Escalating Conflict in DRC Threatens Humanitarian Crisis as Goma Faces Food Shortage

GOMA — The ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo has reached a critical point as military confrontations between the Congolese army and Tutsi-led M23 rebels intensify, perilously disrupting the food supply chain to eastern city of Goma. Over two million residents and displaced persons grapple with the alarming shortage of food and essential resources as the clashes continue to claim territory and lives.

Since the onset of the year, the M23 rebels, accused of receiving support from Rwanda, have aggressively taken control of towns and villages surrounding Goma, inciting a mass influx of refugees into the already strained city. The Rwandan government, however, contests these allegations. Heavy artillery and shelling have inflicted significant causalities with hospitals in Goma profoundly overwhelmed by the surge of wounded civilians seeking urgent medical attention.

The humanitarian situation in the eastern Congo region, already plagued by a displacement crisis involving more than five million people across four provinces, is inching closer to a catastrophe. UN agencies and aid organizations have raised the alarm, projecting a grim forecast of exacerbated hardship should the hostilities persist.

Congo’s central government, together with UN officials and several Western nations, assert that Rwanda's clandestine intervention in support of the M23 rebels only serves to fan the flames of conflict. These actors' instrumental role, especially in extending support to ethnic Tutsi against Hutu militias linked to the 1994 Rwandan genocide, remains a subject of intense international debate and concern.

In a recent call to action by the United States, a stern appeal was made to Rwanda to remove its military forces, including surface-to-air missiles, from Congo. The presence of such arms adds to the peril faced by civilians, UN peacekeepers, humanitarian operators, and commercial aviation within the eastern region of Congo.

With the rebels pushing towards the town of Sake, merely 25 kilometers from Goma, the lifelines of food distribution are fraying. The town is crucial as it links up with Goma, and now the city is left to rely on the scarce supplies that manage to reach it by canoe via Lake Kivu. The Kituku market, perched on the edge of the lake, now stands as the central nexus distributing food into Goma—a stark illustration of how dire the situation has become.

Esperance Nyota, a vendor in the region, grimly forecasts a looming famine if the conflict remains unchecked and access to the city from neighboring farmlands continues to be obstructed. With around 135,000 displaced persons flooding out of Sake and joining the hundreds of thousands already displaced near Goma in the past year due to the conflict, distress signals over food insecurity are peaking.

The UN refugee agency warns that the unfolding violence and bombing raid implicate a severe drain on already scarce resources needed to support over 800,000 internally displaced individuals and another 2.5 million across North Kivu province ensnared in displacement.

Organizations such as the Norwegian Refugee Council have articulated that the armed groups' incursion towards Sake threatens aid systems in the eastern Congo with potentially devastating implications for an already suffering civilian populace.

Medical facilities like the Kyeshero hospital in Goma have become makeshift battleground hospitals, providing gratis treatment to victims of conflict. Here, countless come bearing the scars of warfare—shrapnel wounds, injuries from gunfire, and traumas of bombings. Survivors like 20-year-old Kasalemba Akilimali and 38-year-old motorbike taxi driver Chance Mwishuko serve as harrowing testimonies to the ruthlessness of the violence that has descended upon their lives suddenly, with many innocents caught amidst an ever-raging fire.

Chance, injured by the shelling at a residential quarter, recounts the horrors wrought from above by the M23 factions. Such accounts only underscore the urgency of the crisis gripping the Congolese province of North Kivu.