Goma (Congo, Democratic Republic of)

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    Congo’s Former President Returns Home, Accused of Treason

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    Joseph Kabila was accused of supporting the Rwanda-backed militia M23. Days later he arrived in Goma, a city held by the militia, so he remains out of prosecutors’ reach.A former president of the Democratic Republic of Congo has returned to the Central African country after years in self-imposed exile, according to one of his advisers, days after the country’s Senate accused him of treason.The Senate said the former president, Joseph Kabila, had supported a militia that has captured swaths of Congolese territory this year — an allegation that could lead to his prosecution.Yet he remains beyond the government’s reach, even after returning to his country. The senate voted to prosecute Mr. Kabila, who led Congo for 18 years, in Kinshasa, the capital. For his re-entry into Congo, Mr. Kabila chose Goma, a city 1,000 miles to the east, where the government is powerless.Goma was captured in January by M23, a militia backed by Rwanda, Congo’s neighbor. M23 is the militia Mr. Kabila is accused of supporting.Mr. Kabila’s return to Congo, which leaders of M23 also confirmed, comes as the United States is trying to broker a peace agreement between Rwanda and Congo, and simultaneous minerals deals with both countries. The presence in the country of Mr. Kabila, who still wields considerable influence, could complicate these efforts.In a video address posted on his social media last week, Mr. Kabila accused his successor, President Felix Tshisekedi, of being a dictator.In Congo’s 2018 presidential election, Mr. Kabila’s chosen candidate to replace him decisively lost, and it appeared as if a prominent critic of the president and opposition politician, Martin Fayulu, had won. But amid allegations of widespread fraud, another opposition candidate was declared the winner — Mr. Tshisekedi, who proceeded to enter into a power-sharing agreement with Mr. Kabila’s party.That alliance came to an abrupt halt a year later when Mr. Tshisekedi said sharing power was blocking his agenda for reform.Since then, Mr. Kabila has mostly maintained silence — until this year, when he began signaling his desire to re-enter Congolese politics. His motivation for returning to Congo at this moment is not known, and a spokesman traveling with him did not respond to a request for comment.On his arrival in Goma, Mr. Kabila was given an effusive welcome by M23’s political leader, Corneille Nangaa. Mr. Nangaa, a politician turned rebel who lately dresses in military fatigues and regularly excoriates Mr. Tshisekedi, is the same man who, in a previous political life, was president of Congo’s Independent National Electoral Commission when it first declared Mr. Tshisekedi president. More

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      Sexual Violence Against Children Soars in Congo, U.N. Group Says

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      UNICEF accused “armed men” of raping scores of children in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has been ravaged by conflict recently.Sexual violence against children in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo has soared in recent weeks, the United Nations Children’s Fund said on Thursday, as ethnic tensions and disputes over land and mineral resources fuel fighting in the country. The organization, known as UNICEF, reported that health care facilities in Goma and the surrounding areas had documented 170 cases of children having been raped in a single week, between Jan. 27 and Feb. 2.The health facilities reported 572 cases of rape that week, compared to an average of 95 cases in the prior weeks, said Lianne Gutcher, UNICEF’s communication chief for Congo. She added that the violence was being perpetrated by “armed men” belonging to all parties in the conflict.The aid group Save the Children reported similar trends of children being victimized across eastern Congo.Rebels, said to be backed by Rwanda, have been seizing huge tracts of the Democratic Republic of Congo at lightning speed. In a month, they have routed Congo’s underequipped army several times and caused more than half a million people to flee. In late January, they rebels captured Goma, a Congolese city of three million people along the Rwandan border.Rwanda’s president has denied that his country is arming the rebels or that his troops are in Congo.The rebels, known as M23, say they are protecting ethnic Tutsis, the minority group massacred in a 1994 genocide, some of whom also live in Congo. Experts, however, say the group is after Congo’s rare minerals.Captured soldiers of the Democratic Republic of Congo aboard vehicles outside the city of Goma last month as armed rebel soldiers walk by.Guerchom Ndebo for The New York Times“In North and South Kivu provinces, we are receiving horrific reports of grave violations against children by parties to the conflict, including rape and other forms of sexual violence at levels surpassing anything we have seen in recent years,” UNICEF’s executive director, Catherine Russell, said in a statement. She added that medical workers were running out of drugs used to reduce the risk HIV infection after an assault.Save the Children said it had evidence that 18 girls were sexually violated in South Kivu Province, and that a 16-year-old girl was killed resisting armed men.“One mother recounted to our staff how her six daughters, the youngest just 12 years old, were systematically raped by armed men while searching for food,” she said.The rebel group’s leaders have vowed to bring order and security to the areas it controls.Elian Peltier More

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      The Overlooked Crisis in Congo: ‘We Live in War’

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      Artillery boomed, shaking the ground, as a couple scurried through the streets of Saké, their possessions balanced on their heads, in the embattled east of the Democratic Republic of Congo.At a crossroads, they passed a giant poster of Congo’s president, Felix Tshisekedi, who is standing for re-election on Dec. 20. “Unity, Security, Prosperity,” read the slogan. They hurried along.“Our children were born in war. We live in war,” Jean Bahati, his face beaded with sweat, said as he paused for breath. It was the fifth time that he and his wife had been forced to flee, he said. “We’re so sick of it.”They joined 6.5 million people displaced by war in eastern Congo, where a conflict that has dragged on for nearly three decades, stoking a vast humanitarian crisis that by some estimates has claiming over six million lives, is now lurching into a volatile new phase.Making sense of the mayhem is not easy. Over 100 armed groups and several national armies are vying for supremacy across a region of lakes, mountains and rainforests slightly bigger than Florida. Meddlesome foreign powers covet its vast reserves of gold, oil and coltan, a mineral used to make cellphones and electric vehicles. Corruption is endemic. Massacres and rape are common.For all that, aid groups struggle to draw attention to the suffering in a country of about 100 million people, even when the numbers affected dwarf those of other crises.“There’s a sense of fatalism about Congo,” said Cynthia Jones, the World Food Program head in eastern Congo. “People seem to think ‘that’s just the way it is’.”However this latest phase of the war, which began in earnest two years ago, is drawn in unusually clear lines.On one side is the M23, a well-organized but ruthless rebel group that the United States and the United Nations say is backed by Rwanda, Congo’s eastern neighbor, which is one-hundredth the size of Congo. (Rwanda denies any link.) Since October, the M23 has seized the main roads into Goma, the regional capital, as well as the hilltops overlooking Saké, 10 miles to the west.People fleeing fighting this month pass an election poster for Congo’s president, Felix Tshisekedi, in Saké. Parts of eastern Congo are so unstable that voting has been canceled there.An aerial view of the regional capital of Goma. Since October, the militia group known as M23 has seized the main roads into Goma.On the other side is Congo’s army, whose troops are notoriously ill-disciplined — even as fighting raged near Saké last week, drunken soldiers careened through its streets. But their strength is boosted by two new allies.One is the Wazalendo, Swahili for patriots, a coalition of once-rival militias that the government cobbled together to repel M23, despite the fighters’ reputation for factionalism and brutality.The second is a force of about 1,000 Romanian mercenaries, many formerly with the French Foreign Legion, deployed around Goma and Saké. If M23 tries to seize the city — as it briefly did once, in 2012 — the Romanians are charged with defending it. “They are the last line of defense,” Romuald, a retired French officer advising the Congolese military, said at a lakeside restaurant in Goma. He asked to omit his surname to protect his security.Amid all that, an election is taking place. More