Subcommittee on International Human Rights Committee on May 22nd, 2018

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Welcome, colleagues, the 109th meeting of the Subcommittee on International Human Rights of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development. Today we begin our study hearing testimony in regard to the human rights situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Our first witness is Yolande Bouka, who is a postdoctoral fellow at the Sié Chéou-Kang Center for International Security and Diplomacy at the University of Denver.

Ms. Bouka, if you would like to go ahead, we've allotted 10 minutes for your opening remarks.

[Dr. Yolande Bouka, Postdoctoral Fellow, Sié Chéou-Kang Center for International Security and Diplomacy, University of Denver, As an Individual]

Good afternoon, everyone. All protocols observed. Thank you for having me today.

In addition to the introduction, I'm also a Canadian-based colour and policy analyst, and I will be a visiting assistant professor at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University this coming fall. I also happen to be the co-director of the Rift Valley Institute's Great Lakes region course, which discusses some of these issues in Rwanda, Burundi, the DRC, and Uganda. The course starts in the first week of June, so if anyone is interested, I invite you to enrol.

I used to work for the Institute for Security Studies, a think tank based in South Africa that looks into human security across sub-Saharan Africa, and I was the lead researcher for the Great Lakes region in the Nairobi office.

We are now about six or seven months away from the 2018 presidential, legislative, and provincial elections that are supposed to be taking place at the end of this year, in December. They are supposed to take place two years later than they were initially slotted. President Kabila's term was supposed to end officially in December of 2016, but citing issues with finances, resources, and security, he decided to stay. For most analysts who followed the region before that, this is something that we expected. We kept talking about a slippage of constitutional mandates. Unlike President Kagame in Rwanda, where it was quite easy to change the constitution, President Kabila understood that he was not in a position to bring together a coalition of politicians who would be willing to back amending the constitution.

The DRC has long been a country that has had instability, particularly since the fall of Mobutu, when we saw the collapse of order—not law and order but simply order—the proliferation of armed groups, waves of displacement across the region, and an increased vulnerability of the population.

As for many countries on the continent in the sub-region, election season is often accompanied by tensions, and weak governance and institutions facilitate the return of violence. In the case of the DRC, Kabila's refusal to step down and to hold elections as scheduled has led to tensions, protests, and a resurgence of armed mobilization.

At the moment, 5,500 people per day are displaced on average due to various sources of insecurity in the country, and I'll talk a little bit more about them.

There are approximately half a million refugees in the DRC from other countries in the region, including Burundi, and you also have a wave that goes the other way, with Congolese fleeing to Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda, because of insecurity.

According to the UN, the DRC is currently a category 3 humanitarian situation. There are only three other countries that are in the same category—Yemen, Iraq, and Syria. There are full-blown wars in those three countries and not DRC, just to give you a sense of the scale of what is taking place there.

There are about 13 million Congolese who are vulnerable to the violence but also to what happens once they're displaced, food insecurity and so forth.

I'd like to identify three nodes of human rights concerns in the DRC at the moment. First is the government's response to protests.

The government has banned protests across the country, and this is in violation of their responsibility with regard to the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, for instance, or even UN documents. They keep saying officially that protestors and civil society organizations have the right to protest, but in reality, when protests actually take place in various parts of the country, local authorities, the police and so forth, get involved and try to stop protests quite violently.

Who's involved in the crackdown of protests? Well, you have various branches of the security sector. You have the police, intelligence services, the presidential guards, and the army. In some cases, Human Rights Watch has reported that former M23 members were also recruited from Uganda and Rwanda to return to the DRC to participate in the repression of protests in the DRC.

If you're looking to try to figure out who you should identify as the source of human rights violations, you're going to want to look at these various branches of the security sector. When they crack down on protests, they arrest people and harass people, but they also kill people in quite large numbers.

If you follow the DRC closely, you'll know that January 2015 was one of the first times when we had mass protests in the streets in Kinshasa. Most of the instability in the past decade and a half or 20 years has been in the eastern Congo. This is the part in which we used to see a lot of violence, but that has changed. The fact that there are numerous protests in Kinshasa for the first time since Mobutu fell is something that people should be concerned about. The government is not sure how to respond to them and therefore it responds with violence.

Of course, the second note I want to talk about is the resurgence of armed rebellions and the proliferation of armed groups, not only in eastern Congo but also in regions such as the Kasai, which was usually relatively calm compared to the eastern Congo. That has a lot to do with Kabila's refusal to step down. A lot of these groups have been politicized, taking sides on whether they are siding with Kabila or against Kabila, and they have discourses arguing that Kabila is not the legitimate president in Kinshasa and that that is why they're rebelling.

