DR Congo: State Neglect Causes Over 100 Deaths Of Combatants, Family Members In Camp - HRW

By Staff Writer

Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has received condemnation from Human Rights Watch (HRV) on Wednesday 1 for failing to provide adequate care and attention to demobilized combatants and their families staying at a military camp.

"Over 100 demobilized combatants, their wives, and children have died from starvation and disease in a remote military camp in the DRC after officials failed to provide adequate food and health care," reads the HRW statement.

DRC's government should urgently move everyone at the camp to a more accessible site, hold those responsible for their mistreatment to account, and encourage greater United Nations involvement in the rehabilitation of former fighters.

"The Congolese government's neglect of these former fighters and their families is criminal," said Ida Sawyer, senior Congo researcher. "Before more people die, the government should immediately move them to a place where they have food and health care and are treated with basic human decency."

In September 2013, for a purported three-month period, the government of Congo moved 941 surrendered fighters and their families to a military camp in Kotakoli, which is located northwest of the country, before they would be integrated into the army or civilian life afterwards.

According to the statement, the soldiers and their families had run out of food and medical supplies by the end of the last year, with Congo's authorities dispatching only the minimum of the necessary supplies.

So far, 42 former fighters, five women, and 57 children have died on account of poor conditions in the camp, which is a fundamental breach of international humanitarian law and international human rights law, HRW stated.

Several pregnant women had miscarriages because of a lack of food, camp residents told HRW. At least one woman died during her pregnancy.

"It pains us to see people suffer like animals. And even animals don't suffer like they suffer," said a local leader in Kotakoli.

Sawyer said in the statement that such neglect of the former warriors and their families amounted to crime.

HRW urged the government of Congo to immediately take the former fighters and their families to a place where they would receive adequate treatment and also to punishing those responsible for the current situation.

Former fighters told HRW that military officials told them they would be held at the camp, a rundown former military commando training center built in 1965, for three months, believing that they would then either be integrated into the army or take part in a Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) program before returning to civilian life. A year later, the government has yet to begin a new "DDR III" program.

Providing provisions to the camp is hindered by the poor state of roads in the area with deliveries taking days to reach the camp, on a dilapidated 100 kilometer road. A health worker at the camp had almost no supplies or medicine to treat the sick and did not speak the same language as the former combatants, limiting his ability to correctly diagnose illness.

People looked like "the photos of the famine in Somalia and Ethiopia," a 28-year-old former combatant from North Kivu told HRW. "We saw people like that here. An adult who is just skin and bones.... We first buried people in the public cemetery. When we saw that the situation was becoming more and more appalling, we started burying them in the [regroupment] center, far from the civilian population. We could bury up to five bodies a day."

During the past year, the government made two payments of about US$20 to each former combatant, most of which they spent on food. To earn money to pay for necessities, the former fighters sold the mattresses and cookware they had received upon arrival and worked for local families cutting grass, hauling wood, and fetching water.

Most were paid between 10 cents and 50 cents a day. They would buy cooked cassava for 10 cents or steal squash and beans from nearby farmers' fields. A wife of a former combatant in the camp told HRW that because they had sold their cooking utensils, they sometimes cooked in military helmets.

In a meeting in Kinshasa on September 30, Alexandre Luba Ntambo, Congo's vice prime minister and minister of defense told HRV that the former combatants and their dependents were held in Kotakoli much longer than expected because of significant delays in the implementation of the new DDR program and the "hesitation of donors" to finance the program.

"The situation is really very bad, and we are aware of this," he said. "We didn't voluntarily choose for these people to go hungry or to see them die, but we had difficulties getting them the basic provisions. The delays in providing provisions made them more vulnerable to sicknesses, especially the children."

Since 2004, the Congolese government and international donors have spent millions of dollars on multiple DDR programs for former combatants. All have had significant problems, including widespread corruption and mismanagement of funds and the lack of long-term, community-level reintegration support. The government has said it is still in its "Pre-DDR" phase, with former combatants waiting in regroupment sites like Kotakoli for the formal program to begin.

Wrangling continues among the government, donors, and Mission de l'Organisation des Nations Unies pour la Stabilisation en République Démocratique du Congo (MONUSCO) about the program's funding and financial oversight.