Over the past four months, in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), more than 170,000 people have had to flee their homes to escape the violence of armed groups, adding to the 5.5 million displaced people living in this part. of the country. The M23 rebel militia, which had been inactive for years, has resumed terrorizing the population and raising tensions between the governments of the countries of the Great Lakes region. The insurgency added to a long list of security concerns in the eastern DRC, where more than 100 armed groups have been active for years. The response of Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi was to impose martial law in the provinces of Ituri and North Kivu in May 2021, a decision that ended up further limiting the rights of citizens. But since then, no armed groups have given up their weapons and the Congolese army has not achieved any significant victories.
The book A sublime struggle/A sublime strugglepublished with the Carmignac Foundation for Reliefs editions, is the second that photojournalist Finbarr O’Reilly (winner of the Carmignac Prize in 2020) dedicates to this battered country, after the project Congo in conversation, which involved more than a dozen Congolese photographers in the period of the pandemic. In this volume in two languages, O’Reilly resumes his role as an external observer to tell, through images taken between 2020 and 2022, the precariousness of the life of people who live in constant insecurity, at the mercy of violence unleashed by both humans and forces of nature, such as the Nyiragongo volcano. In May 2021, more than 30 people died when the volcano returned to activity after 20 years, causing rivers of lava to flow over the villages around the city of Goma. Other photos show the hard work in the mines, in a land whose mineral resources do not enrich the population, but governments and foreign fixers.
The work was carried out in collaboration with the International Criminal Court (ICC), because it aims to document how civilians deal with the consequences of war crimes. For twenty years, the CPI has been working in the region to collect the testimonies of conflict survivors, their families and the people of their community. The book traces the history of some victims of violence by armed groups, to see how they coped with the trauma and tried to rebuild their lives.
The title A sublime struggle/A sublime struggle takes up a passage from the speech given at the independence of Congo in 1960 by the Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, who remained in office for a few months, until his murder in January of the following year.