Of course, there's also frustration with local authority. I think it's important to look at the multiple dynamics of why these armed groups are operating. There are economic reasons, obviously. There are frustrations with Kinshasa, but there are also a lot of frustrations that are locally based, and understanding the relationship between local governance and these armed groups is quite important.

There are many regions that it is important to take note of. In the northeastern part of the DRC is Beni, where you've had the ADF, a Ugandan-based rebel group that has found refuge or is now operating in the northern part of the DRC. They're engaged in confrontations with the FARDC and also with the UN forces.

There is the Kasai region, where they've had a rebellion since last year, mostly due to one of their leaders being assassinated by government forces. While the initial rebellion was a little more organized in the first few months, since the assassination of the rebel leader, the group has fragmented and actually has been one of the major sources of displacement in the country.

There is Uvira, and one of the reasons there is more violence in Uvira goes to my third point. There are regional dynamics of instability in the Great Lakes region in general. As most of you know, Burundi has had instability since 2014 and mostly 2015. President Nkurunziza's refusal to step down as President of Burundi and to run for an additional term has led to instability and the emergence of armed groups RED-Tabara and Forebu, which are now operating out of eastern Congo in the Uvira region. That has created instability for a variety of reasons. The first one is the fact that Burundian forces and FARDC are involved in covert operations in the region to try to suppress the rebellion and the fact that because these armed groups have difficulties returning to Burundi, they are now involved in looting, in banditry activities in the region, and also in trying to find alliances with other armed groups in the region.

When you look at these three nodes of instability, you realize that it is quite difficult to pinpoint what the human rights conditions are in the DRC. There are various sources, but with the electoral process, you're likely to see more violence and more instability. People are going to take opportunities to claim political agendas, and with that comes an increase in displacement. People don't necessarily die of armed violence, but there are consequences of displacements once they are displaced.

I will leave it at that, and I'm open to questions.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Thank you very much, Madam Bouka.

Now we go to Mr. Reid for seven minutes.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

With regard to displaced persons, I'd really like to get my head around that. Given the huge numbers, it strikes me that this is where the primary humanitarian crisis lies. You mentioned that there are 5,500 people displaced daily. Should we interpret that as meaning 5,500 more people will be displaced tomorrow versus today, or are some people able to return home, thereby offsetting that number?

[Dr. Yolande Bouka]

It's difficult to tell. I get the numbers from ISS and the UN.

The country is big. People will return home. I think you should take that as an average of the number of people who end up moving, who are displaced from one place to another, and who go back home. However, what often happens is that what you call “home” is sometimes a place you have been for only two years as a result of previous violence. As well, what happens is that people who settle in temporary or informal settlements have to be relocated to another place as they follow the different patterns of violence.

I wouldn't be able to tell you directly if you should assume that some people are returning home in that 5,000 or if it's new displacement, but whatever the type of displacement, it means that if people develop networks for 6 to 12 months, even if they are not home, they've found a way to get food, some sort of security, and some sort of permanence. This uprooting, particularly if it's caused by violence or insecurity, is a challenge even if they return home. Returning home often means finding somebody occupying your land and your house and trying to recreate those networks.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Effectively, then, in some situations you can't return home—or to wherever the previous place was—without displacing somebody else. You have effectively a game of musical chairs in which there are more people than there are places for them. That's very crude, but does that essentially describe the situation?

[Dr. Yolande Bouka]

You would find there are more people than places in countries like Rwanda and Burundi, where land is very scarce. However, in the case of eastern Congo, you do have land conflicts. If you are gone for a couple of years, in some cases people will leave a male behind to continue with agricultural activities, but if you have completely abandoned your property, somebody will come in, and that's where you become displaced. It doesn't necessarily mean that this person you displace when you come home doesn't have a place to stay, but there will be issues with claims of ownership.

Land disputes are prevalent across the region, particularly with regard to getting land titles. People don't necessarily have the titles, so it can be difficult to prove that the land belongs to you. Depending on how long you've been gone, this can definitely be an issue.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

I was in another country, Eritrea, where I had a chance to chat with people who were explaining to me how they deal with land use. The traditional patterns have held up much better there, despite the horrible war they went through with Ethiopia a few decades back.

As far as I can see, the issues relate to land in some cases being useful at one time of the year but not at other times of the year, so that you have mutual rights and effectively what we would think of in our law as rights-of-way. All of these things are negotiated orally and retained in a non-written form, which is quite robust, but it's only robust as long as you're at peace with your neighbours and you don't have some outside authority driving people away. I think the destruction of that would have been very damaging there.

Does that describe a little bit of what's happening, or is it totally different?

