adminKinshasa — A leading Congolese surgeon who treats women sexually abused during conflict warned on Tuesday of “unbearable atrocities” being committed in the country’s east including the mutilation of babies and the disembowelling of pregnant women.
Denis Mukwege, who is the subject of an acclaimed 2015 film about his efforts to help women raped by the military and militia in the Democratic Republic of Congo, said that more than 600 people had been killed since October 2014.
“The images of these mass atrocities are unbearable: pregnant women who have been disembowelled, mutilated babies, human beings bound and butchered with knives,” he wrote in a message to AFP.
Mukwege, who is director of the Panzi Hospital that he founded in 1999 in Bukavu in the east of DRC, called for “radical change of the current system”.
He said that the “crimes and cruelties that have plagued the east of the DRC for 20 years had been reborn with a new intensity”.
The region has suffered chronic unrest for two decades fuelled by ethnic differences and claims to land, along with bids for control over valuable natural resources and rivalry between regional powers.
Meanwhile, health officials in Malawi’s border district of Mwanza have expressed concern over the growing amount of Mozambicans seeking healthcare at public facilities in the area. According to Nyasa Times, close to half of admissions at the Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre were Mozambicans, with 15 to 20 of the facility’s maternity wards being occupied by foreign nationals.
“We’re overwhelmed, we’re overstretched because when we’re doing our budgets for the hospital, we don’t include Mozambicans. But we can’t chase them away,” lamented District Health Officer Raphael Piringu.
Piringu said that although it was difficult to differentiate between Malawian residents and Mozambican nationals, the introduction of national identity documents in 2018 should help ease the burden put on the country’s public health system.
The development came amid concerns over an influx of Mozambican nationals into Malawi, with government officials claiming that strain was being put on Malawi’s already-fragile economy.
“This is an increasing pressure on the social service as these people need food and medical care. We’re working with some partners to alleviate the problems the refugees are facing, as you know they leave their country with little or nothing for their upkeep,” Mwanza District Commissioner Gift Lapozo was quoted as saying. — AFP
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