In Goma there are already too few corpse bags to store all the dead

“The situation is difficult, but now manageable. ” Steve Kisembo is medical director of the Virunga Hospital in Goma. His hospital, in the city in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, was flooded by injured last week. It is the result of the violent rise of rebels of the M23 militia, which are supported by neighboring Rwanda. The hospital has two hundred beds, but in a few days 340 people flocked in, Kisembo says. Soldiers, but also many civilians. The majority is hit by bullets.

With the help of the NGO Doctors Without Borders, which, in addition to the hospital, set tents with beds to absorb the sick, the situation is now a little more under control, according to the doctor. In those beds, sick people are also taken care of who have been sent from other hospitals to Virunga, because they too are overcrowded. According to the United Nations, the death toll as a result of the fighting that erupted last week has risen to certainly three thousand. More than three thousand others were injured.

Hospitals and their mortuaria became overwhelmed throughout the city. “They will be infections before we can all treat them,” an exhausted nurse from another small hospital told AP on Monday.

Airport closed

In the chaos of the fighting, the food and medicine resources of aid organizations were included. The fighting already had an impact on their supply. For example, the rebels now control the international airport that was also used for this. In an open letter called the UN coordinator for humanitarian aid in DRC on Tuesday to open ‘all parties’ at the airport again. “Without the evacuation of serious injuries, delivering medical stocks and managing humanitarian reinforcements is paralyzed.”

“Only a few more days and we are through our medicine stocks,” says Emmanuel Konin, who oversees four hospitals in Goma on behalf of the International Red Cross. “Foundation is cut into three, the medication that we administer in the operating room has been minimized. But we can’t be a doctor without medicines. “

Moreover, the deficits put even more pressure on the camps for internal displaced persons around Goma, the capital of the raw material-rich province of North Kivu. In 2012, the M23 rebels took over the city briefly. Three years ago the conflict flared up again. Hundreds of thousands of people fled and ended up in Kampen around and in the city.

In recent weeks, around one hundred thousand new displaced persons were added, says Raphael Mbuyi of Oxfam Novib. In a dozen Kampen, the NGO provides clean drinking water, among other things. “But we already had too few means to meet all the need,” says Mbuyi. The situation became even more acute when the fighting also made the electricity and the running water.

No power for ventilation

In the meantime, fear of disease outbreaks such as cholera and the infectious MPOX is growing, which was already around in Goma. For example, some hospitals struggle through the enormous influx of patients to comply with standards that prevent the spread of infections, it says International Red Cross. Elsewhere, patients died of ventilation or operations had to be postponed because there was no power to make the monitors and lights work.

In the meantime, the power supply has been partly restored and various neighborhoods have access to running water again. But still not all bodies of the streets have been cleared – and there are too few corpse bags To store all the dead.

Now that the fights have stopped, it also moves in the camps for displaced persons. Last weekend, care providers were surprised when one of the larger camps in northern Goma suddenly largely desertedpossibly at the insistence of the M23 rebels who want to show that it is safe to return home.

Against the French channel TV5Monde, one expressed leader of a village near Goma worry over his fled neighbors whose houses were destroyed. “Yes, it’s safe now,” he said carefully. “But people come back empty -handed and without a house to return.”

Members of the Congolese Red Cross and volunteers carry mountains in Goma. According to the United Nations, the death toll as a result of the fighting that erupted last week has risen to at least three thousand.

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