Ten years after the release of the UN's ′′ Mapping Report an inventory of human rights violations committed between 1993 and 2003, the victims are still waiting for justice.
The ′′ Mapping Report ′′ describes the horrors of ten years of violence and conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in a chronological and thematic way. He analyzes 617 violent incidents committed between 1993 and 2003 in the DRC. During this decade, all parties to Congolese and foreign rebel groups of Congolese, Ugandan, Burundian, Angolese, Rwandan, Chadian and Zimbabwean conflict have been guilty of grave and massive violations of human rights.
For this work done by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the majority of the 617 documented violence can be called crimes against humanity and war crimes. Regarding the massacres aimed at Hutu people between 1996 and 1997, the report states that attacks by the Rwandan Patriotic Army (APR) and the Alliance of Democratic Forces pour la libération du Congo (AFDL) ′′ reveal several overwhelming elements who, if proven before a competent court, could be called crimes of genocide ". This analysis was strongly criticized by Rwanda when it received the first version of the report for comments in June 2009. Until today, this part of the report continues to crystallize the tensions between Rwandan Patriotic Front (RFF) and pro-FPR and tends to hide the rest of the report's contents.
The identity of alleged perpetrators of documented abuses - approximately 200 people, including several dozens of leading military and political leaders - does not appear in the public report, but is contained in a confidential database available to OHCHR.
While the ′′ Mapping Report ′′ should have become a founding document of the fight against impunity in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, its recommendations were not implemented. The idea of setting up a specialized court to shed light on the abuses committed between 1993 and 2003 has never been created. While the Congolese regime of former President Joseph Kabila proposed in 2013 the creation of mixed specialized chambers composed of Congolese and foreign judges and integrated into the Congolese judicial system, the law establishing such a body has never been passed. For their part, the judicial systems of neighbouring countries have systematically ignored the abuses committed by their regular armies in Congolese territory.
Major national action
While mobilization of the UN Security Council could have been salvatory on the issue of combating impunity, the latter, due to lack of political will from member states, has failed to respond to the lack of determination of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Neighbouring countries to have those responsible for the most serious crimes committed between 1993 and 2003. When in March 2016 Dr. Denis Mukwege, Nobel Peace Prize 2018, files a signed letter by nearly 200 non-government organizations (non-government) in OHCHR, calling for the publication of the database identifying the chief criminals described in the ′′ Mapping Report ", OHCHR replies that ′′ Public disclosure of this information could endanger the victims and witnesses of such violations ". However, it is questionable whether the presence of alleged perpetrators of these crimes in the highest ruling bodies of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and neighbouring countries does not further endanger the population in the country.
With the end of the Kabila family's long reign of nearly twenty-five years, during which impunity has been the rule in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the hope of taking the country into a new, more respectful path of human rights is reborn among the opinion Congolese public, with the tormented arrival of Félix Tshisekedi to the Congolese presidency in January 2019.
It is now time for President Tshisekedi, a politician who is not from the world of arms, from an armed group and has no connection with any of them, to take major national action, in consultation with civil society, to break with past impunity and commit the country to lasting peace based on justice and respect for human rights. This cannot be done without the ′′ Mapping Report ′′ whose recommendations need to be implemented, especially with regard to the establishment of transitional justice mechanisms.
It's time that politicians and military leaders of the most serious crimes committed in the Democratic Republic of Congo between 1993 and 2003 respond to their actions before the courts and the victims finally get redress. The advent of restorative justice is essential to building peace in the country. Publicly disclosing their names, listed in the OHCHR database, could help to remove them from power, bring them to justice and free the words of victims and witnesses who are no longer forced to live in fear of reprisals of their executioners. The Mapping Report must no longer be a taboo topic.
