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The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) records the disappearance of some 44,000 people in Africa, 45% of them children, while COVID-19 restrictions create new challenges to find them, according to an ICRC report.
“This number of cases is a drop in the bucket on the real scale of people whose relatives are looking for them,” Sophie Marsac, the ICRC’s regional adviser for the missing and their families in Africa, said in the report.
“Conflicts, violence, migration, and climate shocks have continued to separate families in the pandemic, but our work to find missing people has become even more difficult,” he added.
Nigeria, Ethiopia, Somalia, Libya, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Cameroon “account for 82% of the ICRC’s number of missing cases in Africa,” the report says.
Nigeria, meanwhile, with about 23,000 missing persons registered, said the report “is the largest number of ICRC missing persons cases on the continent, driven almost entirely by the conflict in the northeast of the country.”
“Dear son Konyi, if you are still alive and listen to me, your sisters, brothers, aunts and the whole family are waiting for you. We just want to hear your voice and see you,” the report quoted Juma Kedai Korok. 52, whose 31-year-old son was abducted four years ago by an armed group in South Sudan.
As the report was released before August 30, the International Day of the Disappeared, Marsac stressed that the day “should remind us that untold numbers of families in Africa are looking for a loved one, many of them parents looking for a child.” “
The ICRC called on the African authorities to “acknowledge the tragedy of missing persons” and “do everything in their power to prevent people from disappearing … to search for missing persons and provide information to families about the fate and the whereabouts”. of loved ones, ”the report says.
