Congo: Mass Graves and Delayed Elections
"As of June 30, 2017, UNJHRO had identified a total of 42 mass graves in these three provinces (of Kasai), most of which would have been dug by (Congolese army) elements following clashes with presumed militia members."
UN Joint Human Rights Office report, Congo
"The discovery of yet more mass graves and the reports of continued violations and abuses highlight the horror that has been unfolding in the Kasais over the last nine months."
U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein
The UN has recorded more than 2,800 human rights violations in Congo since the beginning of the year. Photo: Aaron Ross, Reuters "It's the worst humanitarian and human rights crisis in a decade, when both sides have committed serious crimes."No fewer than eighty graves have been discovered in the Congo to the present by United Nations investigative representatives. Having discovered the presence of the graves, they await the time when they can be exhumed and perhaps clues detected through forensic science to identify the bodies. The UN representatives can do nothing about exhumation, the responsibility of the national authorities. Earlier in the year two United Nations experts who had attempted to investigate the graves were killed for their troubles.
Jose Maria Aranaz, United Nations mission in Congo, MONUSCO
As far as the government is concerned the graves hold the bodies of militia fighters. They were buried there, according to government spokespeople, by their fellow militia members. Since access to the sites by independent investigators has been refused by the government, there has been no avenue open to them to discover where the truth lies, though they suspect with good reason that the government is not to be trusted in this regard.
In Kananga, the capital of the Kasai region there is a commune, Nganza, where interviews with witnesses took place describing an entirely different situation to what the government insists is their version. Soldiers and police officers who had been ordered to search the town and clear it of militants went door-to-door in March. They looted valuables. They extorted money from residents, shooting them if enough money was not forthcoming.
According to the witnesses interviewed, the soldiers and police slaughtered newborns, the elderly and those with disabilities. They were killed in their homes. Over 500 civilians are among those thought to have been killed in Nganza in a three-day period. A military official paid a group of men to bury the bodies in at least nine different graves, once the killing was done with.
One of the men described how he and other men had been paid $50 to take up spades, gloves and lime powder, to sprinkle over the bodies, going house to house pulling out corpses in the process of decomposing. Most had been shot, they observed. In the middle of a nearby field where children were playing, the man pointed out a sandy patch where he said 120 bodies were buried.
In the heart of the Democratic Republic of Congo the dead decompose, after having met their deaths months ago. The ground covering them looks undisturbed. Government soldiers in aviator sunglasses carrying AK-47s are posted in the field to make certain that no one approaches the area of the mass grave. With decomposition so far advanced identifying the bodies will be difficult-to-impossible.
The position of both the government and the military they have posted at the sites of mass gives is clear enough. To ensure that no one, after speaking to witnesses, chooses to proceed in investigating who and how many moulder in those mass graves when security forces went door-to-door gunning down whole families in their homes, then closing the door securely behind as they continued on to other houses.
The Roman Catholic Church in Congo estimates that at least 3,300 people have been killed since October, while over 1.4 million people have been forced to flee from their homes, internally displaced or flooding into Angola as refugees In the Kasai region in the center of Congo, government forces are in conflict with a militia in opposition to President Joseph Kabila. Troops had killed the group's leader and the conflict picked up when his followers retaliated.
Like Russian President Vladimir Putin, Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro, President Kabila of the DRC aspires to change the country's constitution to enable him to remain as president after having served 16 years to the present. The violence he is primarily responsible for represents his stated reason for delaying elections.
Labels: Democratic Republic of Congo, Government, State Atrocities
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, August 16, 2017
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