In the province of Ituri, new violence has flared up between ethnic groups, the Hema and the Lendu. The population feels in this 20 years old conflict of the authorities are increasingly left in the lurch.
Internal refugees in a refugee camp in Ituri
Shootings, kidnappings, rapes and mutilation – including eye-witness reports, in the province of Ituri in the North-East of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Hundreds of thousands of people are Fighting between the rival ethnic groups Hema and Lendu on the run. More than 240 people so far been killed.
Esther Nzale fled from their village
Esther Nzale had to, like many others from her village Kpatsi flee: “The Lendu came on Monday in the course of the day, it was 12 o’clock,” she told the Reuters news Agency. “We were in the fields, we heard the news. We walked to our houses, the lit had been.” You’ve seen burned as people alive, or with machetes, were killed. Her husband was killed in the attack, Esther Nzale self-escaped. But you don’t know now, what would have made the assassin with the corpses, whether they were ever buried.
Self-defense groups, and revenge killings
Like your many other. According to Babar Baloch, spokesman for the UN refugee relief Agency UNHCR, have fled since the beginning of the month, 300,000 people before the conflicts in the North-East of the Democratic Republic of the. Since the middle of last week have worsened the Situation in the province of Ituri, more. “The people flee from the attacks and counter-attacks in the Region of Djugu”, so Baloch on Tuesday in Geneva. According to reports, formed both communities self-defense groups and committed revenge killings.
UNHCR spokesman Babar Baloch
The conflict between Hemas and Lendus back to the late 1990s. The trigger for the renewed Flare-up of violence, the murder of a Lendu businessman last week was. Then retribution followed, measures, reports, Dieudonné Paluku. He lives in the provincial capital of Buna and care sidch to the interaction of the various civil society players in the province of Ituri. The farm of his parents in the town of kilos had been attacked. The attackers had sought his mother, who comes from the Hema community. “When they found nobody, they looted our property,” says Paluku. For him, the conflict has several causes. So there would be disagreements over land ownership resulting from colonial time. “Some of the boundaries between the two ethnic groups were not drawn well,” said Paluku. And finally, there is the socio-economic aspect of the conflict.
Women for peace
For Jacqueline Dz’Ju Malosi, the current conflict has its cause in the fact that previous disputes were never lays right beige. She works for “Pamoja Inawezenaka” – a project that brings together several women’s organizations, to restore peace. “We will mobilise the communities so that they can stand up for themselves and support them in building structures, so you can take care of themselves.”. But the activist wonders why the Congolese authorities would be more companies.
Escape from Ituri via lake albert to Uganda
Jean Bamanisa Saidi is the Governor of the province of Ituri. For him the key to the solution of this conflict is the economic development of the Region. Moreover, it needed to engage the government in Kinshasa, and more. “The measures to protect the population, be provided with a larger presence of the army,” said Saidi of the DW. Now he calls by the government for a greater and in-depth support in the areas of education, work and road construction. In addition, there is a need for a greater presence of state authority in the territories of Djugu and Irumu.
The lack of presence of the government
In fact, this is one of the fundamental problems of the Region, confirmed Ntumba Lwaba, a Professor at the University of Kinshasa and a former Minister of human rights in the Congo. “We were never able to establish the authority of the state completely, that is, the army, the police, the judiciary, the administration.”. Also, this would be the fact that a Few would enrich the resources of the province. Lwaba calls: “the authority of The state must be promoted in the entire territory of the province of Ituri. The borders need to be better guarded.”
MONUSCO peacekeepers in Goma in the Eastern Congo
First of all, the peace needs to be in the Region restored. Thus, the local UN peacekeeping mission MONUSCO reinforced, in the meantime, their presence in the contested areas. According to Florence Marchal, spokeswoman for the Mission, were now sent three battalions in the Region – two to Djugu and Mahagi. Marchal explains the procedure of the MONUSCO: “We set up in the municipalities of warning systems, to protect the civilian population. When we realize that a crisis is imminent, we analyze the Situation and can then send troops in these difficult areas, to support the population.”
Ebola is exacerbating the situation
According to eyewitnesses, the trust of the population in the MONUSCO, however, is not particularly large. The UNHCR reported that it could provide people a lack of. It is mainly accommodations and food were missing. Many Refugees tried to reach Bunia, capital of Ituri province, – others would flee across the lake albert to Uganda. They would, however, hindered by youth gangs of the population groups, the Hema and Lendu part of it.
Makeshift Ebola center in the neighboring province of East-Kivu
Last time there was between 1999 and 2003, a major conflict between Lendu and Hema militias. At that time, about 50,000 people were killed. Dangerous the current situation is mainly because it has been in the province a number of cases of the highly contagious viral disease Ebola. If so many people in cramped refugee camps, living together and moving around, could prevent the health authorities contagions barely, warns the world health organization (WHO). A total of almost 2200 people in the Congo since the beginning of the recent outbreak about a year ago, is sick with Ebola and nearly 1450 of them died. About ten percent of the cases were reported in the province of Ituri, a WHO spokesman in Geneva.