The International Centre for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) has urged the Congolese government to vet and prosecute former militia leaders instead of appointing them to high-ranking positions in the newly integrated national army.
“If the Democratic Republic of the Congo [DRC] is to achieve a lasting and sustainable peace, it must not appoint individuals to the army when there is evidence that they may be responsible for serious abuses,” said Juan Méndez, president of the ICTJ and United Nations Special Adviser to the Secretary General on the Prevention of Genocide.
He issued the statement in New York this week, just days after a military court in the DRC capital, Kinshasa, sentenced 21 soldiers to death for atrocities they committed in the east of the country.
The court handed down the sentences only a few weeks after the government commissioned four suspected human rights abusers as army generals.
The four were leaders of militia groups that allegedly terrorised, abused and killed civilians in the south and east of the country until a peace deal was reached in 2003. Under the agreement, former rebels could be assimilated into the national army.
Last week two other militia leaders, Jean-Pierre Guena, also known as Shinja Shinja (meaning “throat-cutter” in Swahili) and Bakanda Bakoka, both from the southeastern Katanga Province, demanded military appointments in exchange for commitments to disarm their groups.
In an interview with UN-supported Radio Okapi, Guena threatened to burn down north Katanga if he received a rank lower than general, the ICTJ said.
It added that the alleged crimes of the former militia and aspiring generals compared with those of the 21 rank and file soldiers who received death sentences for looting, raping, disobeying orders and other offences.
Commenting on the trial, the official in charge of the human rights section of the UN mission in the DRC, Sonia Bakar, said: “The trial was fast, everything was done on one day while there should have been a thorough investigation into the matter.”