By Ebi Kesiena
Pope Francis on wednesday urged people in Democratic Republic of Congo, where decades of armed conflicts have killed millions, to grant each other a great amnesty of the heart and called on Christians involved in battle to lay down their arms.
This is the first full day of his trip, his third to sub-Saharan Africa as Pope, the Vatican presided at an open air Mass for a crowd local authorities estimated at more than a million people on the grounds of a secondary airport in the capital Kinshasa.
Recall that Kenya’s former President Uhuru Kenyatta had on Tuesday, convened an urgent meeting due to the deteriorating security situation in eastern DR Congo, particularly in Ituri and North Kivu provinces, where serious escalation of fighting and targeted killings is reported to be taking place.
The Congolese gave Pope one of the most vibrant welcomes of his foreign trips. On his arrival on Tuesday, tens of thousands lined his motorcade route.
At the sprawling site on Wednesday his popemobile moved slowly on the runway, with hundreds of thousands of people singing and dancing on either side before he began a Mass from a large altar platform.
Many women wore dresses with his picture emblazoned on them, as is customary in many African countries to honour dignitaries, while children climbed on a disused plane for a better view.
The country’s people, the pope said in his homily, were suffering from “wounds that ache, continually infected by hatred and violence, while the medicine of justice and the balm of hope never seem to arrive”.
Pope Francis said God wanted the people to find “the courage to grant others a great amnesty of the heart”.
“What great good it does us to cleanse our hearts of anger and remorse, of every trace of resentment and hostility!” he said.
Eastern Congo has been plagued by violence connected to the long and complex fallout from the 1994 genocide in neighbouring Rwanda. Congo accuses Rwanda of backing the M23 rebel group fighting government troops in the east, however Rwanda denies these claims.
About half of Congo’s population of 90 million are Roman Catholics and in his homily, Francis addressed them as well as other Christians involved in the fighting.
“May it be a good time for all of you in this country who call yourselves Christians but engage in violence. The Lord is telling you: ‘Lay down your arms, embrace mercy,'” the pope said.
Congo has some of the world’s richest deposits of diamonds, gold and other precious metals, but its wealth has stoked conflict between government troops, militias and foreign invaders, as well as driving exploitation and abuses.
The pope will meet victims of violence from the eastern part of Congo later on Wednesday. Thursday will be his last full day in Congo, before he departs on Friday for neighbouring South Sudan, another country grappling with conflict and hunger, on Friday morning.
