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Sent: Thursday, March 04, 2004 9:46 PM
Subject: Violence Displaces Tens of Thousands in Katanga Province, DR Congo


Violence Displaces Tens of Thousands in Katanga Province, DR Congo
    
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Medecins Sans Frontieres (New York)PRESS RELEASE
March 4, 2004 
Posted to the web March 4, 2004 

Kinshasa 

After being blocked for ten days, teams from Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) have finally been able to assess areas outside of Kitenge, in the Katanga Province of northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and begin providing assistance to 9,000 people.Fighting continues north of town, though, and the area is inaccessible to humanitarian aid agencies. As the area's population is estimated at 30,000, up to 20,000 people may be fleeing the violence, unable to reach villages where assistance is available. MSF is worried that many of the people are living in extremely precarious conditions without any access to needed emergency medical care.

Since mid-January, armed groups known as the Mai Mai have targeted civilians living in and around Kitenge, with many people suffering rapes, mutilation, and massacres. More than 50 villages have been emptied and looted. Some villages have been burnt to the ground. 

The Congolese Armed Forces (FAC) have also summarily executed and looted people in the area. In Kitenge, one woman was shot dead in front of the MSF clinic as she sought help. Soldiers have harassed people in the nearby village of Sohe Gare every night for the past two weeks, leading some of the displaced to flee once more.



MSF has cared for more than a dozen wounded civilians, who managed to reach the health center, in the past two months. More than half of them are children. MSF is also treating 100 severely malnourished children in a therapeutic feeding center (TFC) in Kitenge.MSF has been working in Kitenge's Anuarite Health Center since 2002. Today, mobile clinics continue to work in accessible villages where displaced people are seeking refuge.




"The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth becomes the greatest enemy of the state." 

- Dr. Joseph M. Goebbels - Hitler's propaganda minister 

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