, the rapes, the destruction and occupation of villages, and the looting of fields and cattle.”
Francis told the crowds that he lamented the country’s “wounds,” describing them as being “continually infected by hatred and violence, while the medicine of justice and the balm of hope never seem to arrive.”
The pope already set an urgent, angry tone on Tuesday when he referred to the decades of horrors in Congo as an overlooked “genocide” perpetrated by generations of exploiters, plunderers and power-hungry groups who had preyed on the country’s roughly 100 million people, many of them members of his flock. “Never again violence, never again resentment, never again resignation!” Francis reiterated on Wednesday.
Sitting beside Francis in the National Palace on Tuesday, the country’s president, Félix Tshisekedi, accused the world of forgetting Congo, of plundering its natural resources and of engaging in complicity in the atrocities of the east through “inaction and silence.”
“In addition to armed groups,” he said, “foreign powers eager for the minerals in our subsoil commit cruel atrocities with the direct and cowardly support of our neighbor Rwanda, making security the first and greatest challenge for the government.”
Tshisekedi’s comments laid bare not only the rising tensions with Rwanda but also the violence in the country’s eastern provinces of North Kivu, South Kivu and Ituri that has shaken Congo, Africa’s second-largest nation.
The pope with President Félix Tshisekedi of Congo in Kinshasa on Tuesday. Francis said he sought to bring “the closeness, the affection and the consolation of the entire Catholic Church” to the country.
Around 120 armed groups operate in the three provinces, according to the Kivu Security Tracker, which documents human rights violations in the region, with many of those groups ransacking villages, killing residents with guns and machetes, and attacking medical centers.
The unrest has displaced more than 521,000 people since March, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, with many more fleeing across the border to Uganda.
Earlier, during his homily, he urged “all of you in this country who call yourselves Christians but engage in violence” to put down their guns.
