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You Can Run, But You Can't Hide

The East African (Nairobi)
NEWS
August 16, 2004
Posted to the web August 18, 2004

By DAVID KAIZA
Nairobi
With the ongoing International Criminal Court investigations into the massacre
of some 3.5 million people in the DRC, some Congolese and Rwandan refugees who
witnessed the killings before fleeing to Uganda say they are being hunted down
in Kampala by perpetrators who want to hide the evidence. They also accuse the
Ugandan authorities of demanding sex and money in exchange for refugee status.
DAVID KAIZA reports.
At the mention of Congolese rebel leader Laurent Nkunda, Bernadette convulses,
starts to cry, and stops narrating the events leading to the murder of her
family.
Bernadette's village in Rutshuru was attacked on April 17, 2000. Her mother,
father, siblings, nephews and nieces killed. After five months in hiding, she
fled to Uganda with her children. One night in September 2000, men came and
took her husband away.
In October 2003, her daughter was attacked in a suburb of Kampala while she was
away. Even in Kampala, the activities of the Congolese Rally for Democracy,
RCD, make it hard for her to feel safe.
Zachary Lomo, the director of the Refugee Law Project (RLP) of the Faculty of
Law at Makerere University, says that with the ongoing ICC investigations into
the massacre of some 3.5 million people in Congo which started in June,
refugees who witnessed the killings are a target of perpetrators trying to hide
the evidence. But he says that neither the Uganda government nor the UN High
Commissioner for Refugees may be able to protect refugees who have information
the courts might need.
For the refugees, it's a concourse of failure and frustration against what they
see as official neglect.
Agathe, princess of the Fulero kingdom which for over a century hosted Rwandans
fleeing ethnic killings back home, was one day in 2002 arrested by RCD
combatants. In Bukavu central prison, she was beaten and raped - losing a tooth
and acquiring permanent rope scars on her arms - before buying her way out with
a watch. She was pursued to her mother's home in Bunagana, from where she again
fled to her uncle's in Goma. But in the end, Congo ceased to be an option.
In Kampala, she was granted refugee status with her mother and children. But
the events were too much for her aged mother who died of hypertension. On July
2, 2003 people speaking "Rwandan accented French," tried to break into a house
she was renting in a Kampala suburb. She shouted and the neighbours intervened.
The UNHCR could not act without a police letter.
"I went to Queen's Way Police Station to report," Agathe says. "When I told
them that I was a refugee they asked me for Ush10, 000 ($5.7). I told them I
did not have money so they told me that since I was a woman, I should remove my
clothes."
Agathe abandoned redress and shifted to another part of Kampala.
Evelyn, a widowed mother of five, fled to Uganda in 2000 following the death of
her husband. It was felt she was too "Ugandan" and "Rwandan" and must pay for
the invasion of Congo. Technically, she is not a refugee because she has not
been granted status. She gave up the usual channels when an official demanded
sex before status. Now she is pursuing legal action.
She used to do self-help training for girls in Congo, but has failed to sustain
her Kitenge business because Kampala City Council officials depleted her
capital by asking for bribes every time they visited. Jonathan had to drop out
of school when the time to run came. In Kampala, he tried to look for a
scholarship and having got papers from the Clinton Foundation, went looking for
a recommendation letter from the UNHCR.
Instead, the papers were flung in his face. Outside of the system, authorities
elsewhere did not help. He paid Ush120,000 ($70), for rent in Wandegeya. The
landlord rented the house to a third party, before he even occupied it. To
report to police, he needed a letter from the Local Council - who demanded
Ush10,000 ($5.7). The police wanted Ush5,000 ($2.8). He gave up and tried
looking for a job. Except...
"when you apply for a job, you don't say that you are a refugee, because they
will underpay you," he says.
Researchers, civil-rights activists say that the refugee system, operating on
the 1964 Control of Alien Refugees Act, is not only outdated, but operates with
a high level of impunity; breaking international conventions while failing to
protect otherwise bona fide refugees. However, the large number of bogus
claimants, UNHCR and the OPM say, makes it hard to identify genuine cases.
Nevertheless, the RLP has documented at least 10 cases in which refugees thrown
out of the UNHCR and the OPM as "liars", have been attacked in the streets by
would be kidnappers. This includes the case of two men who ran out of Bukavu,
speaking of an imminent attack, a few weeks before Laurent Nkunda commandeered
Bukavu.
History and the politics, researchers say, points to a trajectory which might
end in an even more serious genocide in the Great Lakes region.
The Kivu where Agathe comes from is the epicentre, and even more central is her
own family to the crisis. The Fulero Kingdom, which lies in the Itombwe plateau
east of Lake Kivu was since the 1830s, a receptor of the Rwandans ethnic fall-
outs. The waves of refugees in the 19th to the 20th century settled in various
areas of south and north Kivu and became known as "Banyamulenge" and
"Banyavyura."
