Ethnic land disputes fanned
The region of Ituri is a district of the vast Orientale Province and has a population of about 4.5 million, according to aid agencies working there. Figures of the make-up of the population differ widely. The town of Bunia, swelled by displaced families, is thought to hold at least 300,000 people. The main ethnic groups are the Alur, Hema, Lendu, Ngiti, Bira and Ndo-Okebo. On the key question of the relative size of these communities, there are conflicting figures. The Alur are often regarded as the biggest community in the region, but some figures indicate the Lendu are the largest group. The comparative size of the Hema and Lendu is unclear. Confusingly (and ironically, given the hatred that has been whipped up in the name of ethnic identity), the northern Gegere clan of the Hema speak the Lendu language.
The ethnographic database produced by the Summer Institute of Linguistics provides the following estimates for the size of larger communities speaking the following languages across all of the DRC, not only in Ituri: Lendu: 750,000; Alur: 500,000; Hema: 160,000; Bira: 120,000; Ndo-Okebo: 100,000 and Ngiti: 100,000. Human Rights Watch, which has researched the Ituri conflict in detail (see Web Links), estimates that the Hema and Lendu account for 40 percent of the total population of Ituri.
There are other smaller ethnic groups indigenous to the region, including the Twa and a wider diversity of groups from other regions, particularly in the towns. Generally speaking, the Hema are associated with livestock rearing and business, and the Lendu with agriculture. A key Lendu grievance is a perception of unjust accumulation of land in Hema hands, inasmuch as Belgian colonial administrators favoured the Hema at independence with large land concessions. As the conflict has escalated, Hema leaders, on their side, have expressed fears of being targeted for "ethnic cleansing" or even genocide. In the ethnic ideology which has poisoned the Great Lakes region, the two are sometimes seen (however inaccurately) as representing two sides of a Bantu-Nilotic clash. A Human Rights Watch researcher has said that "the two groups are now identifying with the Hutu-Tutsi categories that figured in the Rwandan genocide. The Lendu are now thinking of themselves as kin to the Hutu, while the Hema are identifying with the Tutsi."
Clashes between Hema and Lendu over land ownership and rights over land for grazing have broken out on several occasions in the last three decades. However, the deadliest phase of the tensions between the two communities started in May 1999. Each group attempted to expel the other from contested areas in a policy of local "ethnic cleansing".
A local NGO suggests that weaknesses in the 1973 land law, which allows occupied land to be purchased and occupants to be evicted two years later without legal recourse, encouraged the strategy of wholesale expulsion. Typically, in order to grab land, loot resources, or chase away the other community, villages, farms and livestock are attacked, looted and burnt. Civilians, including women and children, have been killed and mutilated with traditional weapons (machetes and bows and arrows). Both sides have gained increasing access to conventional weapons backed with communications equipment and more organised command structures. Attacks have become more brutal and barbarous - notoriously, severed heads were reportedly displayed on pikes in city streets in Bunia in January 2001, and human rights testimonies and video footage amply support accounts of devastating violence and cruelty in attacks by all sides. An attack on Nyankunde hospital in September 2002 included the killing of women and children patients in their beds.
Faction leaders battling for political power and territorial control have needed recruits for their forces, and have used ethnic resentment as a way of motivating and inciting their forces, say political sources from the region. Communities are whipped up into a state of fear or resentment to be ready to serve the interests of faction leaders . "Those who do not have, want to acquire by all means. Those who have, see themselves as victims, so a cycle of violence [ensues]," Ruhigwa Baguma, a former administrator with one of the rebel factions, told IRIN.
The clashes between Hema and Lendu have sucked in other ethnic groups in the region, especially the Ngiti, who have fought alongside the Lendu, and the Bira, who have been associated with the Hema. The Alur ethnic group has on the whole kept out of the conflict. Several peace initiatives in the region have recommended that the governor of the region should be of neither ethnicity, to build confidence in the impartiality of the administration. A period when an Alur, Ernest Uringi Padolo, was governor of the region was regarded as relatively peaceful, partly for this reason.While the "macro" political and security processes affecting Ituri present a mixed picture, the situation on the ground remains tense and volatile.
Local media reports say that on the military front, the UPC is beleaguered, with forces of Mbusa Nyamwisi's Armee du peuple congolais (APC), possibly including Rwandan Hutu elements, close to Bunia in the south and challenging the UPC to the north, particularly at Mahagi. In the west, Roger Lumbala's RCD-National (RCD-N), backed by Jean-Pierre Bemba's MLC, is challenging both Nyamwisi and the UPC. Libya is allegedly supporting the MLC (it denies the allegations), possibly adding a dangerous new dimension to the conflict, while persistent but unconfirmed rumours suggest Rwanda is backing elements of the UPC (it too denies interfering in the region).
The UPC, although it has tried to broaden its ethnic composition recently, and is largely composed of Hema politicians and militia backed by Hema business interests, is itself divided somewhat along clan lines, between northern Gegere Hemas and a southern Hema-Sud faction. Conflict between the two has resulted in armed forces loyal to Chief Kahwa Mandro spilling into Uganda, according the Ugandan The New Vision newspaper on 9 December. Clashes between Kahwa and Lubanga broke out in Bunia recently, according to the Kinshasa newspaper, Le Potentiel.
