Democratic Republic of Congo

Congo factions still recruiting child fighters - UN
Reuters Africa 8/5/2008

KINSHASA (Reuters) - Armed groups in Congo's violence-torn east have ignored pledges made this year to stop recruiting children to fight and to free minors already in their ranks, the United Nations said on Wednesday. Dozens of rebel movements and local militias signed up to a January 23 peace accord with Congo's government meant to end a lingering decade-old conflict in North and South Kivu provinces. However, daily ceasefire violations have rocked the plan and U.N. officials say armed groups have flouted their obligations to respect human rights and stop using child soldiers. "This solemn engagement, which demanded nothing more than good will on the part of the leaders of these armed groups, is still far from being a reality," Kemal Saiki, spokesman for Congo's U.N. peacekeeping mission, MONUC, told journalists. UNICEF, the U.N. children's agency, said it had reports of continuing recruitment by local Mai Mai militia, Tutsi insurgents, and Rwandan Hutu rebels in North Kivu. "We believe recruiting is still taking place, without question," Jaya Murthy, UNICEF's spokesman for the eastern part of Democratic Republic of Congo, told Reuters ... the International Criminal Court (ICC) announced it was seeking the arrest of Congolese warlord Bosco Ntaganda for conscripting children during a bloody ethnic conflict in the district of Ituri to the north of the Kivus. Ntaganda is now the military chief of renegade General Laurent Nkunda's North Kivu-based Tutsi rebellion ... At least 43 people were killed in fighting between Nkunda loyalists and the PARECO Mai Mai faction between April 20 and 28 in three villages around 100 km (64 miles) northwest of North Kivu's provincial capital Goma, MONUC said on Wednesday. At least 16,000 villagers fled those and other clashes in the province over the same period. North and South Kivu are still charged with racial tensions rooted in Rwanda's 1994 genocide ... the U.N. estimates around 75,000 refugees have fled violence since the deal was signed ...

New fighting stops DR Congo aid
Virtue Online - West Chester,PA,USA

Renewed fighting in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo has forced the United Nations refugee agency to suspend aid to displaced people. The UNHCR said hundreds more people have fled their homes because of the latest clashes in North Kivu province. A week of clashes between the army and fighters from the FDLR of Rwandan Hutu rebels has killed 20 people after three months of relative calm, the UN says. The army says it is planning a major offensive against the FDLR ... The BBC's Arnaud Zajtman in Kinshasa says FDLR fighters attacked a camp where 1,500 people were sheltering on Thursday, forcing them to scatter ... UNHCR officials said most of the displaced people are women and children who are sheltering in public buildings. Some said their homes had been destroyed and their possessions looted, while some parents said they had lost touch with their children. The FDLR includes some of those Hutus involved in the 1994 genocide, who fled to DR Congo after Tutsis took power in Rwanda ... The displacement in the Rutshuru area, some 70km north of the provincial capital, Goma, comes three months after the signing of an accord in Goma between the government and a different armed group, led by renegade Tutsi General Laurent Nkunda. Gen Nkunda had also demanded that the FDLR be disarmed - he took up arms, saying he was protecting Congolese Tutsis from Hutu attacks ...

Villages 'discovered' in DR Congo
BBC News 18/4/2008

Hundreds of villagers are helping to map parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo where thick forest and conflict have prevented effective mapping ... Most maps are produced from satellite images taken from above, but this project is using handheld GPS units ... "In one of the sectors of the territory that the groups are mapping at the moment, there are something like 190 villages but on the official map there are about 30," Cath Long of the Rainforest Foundation which is organising the project told the BBC's Network Africa. She said millions of Congolese depend on the forest for their existence. "The real worry is that permits to cut timber, permits to extract resources will be given to external companies without recognising the fact that people are already there and already using the forest," she said ... The government has already allocated parts of the territory to 11 logging concessions ...

Militia Fears Rwandan Return

IWPR 18/4/2008

Hutu fighters in eastern Congo say they face an uncertain future in Rwanda. By Jacque Kahorha in Goma (AR No. 167, 17-Apr-08) Many of the estimated 6,000 Hutu militia fighters now in the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC, say they won’t be treated fairly if they return to Rwanda. Many of these fighters say they fled Rwanda more than ten years ago as children, yet fear they will be accused of participating in the Rwandan genocide should they go back. And although most live as renegade fighters, they say they’re better off in eastern Congo ... “Hutus are roughly treated by the leadership [of Rwanda],” said Lieutenant-Colonel Edmond Ngarambe, spokesman for the Abacunguzi, the militant wing of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, FDLR. He claims the Kigali government regards all Hutus as bearing responsibility for the Tutsi genocide ... According to a recent United Nations report, 40 per cent of the North Kivu and South Kivu provinces are controlled by the FDLR. Most Congolese want them to return to Rwanda. “The FDLR are controlling the administration, appointing and dismissing whoever they want, exploiting mines and buying weapons,” said Alexis Kanyenye, a Congolese political activist ... For much of this decade, the Abacunguzi have battled forces of Tutsi general Laurent Nkunda, who heads the National Congress for the Defense of People, CNDP, and claims that he is defending his ethnic Tutsi community against attacks by the FDLR ... “It is traumatising to see about 10,000 armed men … in a country without any control,” Nkunda told IWPR. “In other countries, when there are illegal immigrants, even if they are not armed, citizens are afraid and feel insecure. What about our country?” The regional fighting involves a number of other groups, such as the Rally for Unity and Democracy, RUD, a Hutu militia that split from the FDLR, as well as others such as the Mai-Mai in Rutshuru and South Lubero areas. Lieutenant-Colonel Michel Victor Amani, a RUD commander in Binza, about 100 km northwest of Goma, told IWPR that his group also defends ethnic Hutu. “Our guns are used to protect our relatives who are refugees in Kivu,” said Amani. “As you know, their security is always disturbed by Laurent Nkunda, the FARDC and [UN] forces. We are obliged to fight to protect them.” Congolese officials estimate that the FDLR has about 6,000 fighters in DRC, two-thirds of them from Rwanda. Rwandan officials, meanwhile, say they have a list of 6,974 Hutus who participated in the genocide and live in DRC ...

