After several days of delay, panic and confusion, the burials of several hundred victims of the offensive on North Kivu's provincial capital, Goma, launched by the Rwandan-backed March 23 Movement (M23) rebellion on January 23, were finally underway.

In the cemetery of Goma's Industrial Technical Institute, there wasn't enough room, even though since Tuesday, February 4, two diggers had been digging large trenches parallel to the road to accommodate the bodies, wrapped in sacks and lying side by side. The day before, at the other end of the cemetery, a few dozen graves had been dug by hand.

The toll of the clashes has remained incomplete to date. Some "So far, 2,000 bodies have been collected from the Goma streets in recent days, and 900 bodies remain in the morgues of the Goma hospitals," said Vivian van de Perre, deputy head of the United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), on Wednesday. Humanitarian sources consider these figures to be underestimates. It is impossible to make a precise assessment: Bodies have still not been collected in certain parts of the city where access has remained difficult due to security concerns. The situation has raised the risk of a cholera epidemic, with the disease endemic in the region.

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