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Congo-Kinshasa: Cautious Calm Settles Over War-Scarred Ituri Region
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Inter Press Service (Johannesburg)
17 April 2008
Posted to the web 18 April 2008
Michael Deibert
Bogoro
Wading through the chest-high grass outside of this hamlet in north-eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, Mathieu Nyakufa gestures to the bones - still bleaching in the sun - of those who have been lost to the country's wars.
"I was living just down here in the valley," the 52-year-old farmer says of one terrible morning in February 2003. "They were killing people with guns, with machetes, with spears and arrows. I escaped because I saw people running in my direction. Three of my children were killed in my own house."
An estimated 200 civilians were killed in Bogoro, located in the heart of the Ituri region, when combatants of the Forces de Résistance Patriotique d'Ituri (Patriotic Resistance Forces of Ituri, or FRPI), a militia dominated by the Ngiti and Lendu ethnic groups, attacked this scattered collection of thatched-roof huts and mud dwellings. At the time, Bogoro was a stronghold of the Union des Patriotes Congolais (Union of Congolese Patriots, UPC), an armed group loyal to the Gegere and Hema tribes.
"The UPC told me, 'Papa, run away, don't wait, because the Lendu are killing your people'," says Nyakufa.
The Bogoro massacre was one of many such slaughters that occurred in Ituri, which contains some of the world's most valuable deposits of gold and reserves of timber. A brutal extension of the civil war which engulfed this vast African nation from 1998 until 2003, the conflict in Ituri saw neighbouring Uganda and Rwanda arm militias in an ever-shifting web of alliances, as much for their own designs on Congo's natural resources as for any political solidarity with the Congolese.
The conflict initially pitted the Lendu, a tribe mainly composed of farmers who arrived from southern Sudan hundreds of years ago, against the Hema -- a Nilotic grouping that came to the area more recently. However, it soon spread to include virtually the entire population of the region, claiming at least 60,000 lives.
In the process, the UPC made its own additions to the catalogue of mass murder. These included a siege in and around the village of Kilo that resulted in the deaths of over 100 civilians in December 2002.
Often portrayed solely as an ethnic feud, the Hema-Lendu conflict was in fact more complex. In many ways, it resulted from policies which poisoned relations between two communities that had previously coexisted, albeit uneasily, for many years.
Prior to colonial rule, Lendu farmers leased out vast tracts of land to Hema herders; this changed with the arrival of the Belgians in the 1880s. In an echo of their policy in Rwanda, which elevated the Tutsi ethnic group over Hutus in the areas of administration, education and business, the Belgians in Congo favoured the pastoral Hema over the agriculturalist Lendu -- leading to resentment on the part of those left outside the arrangement.
Little improved with independence.
After the Belgians departed in 1960, the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko -- in power from 1965 until 1997 -- launched a campaign to reduce European influence which included renaming Congo as Zaire and nationalising many foreign-owned businesses. Significantly, the assumption of control over Ituri farm land previously owned by Europeans was overseen by Mobutu's minister of agriculture, Zbo Kalogi, himself a Hema. Kalogi favoured his own ethnic group in reallocating the land, deepening feelings of marginalisation among the Lendu.
A new chapter?
Now, the guns of Ituri are largely silent.
The conflict, which erupted into full-scale combat in 1999 and continued in fits and starts until last year, has for the moment been subdued through a disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration process that saw former militia members recruited into the national army -- and the involvement of warring factions in electoral politics.
"We want to restore peace in Ituri and bring a new political order through peace, equality and unity," says FNI member Jean-Claude Ndjela Konga, at the group's modest headquarters in the regional capital of Bunia.
Certain observers feel there are reasons to be hopeful.
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"They are recognising that they were manipulated and used for the interests of some people, including their leaders, but they now see that everyone was a loser in that situation," says Alfred Buju, a Catholic priest, of the region's combatants.
"They are not ready to start that adventure again," he adds. Buju also serves as the head of the Commission Justice et Paix (Commission for Justice and Peace) in Bunia, a local group formed to heal the wounds of the conflict.
Olamide Adedeji, director at the Bunia office of the United Nations Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, also sounds a note of optimism.
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