Hundreds of wounded people have poured into overcrowded hospitals in Goma, a major city in eastern Congo, as fighting rages on between government forces and the Rwanda-backed rebels who seized the city of around 2 million people.
“They will get infected before we can treat them all,” said Florence Douet, an operating room nurse at Bethesda Hospital, as she attended to patients with varying degrees of injuries.
Since the start of the M23 rebels’ offensive on Goma on Jan. 26, more than 700 people have been killed and nearly 3,000 have been wounded in the city and its vicinity, officials say. Bethesda Hospital alone said it receives more than 100 new patients each day, overstretching its capacity of 250 beds.
Bethesda is one of several hospitals in Goma that we visited that has inadequate personnel and supplies. The city hosts many of the close to 6.5 million people displaced by the conflict, which is one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises.
As more people arrived at the hospitals with gunshot or shrapnel wounds, many were forced to share beds while others lay on the floor, writhing in pain as they waited for medical attention.The M23 rebels are backed by some 4,000 troops from neighboring Rwanda, according to U.N. experts, far more than in 2012, when they first captured Goma before withdrawing under international pressure. They are the most potent of the more than 100 armed groups vying for control in Congo’s mineral-rich east, which holds vast deposits critical to much of the world’s technology.
Unlike in 2012, the rebels say they now plan to march to Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, 1,000 miles (1,609 kilometers) away, describing the country as a failed state under President Félix Tshisekedi.The fighting in Congo has connections with a decadeslong ethnic conflict. M23 says it is defending ethnic Tutsis in Congo. Rwanda has claimed the Tutsis are being persecuted by Hutus and former militias responsible for the 1994 genocide of 800,000 Tutsis and others in Rwanda. Many Hutus fled to Congo after the genocide and founded the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) militia group. Rwanda said the group is “fully integrated” into the Congolese military, which denies the charges.Congo’s government has confirmed 773 deaths and 2,880 injured persons at morgues and hospitals. The toll could be higher, it said, citing fears of finding mass graves and more bodies.