They were never accepted as Congolese, even though scholars say that they were
in the Congo earlier than 1885 when the Congo Free State was created. But the
fear of ill-intentions against Rwandan refugees, which along with hatred of the
Kasaiians of Katanga (the meltdown for which Patrice Lumumba was killed) and
continues to tear up Congo, started with Mobutu's regime.
With Mobutu came Barthelemy Bisengimana, a Rwandan immigrant who rose to become
the dictator's chief of staff from 1969 to 1977. A man responsible for public
policy co-ordination in Zaire, he used his clout to win citizenship for the
"Banyamulenge" and the "Banyavyura" in a 1972 Mobutu decree, and to help
Rwandan immigrants, now citizens, to grab large tracts of land and plantations
in the east, especially in Masisi, northern Kivu, where "authentic" Congolese
were displaced. It is this act, scholars say, which sparked off the on-going
catastrophe in Congo.
When the "land grab" threatened political reversals for Mobutu in 1981, the
1972 decree was revoked. Tens of thousands lost citizenship.
But it was not enough to stop the resentment. The killings, in a gory replay of
the killing of the Kasai people in 1964, started in 1990. But this time, it was
of "Rwandans." It was ignited by the return to Rwanda of the 1959 refugees, but
spear-headed by the "Ugandan" Rwandans, the Rwanda Patriotic Front and Army
(RPF/A). The "Congolese" Rwandans started to leave to aid them.
By the time the RPF took power in 1994, tens of thousands had already perished.
But again, a fresh stream of refugees from Rwanda, the fifth wave since 1830,
started. Its implications were grim, for murder on a scale larger than happened
in Rwanda in 1994 would come within only two years. To start with, the fall of
Habyarimana left Mobutu vulnerable. In Kigali was a hostile regime, supported
in Kampala, composed of people who resented him for the 1981 citizenship
withdrawal, but also the instigation of killings from 1990 to 1994. Some in the
RPF ranks had fled from not only Mobutu's killers, but also from the local Kivu
people who had wanted their land back.
That Kigali would control eastern Congo was a foregone conclusion. That it
would want a favourable government in Kinshasa was a geopolitical imperative.
But Laurent Kabila did not deliver the protection and territorial gift in the
east, so Kigali and Kampala turned against him. The emergence of the Rally for
Congolese Democracy was seen as a cover for this venture.
That the local Congolese would face the wrath of a people they resented was
inevitable. But it was not seen in these terms by the international community.
Under the protective cover of the US, and heavy guilt, and given the hold of
fascination that the April 1994 genocide exercised, it was accepted that the
RPA pursue the Interahamwe into Congo. What the international community knew
little of was the sedimentation of the conflict; the bedrock of sharp ethnic
affinities; the murderous hatreds of a region whose refugees speak of "racial
differences", of a "Bantu-Nilotic" divide to explain the Hutu - Tutsi
impermeability which they have inherited."For the international community,
reality was the linguistic summations of US Secretary of State, Madeleine
Albright whose epithets "great lakes region" and the "new breed of African
rulers" papered over a region dangerously on the skids.
In practice, pursuit of the Interahamwe was the exacting of ethnic traumas that
predated colonialism. The Fulero, the Lubero, Uvira, Hunde - inhabitants of the
Kivu who called their guests usurpers - were the primary targets of the
dichotomous war that engulfed Zaire in 1996, but which was understood only as
an uprising against Mobutu.
Under the cover of Kabila's inexorable march to Kinshasa, an estimated 3.2 to
3.5 million were killed: tens of thousands in Masisi; 350,000 of the 1.7
million strong Banyabwisho; up to 300,000 in Tingitingi; Tingitingi the most
notorious of the massacres, with very strong evidence showing Kigali's hand,
while Washington tried to cover it up by interfering with investigations.
Researchers say that Kampala's and Kigali's precipitate interference in Congo
may have sealed the fate of the very people whom they told the world they were
going into the Congo to protect. With direct military intervention now hard,
the wrath of the "authentic" Congolese turning against those sharing ethnic
affinities with Ugandans and Rwandans; who speak the dialects close to
Kinyarwanda, Lufumbira, Lukiga, like Bernadette and her family, the prospect
that the killings will stop and the region stabilise, looks dim.
Bernadette's husband was killed because the "authentic" Congolese were unhappy
about his marriage to a Nyamulenge, a "Rwandan" in their opinion.