[Dr. Yolande Bouka]

It's quite different. What you have is communities trying to gain control of territory, and I wish I had a map. I can share that with the committee at a later time. There's a wonderful map that has been put together by the Congo Research Group. What they show is control of territory of armed groups and then sometimes the responses by local defence groups. There are claims about who the land belongs to. If a particular group manages to get the upper hand and you fall victim to displacement, it's not about trying to negotiate using the land for part of the year. There are claims that 100 years ago your people came from Burundi and Rwanda and they've managed to reclaim that particular territory.

When you have these types of dynamics, it's quite difficult to negotiate co-ownership of the land. In that particular region, these negotiations don't really take place. In addition, there's the fact that part of these local defences and these armed groups are benefiting from the land itself. They often want to settle and use that land to sustain their fighters.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Very briefly, as an historian I always look to analogies from other situations. There are a number of cases where a military group effectively is divorced from the land where it started out. A great example from central Africa is the German army under Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck and his Askaris in the First World War, who were chased off of German East Africa. I think they were actually in what is now the Congo for part of the time, living off the land as a way of sustaining themselves as a fighting force. From the point of view of the local population, though, that was a humanitarian disaster. Is that roughly analogous to the behaviour of some of these groups?

[Dr. Yolande Bouka]

It is for some of these groups—a group like the FDLR, for instance, which originates from Rwanda. The FDLR's origins and dynamics and size are quite disputed, but they are perceived as a foreign force. They will try to integrate and gain control over certain communities. They've changed location and they've changed their governing styles over the past 20 years. Depending on the relationship they have with local groups, sometimes they are able to integrate those groups and integrate their communities quite harmoniously, particularly if they share the same ethnic groups.

In other cases, it's not the case. You do have some of these groups that are not indigenous to the region. RED-Tabara, for instance, comes from Burundi. They have to negotiate their space, not only with the local population but also with the other armed groups. And when we talked about “armed groups”, it's very loosely defined. Some of them are groups of 50 fighters. Others are a couple of thousand. Those dynamics are also important to take into consideration.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Mr. Fragiskatos, you have seven minutes.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

Thank you for being here today.

I want to cite for you what Human Rights Watch said about the devastation of this conflict. They called it “the world’s deadliest since World War II”, and said that six million people have died over “conflict-related causes” over the past two decades. That is a difficult number, to say the least, to process.

When they say that six million people have died due to conflict-related causes, what does that mean, exactly? What does that entail?

[Dr. Yolande Bouka]

You often talk about death in excess of violence. You have people who fall victim to massacres or who are killed in crossfire. But when you talk about in excess or conflict-related causes, you often talk about the fact that you're displaced, meaning that you're malnourished and you're vulnerable to diseases. All these things are involved in that definition of “conflict-related causes”. They're not displaced because of a famine. They're not displaced because of a drought. They're displaced because there are armed groups in their region that make them and their family vulnerable. They have to go somewhere else.

I'm based in Toronto. If I had to move today, I would just go to Montreal. My family is there. I have a little bit of family everywhere. In a lot of these places, their families and communities, particularly in rural areas, are right there. They have to move all together. Where do you go? You can't necessarily call someone and say, “Hey, I'm going to take to the road with my family and come and crash with you for a few days.” Oftentimes you pack whatever you have. You don't have the networks and resources to be appropriately housed or nourished. That puts people at great risk of vulnerability. Oftentimes it's the opportunistic diseases that are developed in refugee camps or makeshift informal settlements and so forth.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

Whenever we've had witnesses come and testify about a conflict that brings about enormous human rights consequences and suffering, whether it's in sub-Saharan Africa or elsewhere, there's this whole point about the fragmentation of authority within a state. There is a central government, at least on paper. In addition to the central government, you have a number of local actors who in many ways act as if they are a state. In fact, they form the same sorts of structures, their own security forces, and their own leadership dictating what those security forces do, ordering them to carry out all sorts of brutal assaults against a local population in order to maintain authority.

Can you speak about the extent of this phenomenon in the Congo and how it's exacerbated the conflict? I ask that question with this is mind. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, there are 70 armed groups, or more than that, operating in eastern Congo alone. I know you mentioned that Kinshasa has now come into play. I mean, you can answer the question however you like, but I'm talking about that figure itself, which you say is actually an underestimation. Can you speak about the importance of that and about looking at the conflict through that lens?

[Dr. Yolande Bouka]

Absolutely. Actually, since Kabila's refusal to leave office, it's gone from approximately 70 armed groups all the way to about 120. If you want a good source, there's the Kivu security tracker, an organization that is monitoring the security situation in the Kivus.

I agree with you, and for a variety of reasons. Some of these groups are remnants of groups that emerged in the 1990s following Rwanda's invasion of the DRC and emerged in the sense of a need to defend themselves from invaders. What's happened now is that it's become an economy. Being a fighter has become an economy, first, because during the 1990s and early 2000s, when they started negotiating, if you were in an armed group you had the potential of being integrated into the FARDC, the national army. For many of these groups, it became an imperative to swell their numbers in order to be considered an important player in the second Congo war.

