Jewish World Watch (JWW) supports multiple programs in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), including educational initiatives, mass information campaigns around gender-based violence, peace and leadership trainings, and skills development to help war-affected communities move from mere surviving to thriving. At one point, when the situation on the ground remained relatively calm, JWW internally deliberated whether Congo should qualify as a mass atrocity situation and how a change in conflict status might affect our programming there. We ultimately decided that supporting post-conflict work is as essential to sustainable peace and the prevention of future violence as any other work we do.
Unfortunately, we no longer have to justify our engagement in the DRC because the situation there has once again become a full-blown emergency. The conflict in the DRC is a perfect example of one that even while changing locations and key players, it keeps manifesting in different forms, often involving cross-border regional dynamics. The one constant is that innocent civilians—particularly women and children—are primary targets of government forces and armed militants vying for power in a corrupt and ungoverned state.
Several dire security situations have come together in a perfect storm: the lead up to the December presidential, legislative and municipal elections; the Ebola outbreak and the violent attacks in Beni; and the destabilization of the Kasai region.
Election Woes
As I’ve reported before, Congo’s upcoming election has been ill-fated from the start, with widespread political violence as well as reports of President Kabila purposefully orchestrating attacks by armed groups on civilians in order perpetuate a climate of severe insecurity in order to, ultimately, sabotage the elections.
A new report by UK-based Freedom From Torture details how military, police, and intelligence services continue to routinely torture political and rights activists in detention, including by gang rape, choking, and electric shock.
Since 2015, when protests erupted against President Kabila’s attempts to extend his presidency beyond the constitutionally permitted two-term limit, Human Rights Watch has documented arbitrary arrests of nearly 2,000 political opposition leaders and pro-democracy activists. As the elections scheduled for Dec. 23 approach, these abusive tactics are at a high risk of substantially intensifying.
Beyond the political violence, the run-up to the elections is a complete and utter mess. Although Kabila is personally not running, his hand-picked candidate, Emmanual Ramazani Shadary, former interior minister, has been accused of crimes against humanity by the European Union, which is in the process of renewing sanctions against him. Shadary is also languishing in the polls and is projected to receive only 16 percent of votes, according to a poll released by the Congo Research Group at New York University.
His poor performance poses a real threat to the Congolese people, since Kabila tends to lash out against civilian populations when his plans for unequivocal control of Congo begin to unravel. Kabila has rejected any international assistance in setting up or monitoring the upcoming elections. He has barred major would-be contenders Jean-Pierre Bemba and Moise Katumbi from running. He has remained committed to using electronic voting machines, which the UN has warned are much more vulnerable to tampering than traditional paper ballots. And, many have attributed the violent flare-ups peppering the entire country to Kabila’s strategy of maintaining a state of chaos so that either the election will not happen, or people will be so focused on their own survival that they will not go to the polls.
The Congo Research Group’s poll also showed that 64 percent of people do not trust the electoral commission to conduct a free and fair election. Just last week, the army handed over 150 trucks and a dozen aircraft for use by the electoral commission. Photos of the transfer look like a country preparing for war. This militarization of the election process seems guaranteed to result in election-related violence.
Things were looking up last Sunday, Nov. 11, when two leading opposition parties agreed to support a single presidential candidate, thereby increasing the opposition’s chances of beating Kabila’s choice Shadary. The common pick was Martin Fayulu Madidi. Our field representative in the DRC reports that Madidi, while not very well known, represents a solid choice because his hands are relatively clean compared to many other politicians. Unfortunately, this optimism was short-lived. On Monday morning, Congo’s two leading opposition parties withdrew from their pact to support Madidi as their joint contender after protesters supporting another opposition candidate named Felix Tshisekedi set tires ablaze in the capital, Kinshasa. The move marks a serious setback for opposition efforts to unify before the election.
Violence and Ebola in Beni
While the non-functioning government is consumes with proclamations of its commitment to free and fair elections, the situation in the North Kivu area of Beni gets worse by the day.
Just this past weekend, according to Agence France-Presse, armed men entered Beni in the night, killed five people, and looted the shops and homes. During a separate attack in another Beni neighborhood, a woman was killed by machete, and five people, including four children, were kidnapped.
These fresh attacks come on the heels of a bloody massacre in Beni on Oct. 21, when 11 people were hacked to death and 15 others abducted. Angry locals filled the streets in protest, torching the post office, destroying the town hall, and throwing stones at vehicles belonging to health workers fighting the deadly Ebola virus concurrently gripping the province. This particular Ebola outbreak, which began on Aug. 1, has become the worst in Congo’s history, complicated by the omnipresent violence in the region, which has made containment and treatment efforts exponentially more complicated. Eventually driven off by tear gas and live ammunition fired into the air, the demonstrators were enraged by the inability of the DRC troops and UN peacekeepers to prevent yet another bloody strike on their town.
Government officials have attributed the attacks to the Allied Democratic Forces or ADF, a Ugandan Islamic rebel group based in the bush along the Congo-Uganda border. After being repelled by the Ugandan army, the ADF has set its sights on exploiting the resource-rich North Kivu region of the DRC, which is brimming with gold, tin, timber, and diamonds.
