Grant Leaity, UNICEF’s representative for the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), said on Tuesday that violence against children has escalated to horrifying levels in the war-torn eastern provinces. He gave the example of twin girls, only a few months old, who were recently locked into explosive-laden belts by rebels who planned to use them as suicide bombers.
The two girls were rescued from a village in North Kivu province before the bombs could be detonated, but Leaity said many other children have not been so fortunate.
“The intention was with the arrival of police or Congolese military they would trigger the explosion against the security forces,” he said at a press conference in Geneva.
The girls are being treated for extreme malnutrition. Their parents were reportedly killed by the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), an ISIS-linked Ugandan jihadist group, one of several insurgent factions fighting in the Congo.
“You would not be able to imagine what they have been through,” Leaity said mournfully.
Leaity warned of several “depraved trends” reaching crisis levels in the eastern DRC, including violence against children:
More than 2.8 million children are bearing the brunt of the humanitarian crisis in the east. I am here today to, I hope, sound the alarm. On a daily basis, children are being raped and killed. They are being abducted, recruited and used by armed groups – and we know the reports we have are only the tip of the iceberg.
Leaity said “many of the armed groups present in the eastern DRC” are recruiting children as soldiers.
“There are few worse places, if any, to be a child,” he asserted.
Pasika Bagerimana stands outside a temporary shelter she shares with others who fled fighting, in Nyiragongo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Aug. 31, 2022. Bagerimana, who lost two children to hunger, worries her remaining two children might be next. “Hunger is killing people,” she says. (Sam Mednick/AP)
UNICEF recorded over 38,000 cases of sexual and gender-based violence in North Kivu in just the first three months of 2023. About 40 percent of those atrocities were perpetrated against children.
The agency estimates that about 1.2 million children under the age of five are facing severe malnutrition. The DRC is also suffering from its worst cholera outbreak in over five years, and measles cases are on the rise.
UNICEF said the conflict in the eastern Congo has greatly exacerbated these health issues by displacing so many people, and by making it so difficult for humanitarian aid personnel to reach them through the fighting.
The number of internally displaced persons in the DRC is now over 6.1 million, with 1.5 million added since the beginning of 2023. About 800,000 of these new refugees are children.
“Many of these people are now living in camps around Goma, the provincial capital, that are generally overcrowded and overstretched, making the situation ripe for cholera transmission,” Leaity warned.
A boy runs between shelters in Bulengo displacement camp, April 02, 2023 in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo. (Hugh Kinsella Cunningham/Getty)
“There is a significant risk that case numbers will continue to rise and the disease will spread much further into communities and then on to parts of the country that have not been affected for many years,” he added, noting that the DRC’s rainy season will soon begin.
Leaity said about two thousand schools have been shut down in the eastern DRC, many of them having been “directly attacked” by insurgents. Other schools have been pressed into service as refugee shelters.
“They can be shot at or burned down and sometimes they are literally looted and destroyed, but there are far greater numbers where schools are being used by internally displaced people who have no other available options for shelter,” he said of the Congo’s schools.
A gang of armed men attacked a village in the eastern DRC province of Ituri on Thursday, killing at least 18 people and injuring a dozen more. Three of the victims were burned to ashes by the attackers. Survivors said some of the murder victims were children.
“We are deploring this situation,” said DRC Col. Jean Siro Simba Bunga, administrator of the territory where the attack occurred.
Eyewitnesses said they could not positively identify the attackers because the attack was so chaotic and terrifying.
“This attack is condemned by everyone because it was an entity where the population was gradually beginning to recover, but now this attack has once again caused massive displacement of civilians,” noted local human rights coordinator Christophe Munyanderu.