Category Archives: Democratic Republic of the Congo

Welcome to Semuliki: on the trail of the ADF’s Islamist militants | photo essay

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Photojournalist Hugh Kinsella Cunningham has been embedded with Congolese soldiers in the DRC’s ‘triangle of death’. The elusive insurgents they are hunting have pledged allegiance to Islamic State

At the border between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, in a vast territory that ranges from the lofty Rwenzori mountains to the lush rainforest of the Semliki valley, one of the world’s most active militant groups is responsible for the massacre of hundreds of civilians.

The ADF (Allied Democratic Forces) was originally an opposition rebel group from Uganda rooted in a radical agenda of religious militancy. Taking advantage of the regional power vacuum, the group fled to Beni territory in neighbouring DRC to find shelter from the Ugandan army.

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Refugees and the Armenian genocide: human rights this fortnight in pictures

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A roundup of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms, from Colombia to China

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DRC aid agencies appeal to UK Foreign Office to suspend ‘disastrous’ cuts

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Fears of 60% reduction in budget for country where 27.3m said to be experiencing acute food insecurity

A consortium of 19 aid agencies operating in the Democratic Republic of Congo has issued a last-minute appeal to the UK Foreign Office to suspend planned aid cuts to the country, where a third of the population faces acute food insecurity.

The Foreign Office, the second largest provider of aid to the war-torn country, has told aid agencies that cuts are very likely. Although the size of them is not yet agreed, one report has suggested a 60% reduction in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office budget for the country. The FCDO’s aid programme for Congo was worth £180m in 2019.

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Leak reveals UK Foreign Office discussing aid cuts of more than 50%

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Internal reports show projected cuts including 59% in South Sudan, 60% in Somalia and 67% in Syria

Some of the poorest and most conflict-ridden countries in the world will have their UK aid programmes cut by more than half, according to a leaked report of discussions held in the last three weeks among Foreign Office officials.

The cuts include slashing the aid programme to Somalia by 60% and to South Sudan by 59%. The planned cut for Syria is reported at 67% and for Libya it is 63%. Nigeria’s aid programme would be cut by 58%.

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‘Falling off a cliff’: pandemic crippling world’s most fragile states, finds report

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The world’s poorest are becoming poorer as the impact of Covid compounds existing crises, says Disaster Emergency Comittee

Thousands could starve in the world’s most fragile states as the pandemic comes on top of existing crises, warns a new report today which found aid workers are deeply pessimistic about the coming year.

The survey of aid workers by the Disaster Emergency Committee (DEC) found that they believed humanitarian conditions were at their worst in a decade.

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What can we learn from Africa’s experience of Covid?

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Though a hundred thousand people have died, initial predictions were far worse, giving rise to many theories on ‘the African paradox’

As Africa emerges from its second wave of Covid-19, one thing is clear: having officially clocked up more than 3.8m cases and more than 100,000 deaths, it hasn’t been spared. But the death toll is still lower than experts predicted when the first cases were reported in Egypt just over a year ago. The relative youth of African populations compared with those in the global north – while a major contributing factor – may not entirely explain the discrepancy. So what is really going on in Africa, and what does that continent’s experience of Covid-19 teach us about the disease and ourselves?

“If anyone had told me one year ago that we would have 100,000 deaths from a new infection by now, I would not have believed them,” says John Nkengasong, the Cameroonian virologist who directs the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Incidentally, he deplores the shocking normalisation of death that this pandemic has driven: “One hundred thousand deaths is a lot of deaths,” he says.

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Italian ambassador to DR Congo dies in attack on UN convoy

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Luca Attanasio and two others killed in attempted kidnapping north of Goma in eastern DRC

Italy’s ambassador to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and two other people have been killed in an attack on a United Nations convoy in the restive east of the central African country.

The convoy from the World Food Programme (WFP) was attacked at about 10.30am local time (0830 GMT) during an attempted kidnapping near the town of Kanyamahoro, about 10 miles north of the regional capital, Goma, a spokesperson for Virunga national park said.

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Indigenous peoples face rise in rights abuses during pandemic, report finds

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Increasing land grabs endangering forest communities and wildlife as governments expand mining and agriculture to combat economic impact of Covid

Indigenous communities in some of the world’s most forested tropical countries have faced a wave of human rights abuses during the Covid-19 pandemic as governments prioritise extractive industries in economic recovery plans, according to a new report.

New mines, infrastructure projects and agricultural plantations in Brazil, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Indonesia and Peru are driving land grabs and violence against indigenous peoples as governments seek to revive economies hit by the pandemic, research by the NGO Forest Peoples Programme has found.

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DRC is rich with farmland, so why do 22 million people there face starvation? | Vava Tampa

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For two decades the global community has stood by while militia groups have got away with killing, raping and looting

I was food shopping when I read the news. Nearly 22 million people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are facing starvation and malnutrition. Now. In 2021.

You have to wonder how a country with eight months of rain, more than 50% of all the rivers, lakes and wetlands in Africa, and more agricultural land than any African country, with the potential to feed up to 2 billion people, gets to the point where it is unable to feed its population of 100 million.

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Ebola virus kills woman in Democratic Republic of Congo, health ministry says

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Case near city of Butembo comes nearly three months after the end of an outbreak in the western province of Équateur, which killed 55

Health authorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo are racing to contain a possible Ebola outbreak, after a woman died from the virus near the eastern city of Butembo.

