By Dan Wooding, Founder of the ASSIST News Service
DR CONGO (ANS – October 13, 2015)
--In Africa, it isn’t only in the west that Islamist insurgencies are
posing a security threat. While attention has been focused on Nigeria’s
radical Islamist group Boko Haram (whose attacks have spread to
neighboring Cameroon, Chad and Niger), a relatively unknown militant
group has intensified attacks in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC),
raising fears of the emergence of a new jihadist organization in
central Africa.
According to Illia Djadi of World Watch Monitor (https://www.worldwatchmonitor.org),
the vast country of DRC borders Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania to
its east. A group of militants originally rooted in a rebel movement to
overthrow Uganda’s government and replace it with an Islamist
fundamentalist state, but forced to re-locate over the border into DRC,
has been carrying out murders of local people, far from the attention of
most of the world’s major media.
“Attacks
including murder, looting, abduction and rape are carried out on an
almost weekly basis,” said Djadi. “At least 19 people lost their lives
in four separate attacks in September alone, according to local sources.
The writer went on to say that
September 15, 2015, three people, including two women and a community
leader, were killed in Kokola. Three others, including a police officer,
were killed near Oicha; they went out to hunt on 5 Sep. but never
returned. Their bodies were found three weeks later, beheaded and
decaying. Over the same period, 11 people have also been massacred by
suspected militants in various other locations in the Beni area.”
Beni is a predominantly
Christian area, as is most of the DRC, but Independent Catholic News
quotes reports that have stated that, within a few years, the number of
Muslims in eastern DRC has risen from 1% to 10%.
According to the 2014 Journal
of International Organizations Studies, 28 of the 44 mosques (63%) in
the Medina region of DRC, about 50 miles from Beni, were erected between
2005 and 2012.
“There were very few Muslims in
eastern DR Congo until Islamic missionaries declared sharia (Islamic
law) over their claimed caliphate between Beni, Eringeti and the border
of Uganda,” said a local church leader, who wished to remain anonymous.
“To
enforce their caliphate, they killed people along their declared
‘boundaries’ and dumped their bodies to make the point. To those who are
carrying out these attacks, we are all Christians and obstacles to
Islamic rule with sharia over eastern Congo. But this barely got the
world’s attention.”
The National Association for
the Liberation of Uganda (NALU) handed itself over to the Ugandan
government when their needs were met in 2007.
Local bishops and civil society
have, however, repeatedly denounced the resurgence of violence still
carried out in the name of ADF-NALU, but which has now taken the form of
a jihadist organization called Muslim Defense International (MDI).
World Watch Monitor said that
in a letter released in May, the Bishops of the Province of Bukavu
(eastern DRC) denounced a “climate of genocide” and the passivity of the
Congolese State and international community.
“Does the situation have to
deteriorate even more before the international community takes measures
against jihadism?” asked the Bishops, according to whom “a strategy of
forced displacement of populations is taking place in order to gradually
occupy the land and install outbreaks of religious fundamentalism and
terrorist training bases”, the Catholic news agency, Fides, reported.
According to the Beni-based
Study Center for the Promotion of Peace, Democracy and Human Rights
(CEPADHO by its French acronym), October 2015 marks one year since the
beginning of this latest series of deadly attacks, which have claimed
about 600 lives in Beni and the surrounding areas, with about 800
kidnapped, according to World Watch Monitor (WWM) sources. They say the
wave of violence has sparked the mass displacement of more than half a
million people, including some who have fled to other countries.
A report released in May 2015
by the UN Office for Human Rights in the DRC, covering the period
between October 2014 and January 2015, highlights the vulnerability of
the Beni population due to the upsurge of violence committed by MDI
militants. The attacks it reports were executed in a systematic manner
with extreme brutality, as the perpetrators indiscriminately targeted
men, women and children, says the report.
It claims that most of the
victims were killed by machetes, axes and hammers in order to avoid
making a lot of noise. Some of them were burned alive in their homes,
while others were shot as they were trying to flee. Other victims,
including women and children, were mainly abducted in order to carry
goods that had been plundered, or enrolled by force to participate in
further attacks, or taken as sex slaves.
The recourse to extreme
brutality followed a clear strategy aimed at killing “the maximum
[number] of individuals within a very short timeframe”, said the UN
report, which also revealed that the assailants operate in small mobile
groups of between six and several dozen individuals, and use various
methods to disguise their attacks. In the majority of cases compiled by
the UN, attacks were carried out at sunset, when villagers were
returning from working in the fields.
In
total, 35 attacks against villages were documented, as combatants
engaged in systematic looting, destruction of homes, and theft of
domestic animals, food and other goods (such as clothing and kitchen
utensils).
WWM said that meanwhile,
Independent Catholic News reports that about 1,500 children have been
taken to remote jihadist camps “where they are being brutalized and
indoctrinated by Islamist militia”. Based on reports by the Catholic aid
agency, Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), there were signs of at least
three training camps, one in Medina.