However, you also had the fact that Kinshasa has always been very detached from eastern Congo. Mobutu had no interest in having a road that connects Kinshasa all the way to Goma. He wanted to maintain Kinshasa, and whatever was going on in eastern Congo was not really his priority. Subsequent governments have done very similar things, maintaining at arm's length whatever is going on in eastern Congo. That has led a lot of the local population to feel they have to turn to the local leaders. A lot of these local leaders who have ties to Kinshasa, unfortunately or fortunately, also have ties to mining companies, are trying to get their hands on mining concessions to make money on the side, and use armed groups sometimes to secure their financial interests, to gain territory from other people. These networks of governance at the local level are quite important. At one point you have some armed groups who will ally themselves for a particular purpose, to gain a particular political agenda, and that political alliance six months later is null and void, and these groups have realigned themselves with other politician-related armed groups.

It's something that is very, very important to note. In fact, if you followed what happened in the Kasai, with the assassination of two UN investigators, you would know that the investigation by RFI and other people who went to see what happened revealed their assassination was paid for by some of these local government people, who did not want the UN and westerners to know exactly what was going on. Often we point the finger at Kinshasa for some of this violence. Kinshasa has no interest in really securing the region, and it is to blame for a lot of the security concerns, but a lot of the root causes of these security dynamics are actually regionally born.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

You have about 30 seconds.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

With 30 seconds, I wonder if you could integrate a response into any question that touches on what I'm about to ask. You don't have to answer it now.

What does this conflict actually boil down to? I'm hearing concerns about corruption, populations feeling alienated from the central government, problems with the rule of law. If you could get into the real drivers of the conflict, either with other colleagues who might ask you a question in that direction or through something in addition to what you've presented here today, that would be very helpful.

[Dr. Yolande Bouka]

Okay.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Go ahead and answer that question. I'll just adopt it as the “any time—

[Dr. Yolande Bouka]

That's a really hard question to answer.

If you look at a lot of the reports issued by various organizations monitoring this situation, you will notice that they tell you there are various recommendations. There is an issue of governance and rule of law.

One the biggest problems in the DR Congo, I think, is this ongoing impunity. Now, you have impunity on a variety of levels. The first one, of course, was during the first and second Congo wars. People were not held accountable for the massacres they engaged in or for the humanitarian law violations they engaged in among themselves. Instead, in order to promote peace, what they ended up doing was integrating militias into a national army. That became almost a reward: you fight; you are willing to negotiate; we integrate you.

Within the very army of the DR Congo, you have thousands of people who are war criminals, who have been rewarded with government positions in order to maintain the peace. This is one of the challenges. What that does is it corrupts the professionalism of the army, even though it wasn't great to begin with following the fall of Mobutu.

It also brings a mentality in the minds of other armed groups that if maybe they engage in similar practices, they will also be rewarded in the same way.

The second part is that people don't trust the government to respond to their security and social needs, so they look to local authorities for the provision of these services, and that leads to a decentralization of authority. If it's done in order to develop a federal system, that's one thing. But the process is very ad hoc. They say, “Look, the federal government is not providing us with security. They're sending the military to Beni and they're not sending anyone here. We will then create our local militias to protect ourselves.”

A lot of times, these local groups are developed with the intent of protecting themselves and protecting their communities, but then you have to feed them, provide weapons for them. The illicit networks in which these people engage, in order to be able to protect themselves, then also bring in other dynamics of being involved with people who are not so benevolent in their intentions.

There's a regional context in which the DRC finds itself. Kasai and Kinshasa aside, the Kivu region is also a place where countries like Rwanda are benefiting from the instability for economic purposes. For a very long time, the Rwandan government was fomenting dissent in the region to enable them to go in and exploit mineral resources in the region. Now that they've been called out and have had some sanctions against them, they use other means to continue.

Just recently, there was a confrontation between the Rwandan government and Congolese forces in the Virunga region. If you follow the region, you'll know that Virunga park has become a place where people are getting kidnapped. Kidnapping is a great source of revenue for armed groups in trying to get control over the region. There's a dispute between the two countries.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Ms. Hardcastle needs to go, but that was too good a question to leave sitting so....

[Dr. Yolande Bouka]

I could go on and on.

[Cheryl Hardcastle, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Yes, and you can.

I guess my question was surrounding the drivers of conflict. I think that if you had kept talking, you probably would have got to these, too.

I'm wondering about who benefits from sowing conflict in these regions. I don't know if there are these local groups.... Should we be thinking of places like Rwanda and Uganda, and corporate interests?

You can just keep going. Use my time and riff on that a bit.