More than a month after rebels captured Goma, the capital of DRC’s North Kivu province, humanitarian workers dispute the UN’s estimate that nearly 3,000 people died during the fighting.
They say evidence supporting this number simply does not exist.
Rwanda-backed M23 rebels took control of Goma in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) between 27-28 January, following a five-day offensive backed by the Rwandan army. After clashes between rebels and Congolese soldiers, along with local militia, bodies were left scattered on the city’s streets.
Weeks have since passed, yet uncertainty over the number killed remains. It is vital, however, to document what happened.
Estimates of the death toll vary widely.
On 3 February, Patrick Muyaya, the Congolese government spokesman, announced that more than 2,000 had died when the city fell.
A day later, a senior official at the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) told Radio France Internationale the number was closer to 2,900.
Bounena Sidi Mohamed, deputy head of OCHA in the country, said “at least 2,000 bodies have already been buried by local communities” and another 900 corpses were in mortuaries.
From this point, the figure of 2,900 deaths became the standard reference. Newspapers worldwide repeated it. Diplomats cited it too. Bintou Keita, head of the UN peacekeeping mission in Congo (MONUSCO), and Volker Türk, the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, both spoke of “almost 3,000 deaths” at a special meeting of the UN Human Rights Council on 7 February.
The rebels themselves seized on this number as evidence of “manipulation” by Kinshasa.
The Alliance Fleuve Congo (AFC), a political front for the M23, said on 5 February that “over 2,500” of the dead were Congolese army soldiers and pro-government militias known as wazalendo. But this claim, too, remains impossible to verify.
Aid workers in Goma quickly expressed doubts. By 4 February, none had found proof of the “2,000 community burials” reported by OCHA.
Several humanitarian officials said that just one team of around 100 Red Cross volunteers was responsible for recovering bodies in Goma.
At the time OCHA issued its statement, these volunteers had collected far fewer than 2,000 bodies.
