For
Immediate Release: December 5, 2004
D.R. Congo: New Strategies Needed
to End Military Impunity, Foreign Arms Transfers and Sexual Violence amidst
Rising Terrorism in Eastern DRC
Written
by keith harmon snow for SurvivorŐs Rights International
Annapolis,
MD — 05 December 2004 — Survivor's Rights International calls on
the international community, the United Nations and the U.N. Security Council
to immediately define and implement new strategies that will insure effective
and meaningful change in key areas that continue to negatively impact large
segments of the population of D.R. Congo (DRC) both regionally and nationally.
These areas include impunity, foreign arms transfers, a national epidemic of
sexual violence, and demobilization of (especially) child soldiers.
Militias
continue to destabilize the Ituri region of Eastern DRC and numerous sources,
including MONUC administrators, now privately confer that the MONUC contingent
in Bunia has no control over escalating violence. Similarly, the Kivu provinces
have continued to suffer from widespread insecurity. (The Rwandan military
invasion of eastern DRC on 29 November 2004 will be addressed in a subsequent
SRI press release.)
Research,
interviews and observations in eastern DRC in November 2004 indicate that the
Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC), the Front for National Integration (FNI),
the Armed Forces for the Congolese People (FAPC) and other militias continue to
operate with impunity in eastern DRC. The illicit trade in natural resources
appears to continue to be a defining factor in regional affairs.
Militias
(e.g. UPC) continue to inflame ethnic tensions, reportedly extorting a weekly
war tax from local people, committing atrocities against uncooperative citizens
and anyone perceived to be supporting rivals. SRI has received credible reports
that militias have recently executed child soldiers who left their respective
military (militia) camps seeking disarmament, demobilization and reintegration
(DDR). Militias have abducted reintegrated ex-child soldiers, and brutalized
the families and looted the homes of reintegrated ex-child soldiers to send a
message to the civilian population to deter the DDR process. The DDR process in
the region has reportedly failed, notwithstanding substantial financial input
from international donors.
Given
rising insecurity over the past month, with assassinations, nightly shootings,
and the killing of the Administrative Chief of Bunia's Mudzipella Quarter, the
population in Bunia increasingly sees MONUC as a hostile and aggressive force
of foreign military occupation serving an untransparent mission.
Local
sources interviewed by SRI staff working in eastern DRC indicate that arms
shipments continue to arrive in DRC in contravention of the U.N. arms embargo.
International visitors and military personnel in the region have unofficially
substantiated these reports. Weapons are reportedly being shipped to various
DRC militias from Uganda and Rwanda, reportedly with international backing.
Weapons are believed to arrive via the support of local Congolese government
officials and commercial businessmen allied with Rwandan and Ugandan military
elements, and across the unregulated Lake Albert frontier. The Sudan People's
Liberation Army reportedly continues to plunder destabilize the DRC frontier
with south Sudan.
SRI calls
on the Security Council and the United Nations Observer Mission in Congo
(MONUC), and the governments of Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda to immediately
delineate a strategy to secure DRC's eastern frontier. Observers in the region
question the absence of marine patrol boats or other surface craft on Lake
Albert, noting that MONUC maintains at least four high-speed marine craft on
the Congo River, and that these MONUC marine units are operating in areas (e.g.
Mbandaka) free from the ongoing warfare that characterizes DRC's eastern
frontier. SRI has also received reports from MONUC personnel indicating that
their hands may be tied in the pursuit of confiscation of reported weapons
caches.
Impunity
for soldiers, government officials, and commercial agents remains endemic in
DRC. SRI research in isolated areas across the country indicates that
populations continue to suffer wholesale extortion, racketeering, theft, rape
and other violence by local military contingents, often out of sight and
unreported.
Sexual
violence is a national epidemic in DR Congo, involving all military factions,
both current and past military forces involved in the internal affairs of the
DRC, and it appears to be sanctioned by all levels of military command. SRI
research completed in Equateur, Orientale and North Kivu from September to
November 2004 indicates that the scale and frequency of sexual violence
committed during the successive wars (1996e2004) is unprecedented and
unquantifiable, and that it continues.
All sides
in the conflict have targeted women, girls and children of all ages. While
sexual violence in the east has received attention, sexual violence in western
DRC remains unreported, but equally horrible. SRI has collected hundreds of
names of victims (Mbandaka), some who identified attackers by name and
affiliated army (e.g. Zimbabwe, DRC, Uganda, Rwanda). Soldiers of all factions
have repeatedly raped some girls.
The
presence of hundreds of internally displaced girls and women in Mbandaka has
spawned commerce in prostitution and survival sex involving both DRC government
(FARDC) and MONUC troops. FARDC prey on female sex workers by forcing sexual
relations, raping those who refuse, and universally robbing desperate females
of their livelihood. FARDC soldiers all over continue to steal and abduct the
wives of civilians, and to abduct women and adolescent girls many of whom are
impregnated and abandoned. SRI has received a report that girls and women fled
Lisala November 28 after being raped by FARDC soldiers.
SRI calls
on the UN, MONUC and the international community to implement new strategies to
mitigate sexual violence, noting that societal effects will be long-lasting,
and that accountability for sexual violence could be easily countered given
greater international attention to gender violence in the DRC and a campaign to
end impunity and bring the perpetrators to justice. The MONUC communications
infrastructure installed nationwide in DRC (Radio Okapi) provides an excellent,
functioning tool for raising awareness of sexual violence and the growing
campaign to hold perpetrators to account through the International Criminal
Court.
Survivor's
Rights International continues to collect testimony and gather evidence of acts
of genocide and crimes against humanity committed in the Great Lakes region of
central Africa. SRI counts sexual violence amongst these crimes and supports
the immediate empowerment of the International Criminal Court to bring to
justice all perpetrators of crimes committed in the Democratic Republic of
Congo from 1996 to present. For further information, please contact Survivor's
Rights International's Interim director Adriana Mourad at: adriana_srintl@yahoo.com.