The M23 armed rebel group in the DRC executed 131 people last week “as part of a campaign of murders, rapes, kidnappings and looting against two villages,” the UN reported on Dec. 8.
“The humanitarian crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo is unprecedented: six million people are now displaced, homeless and without food,” Mukwege said.
Another rebel group aligned with the Islamic State, the Allied Democratic Forces, attacked a Catholic mission hospital in the country’s northeast province of North Kivu in October and killed six patients and Catholic Sister Marie-Sylvie Kavuke Vakatsuraki.
Mukwege responded to the news of the attack in North Kivu “with horror” and called on all Congolese doctors to demonstrate peacefully on the day of the funeral of the Catholic nun.
“The time has come to consolidate the rule of law and prevent the recurrence of the mass atrocities that have bereaved every Congolese family for more than a quarter of a century,” he said.
Amid the violence perpetrated by armed rebel groups in DRC’s eastern region, Mukwege founded a hospital in 2008 in his hometown of Bukavu, where he and his staff have treated the injuries of thousands of women and girls who were victims of rape and sexual violence.
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