KINSHASA (Reuters) – Tens of thousands of young people began arriving at a stadium in Kinshasa early on Thursday for a rally with Pope Francis.
The Martyrs Stadium is expected to be filled to a capacity crowd of about 80,000 people in the capital of Democratic Republic of Congo, where Francis is on the penultimate day of the first stop of his two-nation African tour.
Francis is expected to continue on the theme of forgiveness and reconciliation in the country where armed conflict has killed millions of people over the past decades, left 5.7 million people internally displaced and 26 million facing severe hunger in the coming months.
On Wednesday the pope listened to harrowing accounts from victims of conflict, hearing them speak of rape, amputation, forced cannibalism and sexual slavery. He condemned the atrocities as war crimes.
Eastern Congo in particular has been plagued for decades by conflict driven in part by the struggle for control of vast mineral deposits between the government, rebels and foreign invaders, and in part by the fallout from the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
Francis set the tone for the visit on his first day, denouncing the “poison of greed” driving conflicts in Africa, saying the rich world had to realise that people were more precious than the minerals in the earth beneath them.
He leaves on Friday for neighbouring South Sudan, the world’s youngest country, which is also grappling with conflict and hunger following a civil war that killed 400,000 people.
(Reporting by Philip Pullella; Editing by Christopher Cushing)
