Posted: 10/14/2015 at 1:00pm
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Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) Congo - Islamist militias threaten central Africa too
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.
“On September 26, 2015, two people were killed as their truck was ambushed
near Kokola village. Five days earlier, militants fired on a truck between
Eringeti and Kokola. The passengers managed to flee unharmed, but the truck was
looted and set on fire.”
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. Source: Assist News
Service
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