UN human rights chief Volker Türk this week met survivors of massacres in eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) who told him they are desperate for peace.
The huge central African nation has seen years of violence in the restive but resources-rich east, which have uprooted millions of people - some 2.7 million in North Kivu alone and more than seven million nationally.
"What breaks my heart is to see a population exhausted by violence, exhausted by conflict, exhausted by the horrors of their daily life", Mr. Türk told journalists on Thursday in the capital Kinshasa.
"They need to have a future. They need to see a future. And we all need to work towards that."
Mr. Türk noted that although the DRC "is one of the richest countries in the world" because of its immense natural resources, "this wealth is unfortunately not available to the population because there is violence".
Over 25 million people need humanitarian help in the DRC and UN humanitarians have warned that epidemics are rampant - particularly cholera, with 50,000 suspected cases and 470 deaths in 2023, the worst since 2017.
Measles cases have more than doubled too, to over 320,000, with deaths tripling to over 6,000 last year.