Photo: IRIN  |
| Victim of conflict, Ituri, 2000 | The two UPC factions are also said by analysts to be divided in their foreign
allegiances - Lubanga allied to Rwanda, Kahwa to Uganda. A Kinshasa newspaper claimed that President Yoweri Museveni was fed up with Lubanga, and had recently tried to engineer a meeting between Kahwa and President Joseph Kabila. Lubanga's foreign affairs minister, Jean-Baptiste Dhetchuvi, told the The New Vision on 16 December that the UPDF may be "poised to attack the UPC". Relations between Rwanda and Uganda had "really deteriorated" recently, a regional analyst told IRIN. If Rwanda were backing parts of the UPC, the analyst said, it would a continuation of previous proxy conflicts in DRC and would be motivated by a desire to undermine Uganda.
Most observers fear a forcible change of power in Bunia is both likely and highly dangerous, with the town, now largely occupied by Hema, possibly facing ethnic pogroms by invading forces or suffering the fallout from an intra-Hema power struggle between Lubanga and Kahwa.
The UPC's two main military opponents are the RCD-N and the RCD-K-ML. These two factions on 10 December gave some assurances to MONUC that they would observe a bilateral ceasefire - this comes after a series of towns changing hands, including an RCD-N takeover in Mambasa in early December. Nyamwisi's RCD-K-ML, in theory a "rebel movement", is widely reported to be backed by Kinshasa. A report by the UN secretary-general of 18 October suggests that the UPC was "reinforced and resupplied" in June 2002 after the RCD-K-ML and the Kinshasa government had made plans to re-establish government control in Bunia. The report did not state from where the UPC received support.
It is hard to say if any community is most at risk. Amnesty International, in a recent statement, warned of the danger of "genocide" in Ituri, but did not name which ethnic group was threatened with genocide. Lubanga, widely regarded as a Hema hardliner, told IRIN recently that in the areas of Djugua and Irumu the situation was volatile, "because there are many tribes there. All of them are targeted by armed militia and I cannot say that these armed groups target on Hema or Lendu".
The mistrust between communities has now become hatred, local people say, and will take years - if not generations - to repair. A rebel official involved in previous reconciliation efforts, Jacques Depelchin, told IRIN, however, that he recalled a Hema woman telling him that the "war is not one between Hema and Lendu, but between the rich Hema and the rest of us". Even matters such as intermarriage between Hema and Lendu can become the pretext for violence. "It's hatred whichever way you look at it," said Chief Mugenyi Bomera, a Hema living as a refugee in Uganda, "When they marry our daughters, they mistreat them so that they cannot stay. Now they say we refuse to allow intermarriage. That doesn't make sense."
Factions, militia and foreign intervention
While the conflicts have a local ethnic dimension, they have been greatly inflamed, human rights and UN investigative reports claim, by the free-for-all among rebel factions and Ugandan army commanders seeking to profit from the DRC's natural resources and export-import businesses. A diplomat familiar with the DRC told IRIN that Ituri was at the mercy of "warlords, smugglers, bandits and thieves". Also, Congolese commanders are seeking to grab territory to exchange for power in a new transitional government. "They have an assumption that the bigger the territory they hold, the bigger the support. Those that already control large territories do not want to lose their power base, and are willing to compete for more," a senior MONUC official said.
Uganda backed rebel groups fighting the late DRC president, Laurent-Desiré Kabila, when rebellion broke out in 1998. Uganda's reasons for becoming involved were "Uganda's legitimate security concerns", according to a foreign ministry statement. Uganda intended to mop up remnants of the Ugandan rebel movements, including the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) and National Army for the Liberation of Uganda (NALU). However, detailed allegations from special UN investigations suggest that conflicts in eastern DRC and the Ituri region provided cover for rampant looting and illegal exploitation of natural resources and tax revenues in the region.
The UPDF has been accused by the UN panels (see Web Links) of usually siding with the Hema community, often being paid to do so by wealthy landowners and businesspeople. A notable exception has been a Ugandan commander, Peter Kerim, who was reported by Human Rights Watch to be consistently arming and supporting the Lendu.
In 1999, Uganda was behind the establishment of Ituri as a province in its own right, first in combination with a district to the north, Haut Uele, then later on its own. Uganda installed a governor of the new "province", Adèle Lotsove, a Hema, who was widely blamed by human rights reports for inflaming the situation still further. She was sacked in December 1999, but later re-emerged as a member of the Hema-dominated UPC.
The "rebels" of Ituri have rarely faced battle with forces allied with Kinshasa until recently. In the looking-glass world of the DRC, a "rebel" group, the RCD-K-ML is now thought to be allied to Kinshasa. Other opposition to the various factions that have held Bunia with Uganda's blessing has come from the Mayi-Mayi (loosely affiliated pro-Kinshasa militia) and remnants of the Rwandan Hutu militia, the Interahamwe. Insofar as these forces are allied with any group, they have tended to be reported as fighting on the side of the Lendu against the Hema.
A series of rebel splits from 1999 to the present day have resulted in Bunia being a stage for repeated power struggles and skirmishes, as the original RCD begat the RCD-ML and later the RCD-K-ML. At each stage in the fragmentation of the rebel groups, new militia were recruited loyal to one or other commander or faction leader, often half of whom were child soldiers, and deployed not only to fight each other but to whip up insecurity in the countryside and seize strategic villages and commercial opportunities, such as the lucrative Kilo Moto gold mines.
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