On July 21, a motion was brought before the Congolese parliament that revived
the dread topic - citizenship. While the "Banyamulenge" want their "tribe"
declared Congolese, opponents in parliament say it is a ploy that would mean
anybody from Burundi and Rwanda can move in and out as Congolese claiming to be
Nyamulenge because of the physical features. Instead, the offer of individual
application for citizenship, which would have drawn a line between Congo,
Rwanda and Burundi, has not been accepted. The question now is what will happen
should the parliament reject "Nyamulenge" as Congolese.
Expulsion would be a certainty, observers say, but it may put the Congo clock
back to 1964. The desperate but ineffectual action by Nkunda against Bukavu
seemed to be aimed at forestalling this. But Kinshasa, more righteous now in
the world's eyes than it was under Mobutu and Kabila Sr, has started girding
its eastern flanks. The fear in Rwanda and Uganda is of a retaliatory attack -
a conflagration when it comes - should Congo continue to gain firm footing.
To these, the refugees have no answers. Instead, talk is rife amongst them of a
conspiracy in Kigali and Kampala to erect a "Tutsi-Hima emporium" over their
land; "La Republique Ituri"; the restoration of Chwezi hegemony, which debuted
in the interlacustrine region in the 14th century.
They know the killers personally. Some say they were schoolmates with Nkunda;
that they know of his movements between Kigali, Kampala, Bukavu and Goma.
Kivu is within quick striking distance of the RPA, a territory outside
Kinshasa's orbit. Their forces frequently deploy on speed boats on Lake Kivu,
crossing to land at the lakeside town of Kalehe in Kivu - between the 100 km
stretch between Goma and Bukavu, the route that Nkunda used when he fled Bukavu
with his forces.
There are already several leads on the ring leaders of the massacres; well-
known commanders responsible for thousands of deaths apiece.
Patrice, once a university student in Bukavu, now stranded in Kampala says: "We
went to school; we had some level of education. We fear that if they know that
we are here, they will follow us. Sometimes they use their women to track us.
There are secret agents who have refugee status."
Kanda, whom The EastAfrican first met two years ago, says he gave up computer
classes after total strangers referred to him by name. He says he has been
followed on the streets.
He was working for a civil rights organisation campaigning against the war.
When he walks out, he does not use the same route back. The Congolese refugees,
under the Association of French Speaking Refugees, ASSOREF, are campaigning for
better treatment. Although belonging to ASSOREF is invitation for hostility,
even rejection by the OPM and the UNHCR, some of their complaints of impunity
may be getting through, for the UNHCR headquarters in Geneva has requested for
direct contact with refugees.
The 80,000 Rwandan refugees living around Rwanda's borders are seen as a
political threat by Kigali. The greater majority is repatriated, some
kidnapped. The range of tactics used to kidnap and dispose of opponents are use
of phony business contacts; infiltration of security organs including the
police - of which an incident in Kisenyi where a refugee was rescued by an
irate crowd, revealed that the police had been bribed by kidnappers.
Fears that poisoning is now being applied are rife but hard to prove, although
the death of one refugee remains suspect.
The departure of former Rwandan ambassador to Kampala, Sagahutu Murash, is said
to be connected to the busting of one such ring by security forces in Uganda.
"Kigali realises what can happen amongst refugees," Amnesty International
Researcher for Central Africa Robert Richard Haavisto says, "which is why they
don't want refugees sitting around their borders."
RLP says that the tactics of refugee-hunters are subtle. They use the ethnic
affinities to blend in with the respective immigration departments. "People
choose nationality as far as it is convenient," Emmanuel Bagenda, the advocacy
officer of the RLP says. "Lack of controls is what makes it easy for people to
switch sides."
To pass as a bona fide citizen, an agent working need only buy a graduated tax
ticket. Says Bagenda: "In Mbarara, they told us the only national ID they had
was the graduated tax ticket. You have many people who go to the district
offices and buy a tax ticket. The authorities are always short of money and
don't ask too many questions."
Gunning down refugees, researchers say, tends to be restricted, although it has
been used to effect in, Nairobi, the killing of former Rwanda Internal Affairs
minister, Seth Sendashonga, in 1998; the murder of two children and near fatal
shooting of their mother - a relative of Habyarimana in Parklands Nairobi in
April, 2002.
Amnesty International says it receives desperate e-mails from Rwandan refugees
in the supposedly safe Western countries saying their lives are in danger. Lomo
says that the tactics of Kigali are ruthless, subtle and professional.
In this milieu, researchers say guilt is not the only reason for execution.
Ethnicity itself is a crime; children guilty by parental association. Said a
researcher, "The regime sees them as a threat that should be dealt with. He who
kills Brutus but does not kill the sons of Brutus will be a target."
