New report by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on the Democratic Republic of Congo

The new report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights on the Democratic Republic of the Congo in important, if troubling, reading. It says, in part:

The High Commissioner notes that the situation of human rights had significantly deteriorated since her previous report to the Council, especially in the eastern part of the country, where...an important increase in the number of human rights violations and serious violations of international humanitarian law that could amount to war crimes, committed by national security and defence forces, as well as by foreign and national armed groups. The increase in gross human rights violations during the period under review can be attributed to various armed groups, including Mouvement du 23 mars (M23), and to the security and defence forces, in relation to M23 activities. M23 combatants were indeed responsible for gross human rights violations and serious violations of international humanitarian law, including summary executions, rape and child recruitment. Other armed groups, which took advantage of the security vacuum that followed the redeployment of FARDC units to combat M23, since May 2012, were also responsible for gross human rights violations and serious violations of international humanitarian law. Such groups have sought to extend their influence and control over areas rich in natural resources in the eastern part of the country, committing attacks against civilians, often on ethnic grounds. In addition, in the context of operations against M23, members of the Congolese defence and security forces allegedly committed gross human rights violations and serious violations of international humanitarian law...

The full report can be read here.

Children Burned to Death by Rwandan Hutu Militia in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo

The FDLR came and circled my house. When we tried to leave, they said, “You can’t leave or we’ll kill you.” I was able to move out a bit and get some distance from the house, but my three young boys were still inside, sleeping on a single bed. Then I saw the FDLR combatants light a fire directly on my house and my three boys burned to death.

-Father of three young boys (ages 3, 4, and 6) burned to death in their home:

According to Human Rights Watch, on the night of April 17, 2009, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR, a Rwandan Hutu militia) attacked Luofu and Kasiki villages in the southern Lubero territory of North Kivu province in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. As a result of the attack at least seven civilians, including five young children, were killed, the latter burned to death in their homes.

Though the FDLR had warned earlier that Luofu would be attacked, according the Human Rights Watch, neither the Mission de l'Organisation des Nations Unies en République démocratique du Congo (MONUC) nor the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC) took any precautionary measures to protect civilians in case the threat was carried out.

Photos and first-hand accounts of the attack can be read here.

Note from North Kivu

We drove north from Goma along the road to Rutshuru, along a ribbon of concrete that wound towards the Ugandan border. To the west loomed a volcano that glowed red as dusk fell, still active and perilous. To the east, a pair of its now-dormant brothers rose many thousands of feet into the air, visible in Rwanda. The landscape was impossibly green and fecund, densely packed semi-tropical forest dappled with mist in its upper reaches. My traveling partner, Andrew Mcconnell, a photo journalist from Northern Ireland, and I, were ranging far in the Congolese province of North Kivu, as stunningly beautiful a place as I have ever set foot in, but which warring political foes have succeeding in turning into a hell for its people.

Refugee camps, crowded and squalid, dot the landscape, as fighting between Congolese government forces (the Forces Armées de la Republic Démocratique du Congo or FARDC) and their allied paramilitary Mayi Mayi supporters (such as the Patriotes Résistents Congolais or PARECO), forces loyal to renegade Tutsi general Laurent Nkunda (who leads the Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple, known as the CNDP) and the Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda (FDLR), a group with its roots in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide and comprising mainly of ethnic Hutus from Rwanda itself and Congo, has succeeded in emptying out whole villages whose residents flee the mass rape, forced recruitment of child soldiers and other attendant atrocities that have characterized the conflict.

What I saw, and those whom I interviewed while there, will form the basis of some articles that will be appearing over the next several weeks.

In the meantime, I offer this photo of children at the Magunga 1 camp for internally displaced persons, or les déplaceés, as they are called here, where nearly 20,000 souls live under an intense sun in an expanse of temporary huts constructed of banana leaves and grass, with thin sheets of UNHCR-donated tarpaulin slung across them. I believe that the look on their faces speaks in eloquent commentary of the situation as it stands today in North Kivu, and the necessity of committed journalists to go there and report on what is a largely forgotten though ongoing conflict, one in which many actors from Europe, North America and Africa itself have a long history of involvement in and culpability for.