Grands Lacs: December 2010 mº 71
- Detalles
- Categoría: Actualidad en inglés
- Publicado el Viernes, 17 Diciembre 2010 07:19
Operation Ruwenzori, or Operation Beans?
They killed everyone, nine people. Then they set fire to the lorry. With the bodies inside. They just took the beans.” I am in the Grand Nord in the Kivus, not far from the Ugandan border. My interlocu-
tor, the leader of a local development NGO, is telling me a nightmarish tale. We are a few kilometres from the edge of the Virunga National Park. Since the 1990s, large areas of the park have been controlled by rebels. It is in this region, not far from Butembo, that there are ADF-Nalu members installed. Where possible, under the pressure of the land problem, the local population living in the hills around the park has started to cultivate different cereals and vegetables, in a sort of cohabitation with the Ugandan rebels. The Congolese community has never lived in the park, but makes use of the fields with regular comings and goings.
On 28th June 2010, at the start of the military Operation Ruwenzori against the ADF-Nalus, a battalion from the sixth FARDC brigade was deployed to Bulambo, 30km from the park, and the soldiers immediately gathered up peanuts, maize and rice grown in the park. They took these away, along with hens, goats and pigs which the population rears there. The date was not a coincidence. The authorities, wishing to avoid problems with the unpaid soldiers on the celebrations to mark the fiftieth anniversary of independence, had given the soldiers the green light to pay themselves off the backs of the population. The pillaging has left the population with neither food reserves nor money. The soldiers returned at the beginning of November, at the same time as the bean harvest. Captain Jeancy Kasongo led the operation. While his men continued the gathering-pillaging, Kasongo left first with 24 sacks of beans, each weighing 100 kilos. A few kilometers on, the lorry was ambushed. Nine people were killed, including the Captain. Killed by his own soldiers, dissatisfied because he had not sufficiently shared the loot from previous pillages with his men. “He always eats alone, him”, they have been heard to say.
In order to cover the tracks of this settling of the score within their ranks, the battalion launched an offensive against the ADF-Nalu rebels, to make it look as if they were guilty of the good officer’s assassination. But the population was not surprised that this action yielded no result. The population knew very well that the rebels had left the region in anticipation of Operation Ruwenzori.
We do not usually recall specific incidents in our EurAC publications, but I wanted to share with you what a brave witness had told me. Many elements in the Congolese drama are rooted in this history: the land issue, threatened biodiversity, foreign armed groups, the undisciplined army, counter-productive military operations and, above all, the martyrised population which is abandoned to rapacious whims imposed by force and which do not even draw the line at killing their own in order to have a bigger piece of the loot.
Butembo, 5 December 2010
Kris Berwouts, Director