Malnutrition is one of the main causes of death in prisons in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), according to a special United Nations report obtained by AFP on Thursday.
The study by the UN peacekeeping mission in the DRC (Monuc) found that more than 50 prisoners had died of starvation since March this year.
Monuc said it had registered an ”alarming number of deaths of prisoners in several penitentiaries where national and international norms are flouted”.
UN experts visited about a dozen prisons and found that at least 50 deaths were directly caused by malnutrition.
In the main prison of Mbuji-Mayi in the central Kasai Orientale region, 18 detainees had died since March, with a ”frightful record” of 11 in the month of November. UN experts found 40 prisoners suffering from advanced malnutrition in the jail, the report said.
In prisons in Kananga, also in Kasai Orientale, and in Matadi (Bas-Congo, western DRC), 18 prisoners had died as a result of malnutrition.
If they do not actually starve to death, the weakened prisoners succumb to other illnesses aggravated by malnutrition, experts said, lambasting prison authorities of failing to provide adequate food.
”Authorities in Maniema [east-central DRC] have not supplied food to the central prison in Kindu since the outbreak of the last war on Congolese soil, in August 1998,” the report said.
Sometimes individuals or charities make up for the state’s deficiency, and ”in a few rare establishments” the prisoners themselves get to work on growing food and raising livestock to ensure at least a minimum self-sufficiency, the report noted.
Apart from the ”extremely worrying” number of deaths and malnourished prisoners, the report also expressed concern at an ”abnormal” number of people in custody and severe overcrowding in the jails, which can often be blamed on incompetent management.
The report cited the example of a detainee sentenced to five months in prison in May 2004 who was still behind bars in December in the central prison of Kisangani in Province-Orientale, in the north-east DRC.
The experts called on the country’s leadership to make rapid improvements to prison conditions, in particular by developing useful collective work for detainees and systematic procedures for release on parole. — Sapa-AFP