The Papa will see up close starting this Tuesday the abyss of two of the most forgotten and cruel conflicts of the planet. Pope Francis will visit two nations in central Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) y South Sudan, countries devastated by violence and humanitarian crises. It will be a six-day trip in which the head of the Catholic Church plans to encounters with refugees, displacedand people in situations of poverty and extreme famine.
The trip arrives preceded by some forceful statements by Francis about the reasons behind these conflicts, which repeated from there may also be heard in other parts of the planet. The first is the condemnation against the arms industry“which is one of the most powerful,” as he said in an interview last week with an American media outlet.
The Pope’s idea on this matter is clear. “The world is obsessed with having guns. countries today instead of testing the weapon of dialogueof understanding, of negotiated, we go to the weapon of arrogance, of war, it is more at hand, ”said Francisco, in dialogue with the AP agency, in which he also criticized the looting suffered by Africa by the great powers.
hell on earth
The scenarios to which Francisco goes —after having to postpone the trip in July due to his mobility problems— are, in this sense, some of the most dramatic in the world. Both countries have ongoing conflicts. In the DRChave been reactivated clashes in the east of the country between the Army and the militias that exist in the border area with Rwanda. For this reason, Francisco has had to give up the scheduled stage in Goma.
In South Sudan, attacks on civilians by armed gangs amid the upsurge in violence in the states of Jonglei and Upper Nile (bordering Sudan and Ethiopia), have already led to hundreds of dead. For this reason, more than 20,000 people have been displaced by violence since August, according to one of the latest reports from the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
The figures on the humanitarian crisis are, in fact, staggering. In South Sudan, a country of 11 million inhabitantsthere are a total of more than 2 million internally displaced persons and more of 6 million seriously hungry (in a state of acute food insecurity, in technical language). In DRC, it has been declared a cholera epidemic in the Goma area and last year even the virus of ebola reappeared in the east of the country. Plus, with the world looking the other way, funds for humanitarian aid received by UN agencies are still insufficient.
active Catholics
But, in this scenario, the meetings that Francis has planned in Khinsasa and in Juba, the capital of the DRC and South Sudan, with the local faithful and priests, generate great expectations. The reason is that, despite everything, Catholicism is here particularly active and Catholics are around half the population in the two countriesaccording to official Church statistics.
So much so that local Catholics also participate in the most relevant debates of the companies of both countries. In addition, in the case of South Sudan, they have also participated in the negotiations in 2018 for the so-called ‘Revitalized Conflict Resolution Agreement’, a pact (in which the Association of Sant’Egidio also collaborated) that, however, it has been breached in many of its parts and that the Juba government suspended last November, supposedly due to a lack of agreement between the parties.
With this, as he usually does before his international trips, the Pope He went to the basilica on Monday of Santa María la Mayor, in Rome, to entrust his journey to the Virgin. The bet of the analysts in matters of religion is that the Pope take advantage of the occasion to launch strong messages. The unknown is whether, at the end of his trip on february 6these appeals will have reached everyone.