Amnesty A to Z: D for Democratic Republic of Congo
Congolese refugees seeking medical attention, WHO
In this week’s podcast, we introduce our new intern Erica and she chats about, amongst other things, her experiences with the British medical students’ association Medsin. Listen in here. In today’s blog, we continue our series on human rights throughout the world, focussing on the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The majority of the population lives in abject poverty where more than two thirds suffer from malnutrition and the average life expectancy is 45.8 years
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is a country in central Africa, known until 1997 as Zaire. It is a country rich in mineral resources such as cobalt ore, copper and industrial diamonds, and, as a result, the country has been exploited by mining corporations and a government that sells off this natural wealth without the workers receiving any benefit. The majority of the population lives in abject poverty where more than two thirds suffer from malnutrition and the average life expectancy is 45.8 years.
This terrible state of poverty is not the only cause of the low life expectancy. There are several major sources of armed conflict in the DRC, including the fighting in North Kivu between the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP) and the DRC army (FARDC), which resulted in large numbers of FARDC deserters running amok in the province, committing acts of murder, rape and theft. Since then, the CNDP has been resisted in the area by militia groups, sometimes in co-operation with the Democratic Liberation Forces of Rwanda (FDLR), whose involvement in the conflict has caused a breakdown of relations between the two countries. Elsewhere, in Orientale province, civilians have come under attack from the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), who have murdered, raped, burned homes to the ground and systematically abducted hundreds of children.
The DRC government does little to protect those in conflict zones, and the 17,000 members of the UN peacekeeping force in DRC are simply too few to be everywhere, though they intervene when they can. This has resulted in 1.4 million people displaced from the North Kivu region alone (while a further 3,000 fled to Uganda) and being forced to stay in insecure camps where they were outside the reach of humanitarian aid and subject to outbreaks of diseases such as Cholera, as well as continuing attacks from belligerent forces.
Even outside the conflict zones, hundreds of unlawful killings have been committed by internal security forces and Congolese and foreign armed groups, all of them deliberately targeting civilians. Further killings have been perpetrated by police forces: according to the UN, around 100 people were killed by excessive use of force and extrajudicial executions in the Bas-Congo province in February 2008, although the DRC government puts the number at only 27 and failed to investigate further. Many people with suspected affiliations to perceived political opponents were also arrested and detained without trial in degrading conditions where the majority were subjected to routine torture.
Abuse of women and children is also common in the DRC. Levels of sexual violence have always been high in the country, and it is particularly common in the eastern regions, where soldiers were most often responsible. Large numbers of women and girls were raped, gang raped or held in sexual slavery by soldiers, unable to report the crimes or even seek medical help for fear of reprisals. In the case of children, in 2008 between three and four thousand children were reported to be serving with the armed forces, some of them forcibly recruited or abducted and many threatened with death if they deserted and were caught.
The majority of these human rights violations go unpunished in the DRC. Those campaigning for human rights have been attacked, threatened and even abducted by government security forces. In the case of military crimes, only low-ranking officers have been brought to trial, and even then, only in small numbers. On the international stage, four former military commanders are in the custody of the International Criminal Court awaiting trial while a fifth is the subject of an arrest warrant. In July 2008, 258 detainees were released from prison having been held without trial, but since there was no visible judicial process preceding the release, it is not as encouraging as it could be, especially when large numbers of political prisoners remain in detention. Since the majority of these violations are politically motivated and committed by government forces, there seems to be little hope for change in the immediate future.