Deadly clashes in west DR Congo
BBC news 17/3/2008
At least 68 people have been killed during violence in the west of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Dozens were wounded in the clashes between the police and members of Bundu Dia Kongo, a religious and political group that has its own militia. It accuses the central government of corruption and mismanagement and is trying to establish its own authority in the west ... A UN internal report, leaked to the BBC, says that at least 68 people

Police clash with DR Congo miners
BBC news 7/3/2008
Hundreds of miners have clashed with police in the Democratic Republic of Congo's mineral-rich Katanga province. At least one miner was reportedly shot dead and 30 others injured as police tried to evict them from an old quarry. The miners were digging for copper and cobalt ore in a quarry belonging to the state mining company, Gecamines. Thousands of casual miners are afraid of losing their livelihoods as the government seeks to sell mining concessions to foreign investors. Police started evicting the miners from the quarry in Kamatanda - near the country's border with Zambia - on Thursday ... Gecamines went bankrupt in 1990, and its mines have since been invaded by thousands of self-employed diggers and artisanal miners ...

At least 22 dead as western DRC violence rages
M&G 5/3/2008
Clashes between separatists and police sent to impose order in the Democratic Republic of Congo's western Bas-Congo flared again on Tuesday, the official death toll rising to 22 after five days of violence. Police, bolstered by hundreds of reinforcements, began battling members of the ethnic-based political and religious movement Bundu dia Kongo (BDK) in the town of Luozi ... BDK's followers are campaigning for the reestablishment of the pre-colonial Kongo kingdom, which encompasses parts of present-day Angola, Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, and Gabon. Bas-Congo Governor Simon Mbatshi told journalists in the provincial capital Matadi that the number of dead had risen to 22 ... Fighting erupted late on Monday in the town of Sekebanza, 80km north of Matadi, and continued into Tuesday morning ... "The police arrived to attack the BDK. They regrouped in their chapel with rocks and machetes. It went on for a long time last night, but only lasted 10 minutes this morning," said a witness who asked not to be named. Guy Ngumbi, the chief of staff at Sekebanza's General Hospital, said doctors had treated six people with gunshot wounds since Monday, but added that the number of victims of the clashes remained unclear. "At the hospital we have not yet received any dead, but we are in contact with the population, and out in the neighbourhoods there are a lot of dead." ... Three people suspected of being witches were burned alive by BDK members last week ... In January 2007, 105 people died in a military crackdown on BDK supporters protesting alleged fraud in provincial governor polls. A UN human rights report accused authorities of using "excessive and indiscriminate lethal force" ...

DRC: Alarm over lack of care leading to 16 prison deaths
Reuters AlertNet 25/2/2008
KINSHASA, 25 February 2008 (IRIN) - Human rights activists in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have condemned the death by starvation and lack of medical care of 16 inmates in a congested prison in Mbuji-Mayi, capital of the central province of Kasai Orientale. "The state has failed in its obligations because there are laws, national and international, which require it to feed and care for prisoners," said Jean-Marie Eley Lofele of the NGO Association Internationale des Avocats de la Défense et du Reseau des Droits Humains au Congo. The deaths occurred between 1 January and 19 February and included remand prisoners ... The UN Mission in Congo (MONUC) attributed the deaths to malnutrition, starvation and lack of healthcare. "Nine of the dead had been sentenced and seven were remand prisoners," said Kemal Saiki, MONUC spokesman ... The governor of Kasai, Nogy Kasandji, acknowledged the problem of a lack of food and healthcare for prisoners in the province, saying there was no provision in the province's budget for such expenditure ... The prison was designed to accommodate 100 inmates, but now holds 398 people - 387 men and 11 women ... "Each visitor has to pay between 200 and 500 Congolese francs (36-91 US cents) to have access to his prisoner, and if he has brought any food, a guard can ask for 500 francs," said Saiki. "The prison in Mbuji-Mayi does not meet the minimum UN standards for the treatment of prisoners ... preventive detention is routinely used in both civil and military courts in DRC even for minor offences. Suspects can languish in jail for months before they are tried. "Generally, it is the rich whose cases are heard ...

Needham confident about Metorex's standing in DRC, Zambia
Mining Weekly - Garden View,South Africa
Once again proving that ‘Africa is not for sissies', South African miner, Metorex's CEO Charles Needham on Thursday explained the firm's interactions with the governments of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Zambia, where it operates copper mines, and assured investors that he felt confident about