The woman showed symptoms on 1 February in the town of Biena, North Kivu. She died in hospital in Butembo two days later. She was married to a man who had contracted the virus in a previous outbreak.

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‘The music industry kills artists’: Damso, Belgium’s biggest rap star

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With multi-platinum No 1 albums including topics such as suicide and the psychology of paedophiles, the Congolese-Belgian MC has carved his own lane with total determination

‘The questions that I ask myself about death aren’t about dying, they’re about death in this life.” Damso doesn’t really do small talk. Engaging and magnetic even through a computer screen, the 28-year-old Congolese-Belgian rapper is sporting a flamboyant shirt and a considerable amount of jewellery as he ponders the nature of existence. “There are people who are alive, but live like they’re dead,” he says. “They don’t strive to go further. But I know life is really short because I’ve seen people die just like that, in the street. So this question speaks to me: how can we be absent from our own lives?”

This is Damso’s first interview for an English-speaking audience, but we barely mention any of the achievements his team send over to illustrate how successful he is. When his fourth album, QALF, dropped in September 2020 without a whisper of promotion, it generated 14m streams in 24 hours, making him the most streamed artist in the world that day. “The music won,” he says simply.

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Six gorilla rangers killed in ambush at DR Congo’s Virunga national park

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Previous attacks against rangers blamed on militias fighting to control land and natural resources

Armed men have killed at least six rangers and wounded several others in an ambush in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo’s Virunga national park, a sanctuary for endangered mountain gorillas, the park said.

The identity of the assailants was not immediately clear, said Olivier Mukisya, a Virunga spokesman. Previous attacks against the rangers have been blamed on various militias who fight to control land and natural resources in eastern Congo.

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Congolese people have been brutalised since 1996. Why isn’t the west helping?

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Despite accusations of war crimes in the central African country, the international community seems unmoved

On New Year’s Eve, a gang of militia left its jungle base and swept across Beni, a forested north-eastern corner of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, looking for Nande people to kill.

Locals alerted the Congolese army but they were ignored. In small farms in Tingwe, a few kilometres from a DRC army base, the gang found 25 people – men, women and children – out harvesting food. One by one they hacked them to death with machetes and axes.

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France arrests former DRC rebel leader for role in ‘crimes against humanity’

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Roger Lumbala suspected of various acts during 1998-2002 war in Democratic Republic of Congo

French anti-terror prosecutors have announced the arrest of the former head of a rebel group in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on charges of “complicity in crimes against humanity”.

Roger Lumbala, 62, is a former opposition lawmaker who led the RCD-N party, an armed group suspected by UN investigators of carrying out extrajudicial killings, rapes and cannibalism during the country’s civil war from 1998-2002.

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Boat capsizes on Uganda’s Lake Albert, leaving 26 dead

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Twenty-one people rescued after sinking in high winds, with official saying no more survivors expected

At least 26 people died when their boat sank on Lake Albert, which marks the border between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ugandan officials have said.

The boat was carrying passengers between two Ugandan locations in the lake’s north-east on Wednesday when it “hit a strong wind” and went under water, local official Ashraf Oromo said on Friday.

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Sub-Saharan Africa named riskiest investment region due to violence

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Annual global terror index highlights attacks in Mozambique and DRC and says human rights abuses are driving violence

Militant violence and abuses by security forces have made sub-Saharan Africa the riskiest region in the world for business and investors, a new report says.

Seven of the world’s 10 highest-risk countries for militant violence are in the region with significant deteriorations in Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), according to the annual Terrorism Intensity Index released on Friday by risk consultants Verisk Maplecroft.

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Report clears WWF of complicity in violent abuses by conservation rangers

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But independent review criticises wildlife fund’s inconsistent approach to human rights

A long-awaited report into allegations that conservation rangers supported by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) committed violent abuses in several countries, including murder, has cleared the organisation’s staff of complicity but criticised it for serious shortcomings in oversight.

But even as the report was released, campaigners for tribal rights – including Survival International, which has long been a critic of WWF – suggested the report had failed to investigate some of the most serious issues and that it had been released two days before the US Thanksgiving holiday in an attempt to bury the news.

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Democratic Republic of Congo declares end to Ebola outbreak

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End of 11th outbreak is first time for nearly three years country has been free of Ebola

The Democratic Republic of the Congo has declared an end to its 11th Ebola outbreak, nearly six months after cases were reported.

The end of the outbreak in the western province of Équateur marks the first time that the vast central African nation has been Ebola-free in about two and a half years.

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UN issues $100m emergency funding and calls for global effort to avert famine

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Organisation says money pledged is ‘not enough’ and warns of potential for huge number of child deaths

The UN has earmarked $100m (£75m) in emergency funding for seven countries deemed at risk of famine, warning that without immediate action the world could see “huge numbers of children dying on TV screens”.

The climate crisis, Covid-19, conflict and economic decline have created an “acute and grave crisis” in Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, South Sudan and Yemen, where millions of people are facing emergency levels of food insecurity, UN humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock told the Guardian.

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US to send asylum seekers home to Cameroon despite ‘death plane’ warnings

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Move by the Trump administration comes despite reports that other deportees have gone missing since being repatriated

The US is expected to fly Cameroonian asylum seekers back to their home country on Tuesday despite fears that their lives will be at risk and reports that deportees repatriated last month are now missing.

Some of the deportees are activists from the country’s anglophone minority, who face arrest warrants for their political activities from government forces with a well documented record of extrajudicial killings. They and their lawyers refer to Tuesday’s flight as the “death plane”.

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