AFP, Bunia, DR Congo :
With three fingers chopped off his left hand, Father Guy-Robert Mandro bears physical witness to a resurgence of violence in DR Congo that has gone widely unnoticed in a world fixated by the coronavirus pandemic.
Since the start of the month, around 50 people have been killed in the eastern province of Ituri, 15 of them overnight Sunday alone, according to local sources.
Bloodletting in this troubled region has already claimed some 700 lives since late 2017 – a tale of trauma and sexual violence blamed on a little-known militia.
Mandro, the parish priest in Fataki, about 80 kilometres (50 miles) north of the provincial capital Bunia, said he was attacked after mass about a week ago.
“A group of young people came up to me. They hit me about the head with machetes. I protected myself and that’s how I lost three fingers,” he said.
The injured man was flown by helicopter to Bunia, where he underwent lengthy surgery. A local priest gave him a room on the bishop’s premises to convalesce, with both hands bandaged.
Valerie, a Fataki woman of 44 going by an assumed name for her safety, said she cowered beneath a parish building as the priest was assaulted.
But the young men found her. “Three of the attackers raped me, taking turns,” she told AFP.
