Congolese people forced to return to their home town from displacement camps when the M23 rebel group advanced on the city of Goma earlier this year have described scenes of devastation, with hundreds of homes destroyed by fighting and no opportunity to work or access aid.
As M23 entered Goma, a regional humanitarian hub that hosted hundreds of thousands of people displaced by previous rounds of fighting in the region, more than 100,000 people left camps around the city to return to their homes.
According to humanitarian agencies, M23 – who suspected that rival armed groups were hiding in the camps – gave people a 72-hour ultimatum to leave. M23 said it had called only for voluntary returns, arguing that territory it had taken over during its advance was now safe.
As of early February, more than 42,000 returnees were recorded in Masisi territory. That represented at least 40% of previously displaced households.
In the town of Sake, which sits at a strategically important location on a crossroads, providing good access to large population centres and which was the scene of intense fighting in early January, former residents who were forced to return found a ghost town, with houses destroyed or vandalised.
“I thought life would be easy when I got back,” said 53-year-old Furaha Pendano, who had been living in the Lushagala IDP (internally displaced persons) camp on the outskirts of Goma since February 2024.
Pendano, speaking by the side of a road just outside Sake where she was selling apples, said she and her husband had been forced to put up a tent as a shelter for them and their seven children on the site of her old home. She said they no longer had access to electricity, clean water and clean toilets.
“I had a hard time receiving humanitarian aid in the camps,” she said. “But there’s no promise here now, even though I’ve already been here for a month and a half.”
Kahindo Batachoka, 38, returned to Sake in February after spending two years at the Bulengo camp in Goma.
She found her wooden house in ruins, having been destroyed by bombing, and has set up a UNHCR-labelled tent in her compound for her five children. Her husband was killed in the fighting.
She said life had become harder since returning from the IDP camp, as she could no longer find work in nearby fields to sustain the family. “We lead an abject life,” she said.
Gaspard Bulenda recently moved back to Sake after two years in Lushagala camp. “We have no money, no houses in good condition,” the 38-year-old said. “We were dispossessed of what we had as material and financial possessions during the war. Our children no longer study.”
Batachoka Douglas, a local official, said more than 1,000 houses had been destroyed in Sake during the most recent round of fighting.
Many of those who were displaced used to make a living from farming, he said, but lack financial and material resources to help them restart work and forget the worries of war.
“Hunger is likely to affect many of the inhabitants of Sake,” he said. “They no longer have any seeds, their houses were burned down or destroyed during the fighting, and people have no means of rebuilding their homes. Many women are giving birth on the ground.”
The fighting in mineral-rich eastern DRC stretches back decades and has roots in the 1994 Rwandan genocide that targeted Tutsis.
The Rwanda-backed M23, one of dozens of armed groups fighting Congolese forces in the region, has taken control of large swathes of North and South Kivu provinces since 2021 and launched a lightning push earlier this year, capturing Goma and Bukavu, the provincial capital cities. Half a dozen ceasefires and truces have been brokered and then broken.
It says its objective is to safeguard the interests of the Congolese Tutsi and other minorities, including protecting them against Hutu rebel groups who escaped to the DRC after taking part in the genocide. The DRC, the US and other countries say Rwanda is backing M23 to exploit the region’s mineral resources. Rwanda says its forces are acting in self-defence against Congo’s army and militias hostile to Kigali.
The rebels have ignored calls for a ceasefire in recent weeks and have continued to advance south and west of Goma and Bukavu. With no letup in the fighting, Sake’s beleaguered returnees are wary that they may be forced to move again. “I fear for my future here,” said Bulenda.