Maria Lozano, ACN vice-director
of communications, said: “We have been given access to a variety of
materials that show the nature of these camps. The reports show soldiers
wielding rifles, watching over the children – aged nine to 15 – in
military outfits, carrying out military exercises. The images we have
seen are very disturbing.
“The sudden emergence of the
jihadist camps is being linked by ACN sources to UN peacekeeping forces,
with concerns that the UN forces are complicit with the camps and that
they are intentionally failing to take action against them. It is
alleged that some members of the Mission of the UN Organization for the
Stabilization of DR Congo are fundamentalist Muslims from Pakistan who
in their spare time are setting up Quranic schools and working on mosque
construction sites.”
Churches and clerics targeted
On the night of October, 16, 2014, one attack decimated an entire community, including a pastor and his family.
“Overnight, suspected militants
slaughtered 19 people in the neighboring village of Ngade with
machetes, before attacking the nearby Kadohu village,” said the church
leader, whose identity is being protected.
“Pastor Kanyamanda Jean Kambale
and his wife Odette were asleep in their beds with two of their
children when they were warned by church members to run. But, as the
assailants approached their door laughing and acting in a friendly way,
Kambale innocently opened the door to his murderers.
“They dragged him from the
house and butchered him with machetes while his wife managed to hide
their two little sleeping children in the house. But she was then cut to
death with machetes. Before dawn broke over Kadohu, the chief of the
village and 13 other residents had been slaughtered with machetes. Most
of the victims were members of Kambale’s church, a new community
composed of about 40 people, mostly Mbuti Pygmies. Today the Pygmies are
possibly in the gravest danger as they are on the outskirts of town and
far from protection.”
It’s not the first time
churches and clerics were targeted by militants. On October, 19, 2012,
three Catholic Assumptionist priests, P. Jean-Pierre Ndulani, Edmond
Kisughu and Anselm Wasukundi, were kidnapped from their home in the town
of Mbau, in Beni. Local journalists reported that they were taken by an
armed militia and later handed over to ADF-NALU. According to local
newspaper Les Coulisses, and Radio Kivu 1, they were killed by ADF/MDI a
year later because they refused to convert to Islam, but there is no
proof of this, and their whereabouts remains unknown.
How was MDI formed?
Illia
Djadi said that MDI was founded in the early 1990s following a fusion
between the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), an armed group with a
radical Islamist orientation, and the National Army for the Liberation
of Uganda (NALU). NALU was a local tribal militia who refused to be
governed by the Buganda, the main tribe. They battled for an independent
kingdom of Ruwenzori inside Uganda. The two groups shared the common
goal of overthrowing the Ugandan government of Yoweri Moseveni, in power
since 1986, and (a later goal) replacing it with an Islamic
fundamentalist state.
In
1995, after being driven out of Uganda, the group established a base in
Beni, a highly volatile region in eastern DR Congo, which has
experienced cycles of violence for more than 30 years. Moreover, the
Virunga National Park, with its mountainous landscape, offered fertile
ground for guerrilla activities. ADF-NALU is believed to have ties with
the Somalia-based Al-Shabaab. Its militants come from Uganda, but also
Kenya, Somalia, Tanzania, Rwanda, Sudan, Burundi, Central African
Republic, and DR Congo.
If the joint military
operations carried out by UN troops and the DR Congo Army in April 2014
succeeded in destroying the militants’ main base in the Virunga National
Park, the radical Islamist group has conserved its capacity to cause
destruction by adopting guerrilla tactics.
The WWM writer concluded by
saying, “MDI constitutes a real security threat for the DR Congo and the
entire central African region. It adds to the list of radical groups
operating across the continent, with Boko Haram active in Nigeria,
Niger, Cameroon and Chad, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and its
affiliated groups active across the Sahara region, and the
Somalia-based Al-Shabaab in East Africa.
Photo captions: 1) Democratic
Republic of Congo military personnel (FARDC) on patrol. 2) Kanyamanda
Kambale, with his wife Odette, and one of their children. (World Watch
Monitor). 3) An Islamic center near Bukavu, in eastern DRC. (Aid to the
Church in Need) 4) Democratic Republic of Congo military personnel
patrol near Beni in North-Kivu province, December. 5) Congo rebels. 6)
Samaritan’s Purse Built a New Place of Worship to Replace a Church
Destroyed by Wars and Rebel Attacks in a Jungle Village in the
Democratic Republic of Congo. 7) Dan Wooding preaching in the open air
in Africa.
About
the writer: Dan Wooding, 74, is an award-winning author, broadcaster
and journalist who was born in Nigeria of British missionary parents,
and is now living in Southern California with his wife Norma, to whom he
has been married for more than 52 years. They have two sons, Andrew and
Peter, and six grandchildren who all live in the UK. Dan is the founder
and international director of ASSIST (Aid to Special Saints in
Strategic Times) and the ASSIST News Service (ANS). He is also the
author of some 45 books and has reported for ANS from all over Africa
and also preached there.
** You may republish this or any of ANS stories with attribution to the ASSIST News Service (www.assistnews.net)
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