Despite numerous sources attributing the attacks to the ADF, which has terrorized the region for years and caused massive displacement, reports have circulated that Congolese troops were present among the ADF’s ranks, bolstering the theory that Kabila somehow had his hand in the violence as a means of creating a state of emergency. This has been confirmed by two JWW partner organizations with close ties to the Beni community.
Another theory shared with JWW by a Congolese partner is that these attacks are part of a systematic ethnic cleansing campaign orchestrated by Kabila and his counterpart Rwandan President Paul Kagame to rid North Kivu of the Nande people. Kabila has voiced disdain for the prosperous Nande tribe on numerous occasions. According to our source, Kabila has openly said, “I detest the Banande [Nandes]; they think that they are the strongest people [in Congo] because of their business. I am able to make them become poor.” In his recent trip to the Beni region, Kabila allegedly warned, “if you want to see this conflict end, you must accept to live with other people.” He was referring to the Nandes’ control of the resource-rich and fertile land of Northeastern Congo, which the tribe, known for its success in agriculture and trade, has populated for generations. On the evening of the day Kabila left Beni, 24 people were slaughtered less than 3 miles from where he spoke.
More research is needed to understand the complex dynamics in play in North Kivu. As with most things in Congo, control of natural resources likely plays a big part in the unrest. Armed groups have taken the government’s complete impotence and lack of concern for its civilian populations as license to murder, rape, and pillage for their personal gain, all the while perpetuating the state of overwhelming chaos that will preclude Congo from a peaceful and legitimate transition of power.
However, if ethnic tensions and the desire to forcibly displace the Nande people are indeed part of this labyrinthine situation, these undertones must be fully explored in order to prevent even greater atrocities.
Crisis in Kasai
The Kasai region, located in southern DRC, is struggling to recover from two years of intense conflict. The Kamuina Nsapu insurgency first erupted in 2016, when the Kamuina Nsapu anti-government movement and Congolese security forces engaged in inter-communal clashes that spread far and wide, soon engulfing the entire region. The conflict escalated in 2017, with government forces perpetrating massacres and filling mass graves. There was a climate of general unrest marked by banditry, and poor harvests led to severe food insecurity and malnutrition. An estimated 5,000 people have been killed and more than 1.4 million displaced, with many fleeing to neighboring Angola.
Although the Kasai conflict was thought to have subsided after a peak in violence more than a year ago, gender-based violence continues at a staggering rate. MSF reports that between May 2017 and September 2018, they treated 2,600 victims of sexual violence in the town of Kananga alone. 80% of women reported having been raped by armed men. Of these thousands of rape victims, 162 were children under the age of 15, with 22 below the age of five. MSF believes these cases represent only a small fraction of the problem in the greater Kasai region.
As if the situation were not dismal enough, a recent influx of more than 300,000 Congolese refugees and migrant workers from Angola has aggravated an already critical humanitarian crisis. In an attempt to clamp down on what it called illegal diamond mining operations, Angola’s government ordered the expulsion of more than 360,000 Congolese nationals, forcing them to flood the neighboring Kasai region. “This new shock is compounding an already dire situation in the same area that was the epicenter of the Kasai crisis over the last couple of years,” Dan Schreiber, head of the UN’s humanitarian affairs arm in Congo, is quoted in an IRIN article. The returnees face harrowing conditions, and aid agencies already stretched to the brink are struggling to meet the basic needs of the newly swollen population. The piling of one problem on top of another in the same geographic area may prove catastrophic for the Kasai, with the risk of new conflicts heightened by competition over limited resources.
Breaking the cycle
With everything going on in this vast African nation, a change in leadership is needed now more than ever. Clearly, Kabila’s government has overstayed its welcome, perpetrating abuses against innocent civilians more often than supporting them in any way. Never in Congo’s history have free, fair, and credible elections been more necessary.
This is why international outrage over the deteriorating situation in the DRC must be sustained and amplified all the way up to December 23. Kabila and his cronies, both inside and outside of Congo, must know that we’re watching.
JWW has been communicating with our partners in the DRC on a near-daily basis to ensure we have real-time, accurate information on the various crises in Congo. And, we are developing new programming in the area to respond more rapidly to last-mile communities targeted within this milieu of unmitigated violence.
Please reach out to your members of Congress and ask them to support H.R. 6207, the Democratic Republic of the Congo Democracy and Accountability Act of 2018, a bipartisan effort spearheaded by Representatives Karen Bass (D-CA) and Christopher Smith (R-NJ). While the Senate has passed a resolution (S.Res.386), co-sponsored by Senators Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and Corey Booker (D-NJ), urging Kabila to hold credible elections, the time is ripe for legislation with more teeth. Urge your Senators to sponsor a companion bill to H.R. 6207!
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We must unpack the complicated players in Congo’s protracted violence, particularly in Northeastern DRC. We must impose expanded targeted sanctions on Kabila and his inner circle and the various businesses they run and benefit from. The UN and its peacekeeping force must insist on having a monitoring role in the elections rather than waiting for Kabila to request assistance.
We at JWW know firsthand the beauty of the Congolese people, exemplified by our longtime partner Dr. Denis Mukwege, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize for Peace Laureate. We see it in the smiles and testimonials of children benefitting from peace-infused education, who are slowly letting themselves feel hope for their future. We cannot allow for this beauty to be bulldozed by kleptocracy, corruption, and violence. It is time to give Congo back to its people.