(12 Feb 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Goma, DR Congo – 11 February 2025
1. Various of the Bulengo camp for internally displaced people (IDP) as residents demolish their shelters
2. People walking with their belongings on their backs
3. SOUNDBITE (Swahili) Sibomana Safari, Bulengo camp resident:
“I don’t know if we will make it. I have children, and to my surprise we are being told to leave, and I have nothing to give the children. And others that you see here near me, we were all in the Bulengo camp, and we are all leaving without any help."
4. Resident Vincent Bauma dismantling his shelter in the Lushagala camp
5. SOUNDBITE (Swahili) Vincent Bauma, Lushagala IDP camp resident:
"The authorities asked us to destroy our small houses and go home, but we don’t know how we’re going to get home. There has been no peace yet. We still can’t go to the fields and farm. We don’t have peace yet. We might run to the mines that have been left behind, we really don’t know what to do. Even at home, there’s no peace, but we are asked to return there. We don’t know what to do."
6. Woman taking apart her shelter
7. Resident Kwimana Sifa taking apart her shelter
8. SOUNDBITE (Swahili) Kwimana Sifa, Bulengo IDP camp resident:
"All of us, what we want is peace and nothing else. Our homes have been destroyed by bombs and we have nowhere to go. We are suffering. It is better to leave us here. Although we don’t have any food, at least we have shelter here."
9. People sitting on the back of a truck with their belongings
STORYLINE:
The sounds of hammering and the rattling of corrugated metal roofs echoed across Goma’s Bulengo camp for internally displaced people on Tuesday as residents dismantled the shelters that some of them have lived in for years.
They say that Rwanda-backed M23 rebels passed through the camp Saturday and told them they had three days to vacate the camp.
Just weeks ago, M23 took control of Goma, a strategic city in the east of the country that has long served as a refuge for those fleeing the ongoing conflict.
Camps in and around Goma hosted hundreds of thousands of displaced people, many who had fled conflict multiple times in their lives.
Sibomana Safari, who lived in the Bulengo IDP camp, walked through the camp hunched over with the weight of his belongings on his back.
“I don’t know if we will make it. I have children, and to my surprise we are being told to leave, and I have nothing to give the children,” he said.
Shortly after taking control of Goma, M23 leaders said they would reopen schools and reestablish the interrupted water supply.
As bodies killed in the fighting piled up in the streets, with Red Cross workers struggling to bury them, citizens were told to return to their daily lives.
But the fate of those in an already precarious situation remained unclear.
Before the M23 invasion of Goma, the eastern provinces of North Kivu and South Kivu were already home to more than 4 million displaced people.
Vincent Bauma lived in Goma’s Lushagala IDP camp.
He dismantled his simple shelter with only a hammer on Tuesday morning as other camp residents looked on.
“The authorities asked us to destroy our small houses and go home, but we don’t know how we’re going to get home. There has been no peace yet,” he said.
Kwimana Sifa was visibly exhausted as she took apart her shelter piece by piece.
“Our homes have been destroyed by bombs and we have nowhere to go,” she said.
“It is better to leave us here. Although we don’t have any food, at least we have shelter here,” Sifa added.
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