The Rt. Rev. Martin Gordon, who has served as Bishop of Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo since December 2022, has fled the see city amid renewed attacks by a rebel military group backed by neighboring Rwanda.
The bishop has taken his flight as an opportunity to urge other parties to intervene in the long-suffering nation. His five-point plea ends simply: “People in the region want only peace.”
Goma sits atop minerals that are in increasing demand in the West, which makes it a target of M23, which also calls itself the Congolese Revolutionary Army. Mining.com has reported:
Congo is the world’s top producer of tantalum and cobalt, a key component in batteries for electric vehicles and mobile phones, and is also home to significant coltan and gold deposits.
“Mineral exports from Rwanda are now over a billion dollars a year,” said Jason Stearns, a political scientist at Simon Fraser University and former UN investigator.
“That’s about double what they were two years ago. And we don’t know how much, but a fair chunk of that is from the DRC.”
Bishop Gordon traced some of the region’s conflicts in an interview with Michelle Martin of National Public Radio.
“Conflict in eastern Congo is something that we have lived with for 30 years,” he said. “But between 2012 and 2021, there was relative calm. And then the M23 took up arms again in 2021. And so our diocese covers much, much more than Goma in the north in Rutshuru and in the west in Masisi. We’ve had schools that have been destroyed by bombs. We’ve had many of our clergy at one point in the last two or three years have had to flee for their lives and hide in the forests. We’ve had roadblocks. We’ve had increasing food prices.”
He added: “There have been many fine-sounding statements from the U.N., from the European community. What we need now is action. So what the U.N. Security Council have said, what the U.S. Secretary of State has said in a phone call, both to President Tshisekedi of DRC and Kagame of Rwanda, is absolutely right: the M23 must withdraw.”
Gordon is a British citizen who serves in the DRC through the Oxford-based Church Mission Society. He arrived in the DRC in 2020. “My role, as an impartial outsider not tied to a particular people group or region, was to bring some peace to a diocese internally riven by conflict and to prepare the diocese for the election of their next bishop,” he wrote on the CMS website.
“As the time for elections neared over two years later, God gradually made it clear that the most effective way for me to continue to serve the diocese was to become their missionary bishop. I was appointed in December 2022.”
In June 2021, the Diocese of Goma was in the news as it helped relieve suffering after a volcanic eruption of Mount Nyiragongo. “The Anglican Alliance reports that development teams from the diocese are assessing the damage and working with chiefs in the villages most severely impacted by the blast to distribute food, hygiene items, and household goods,” TLC reported.
The Anglican presence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is concentrated in the region along the country’s eastern border, where Goma is the largest city. Ugandan missionary Apolo Kivebulaya began his ministry to the people on the edge of the Ituri Forest there in 1896.