Amidst the changed threats to refugee security, there are accusations that the
system is asleep, redolent with corruption - bribery for papers, for
resettlement, and even sale of resettlement to non-refugees seeking greener
pastures. Documentation shows a higher proportion of sexual violence in the
settlements. Accusations of rape against camp commandants have gone
uninvestigated. Murder, arson and loss of property in the camps get incomplete
attention.
Bagenda says that these refugees are victims of a system which no longer
matches modern challenges: "The system deals only with generalised refugee
problems and not individual cases of persecution. If persecutors can come
freely and pursue a refugee, then this ceases to be a country of refuge. The
police treat assaults on refugees as ordinary cases of assault, and do not
consider the very complex political background behind it."
"The majority of the refugees that come to us are alleging insecurity," Stephen
Gonah, UNHCR senior protection officer, said. "Some of them are true; some of
them are not true."
State Minister for Disaster Preparedness, Christine Aporu Amongin, says that
the greater majority of refugees are safe. She denies accusations that
officials in her ministry mistreat refugees or that they demand for sex and
money.
"We have never heard about that," she said. "It is shocking for people to make
such accusations. If there was any threat to the lives of refugees, we would
have heard about it."
"There are people who are out to do damage to our country or to individuals,"
Carlos Twesigomwe, the Commissioner for Disaster Preparedness in the OPM said.
"We have Amnesty International writing reports that are so damaging. But we are
on record as the best hosts for refugees in the region."
Both the minister and the commissioner say that the process of granting status
is done by a technical committee, which eliminates chances of graft. But the
RLP says that status can also be granted prima facie - by authorised
individuals - which would then circumvent the Refugee Eligibility Committee.
The police spokesman, Asuman Mugenyi says that all threats against refugees are
duly investigated. But he says that there are instances in which refugees have
tried to bribe police to get documents that would help them get easy
resettlement.
The expulsion of former UNHCR representative to Kampala, Saidi Sayou, over the
forcible removal of refugees from Kiryandongo, Bagenda says, may have
dispirited both the OPM and the UNHCR, who now "go through the motions" of
looking after refugees; sticking fast to the rules - in the case of Agathe's
mother, Inter-Aid, supposed to dispense assistance, doing nothing even when
Agathe reported her mother's hypertension and acting in the extreme to take her
to Mulago Hospital where she died within three days.
Her daughter too is reporting similar symptoms, but she cannot get medical
attention because the rules say that refugees can only receive assistance in
the camps. Hakim, a Somali-Ethiopian refugee, says he is the victim of a system
that does not function well. At Nakivale settlement camp, he was suspected by
both Ethiopians and Somalians, sceptical of his ethnic and religious dualities
(Christian-Ethiopian mother and Somalian-Muslim father). He says that he was
beaten and nearly drowned, was hospitalised in Mbarara hospital and relocated
to Kampala.
He says he has been stabbed twice, on the chin and in the groin - by Ethiopians
and Somalians who accuse him of spying for either country. He was jailed at one
time but was released on police bond. His entire family was butchered in 1992
when Somalia went up in smoke. He once was candidate for resettlement to the
US, but thinks his resettlement may have passed to someone else. As an urban
refugee, he is prone to police raids for "aliens."
In this light, Haavisto fears that up to 40,000 refugees could be forced back
to Rwanda at the behest of a jittery Kigali, but ultimately, against the 1951
United Nations Convention on Refugees and with the full awareness, by the UNHCR
that it is against regulations.In Kigali itself, asylum seekers are frequently
snatched off the UNHCR gates by security agents, without the commission's
intervention.
The RLP says several parts of this convention are frequently broken. Lomo says
that several cases are not properly handled on allegations that the refugees
are liars. "While it is true some may lie, it is equally true that some are
aliases." But he says that Article 31 of the '51 convention provides for that,
on the understanding that refugees may need to conceal their identity to
protect their lives.
"Contracting state parties shall not penalise refugees and asylum seekers who
use methods and means that may otherwise be unlawful. This includes use of
forged documents and aliases as long as they report it. Surprisingly UNHCR
field staff has this in their work manual but don't refer to it."
The RLP says that the government should consider the political dimensions of
the refugees background. Lomo fears that a too precipitate investigation of war
crimes in eastern Congo may make victims of refugees.
"We would be happy if a prosecutor was careful," Lomo says of the International
Criminal Court. "They are dying for limelight, and that is wrong. The terrain
on the ground is not safe. They have to take time and ensure that the work is
properly done."
But he fears the worst: "The anger, the frustration among sections of Congolese
who feel they are victims may lead to genocide. While the Banyamulenge believe
they are the victims, the other tribes feel they are the real victims; about
three million Congolese have been killed and what has the international
community done? These people feel they were invaded by Uganda and Rwanda but
the international community did nothing to condemn it."

   

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