SOS from DR Congo

An email in my inbox titled “SOS”, catch my attention, despite my attempt to ignore the outside world during my holiday. It starts with:

“…you may have been informed about my kidnapping last week by armed people in Rutshuru, I was released and I am back now in Goma, even if security is fragile now and everything can happen.”

It is Ilot, who is the Executive Director of Congo Men’s Network, and also a dear friend. We last met in Stockholm in November, just after yet another attempt on his life, and he had been forced to evacuate his family to a neighbouring country. Despite all the dangers both present and past, Ilot firmly believes in working for peace. A year ago when I landed with the UN World Food Programme plane in North Kivu, it was a stranger who met me at the airport, and dedicated many days of his time to my research without ever asking for compensation. Now it is a friend, who is a living beacon of hope for human rights and peace in the conflict zone.

Ilot and I together at UNICEF, Goma together with the officer for SGBV

-When I was a child I was wounded by a grenade, and lost most of my eyesight. Then I had two options; the first one was to join the armed group so I could revenge what I faced and saw. But after a while I realised that, after some time, violence is just reoccurring. I was born in a village called Ruthsuru, it is in the most conflict torn region in the DRC. I decided to just work for peace building, because it was the only way I could help my village to find peace. 

North Kivu

It is this region, of the eastern part of the DR Congo, and North Kivu that Ilot is talking about now, that is in urgent need of assistance:

-I have personally been in the fighting zones and witnessed sufferings of villagers during this period. Two of our offices on the ground cannot function, and all our community facilitators are staying now in camps here in Goma. This message is a call for help for our brothers and sisters who are in urgent need now. The collected donations will go directly to beneficiaries as non food items.

Together with young children from the village of Kibumba, who are now displaced together with their families due to the violence in the region.

Ilot is a trusted human rights officer, and know by many of the internationals working and visiting Goma and North Kivu. He has also himself used his local connections to work on the ground with the needs of the locals, his family, friends and country men. The organisations working on the ground are necessary for peace building, and for the daily struggle of survival in the region, as well as to report on the developments in the region on the ground. One of the villages now suffering displacement is Kibumba where I interviewed child soldiers together with Ilot last year, with the support of PEREX and Congo's Mens Network and their local facilitators. 

- The first organisation I applied to was PEREX. I was accepted and started working as a Peace Building officer, then one day I discovered that there is so many excombatants, and so many were men. So I started Congo’s Mens Network that is active in sexual gender based violence prevention. We believe it also important to focus on women, because whilst most ex-combatants are men, the children are the most vulnerable group and the women as well affect the situation in the family. Women they have specific problems other than men, and also we were thinking of children. What can we do for them? If you go to the streets you will find that most of the children they are child soldiers, and you  can see that they are not receiving any help, their families are struggling to support them. Those children that we left behind, what are their future now?

Child soldiers and SGBV victims in the village of Kibumba, outside the house of PEREX-CV in the community.

A year later, our research shows that at least 75% of those children we interviewed expressed determination to return to the life of the rebel groups. It means that without the assistance in reintegration and rehabilitation they will be returning to a life of child soldiers. And this is why the work of Ilot, is so important. If the children have no choice but to take part in the conflict, how can it ever end?

-I still believe that when you recruit a child it is something like putting an end to his life. He will be traumatized all his life. Yes it is very critical the situation of child soldiers. Children in general here in our country are suffering, but child soldiers have another problem where they are first of all victims of discrimination in society. They are not really taken into account as other children. Even for parents it is a little bit difficult to understand that it is possible to recover the family that the child had before. For the children they need really so much attention and advocacy for them because they are really discriminated.

Last year I asked Ilot: What kind of assistance would you like from the international community?

-We have to be responsible for our own and ask for support when we have done the first step. What I have been doing for seven years was not for my own interest first. And as you can notice for seven years I did not get any salary, all of us are volunteers, to not get paid, that is my daily life. I know how to volunteer for the common interest. I think that is my own motivation and I hope that one day I will be granted for that. So practically we have so many problems, and in such cases we usually give the opportunity to the person and the donor who want to give to choose, and find what they want to give that can be helpful for us.

But now Ilot is asking, the man who does not even get a salary for his daily work, is asking for help. And it is therefore imperative that he receives help, help for those in Congo who cannot themselves ask for help. Help them, you can!

Congo is chaos, according to a high ranking UN official I met in the region of North Kivu, an assessment now even more accurate due to the accelerated violence in the region. So it is important that we act, that we care and that we help!

What defines a selfless, brave and inspiring person? For me, it is all personified in Ilot, or Ilot Alphonse Muthaka.

Help here!

"I see the soldiers every day"

“This day was like the 1948 war. Around 1 000 soldiers came down on the hills and surrounded our tents.”

It is midday and we are standing out in the sun, in the middle of the Jordan Valley. It is above 30 degrees Celsius. Yet there is no option for shade, as we are talking to one of the families who have been forced to leave their land and had their tent demolished. On the 30^th of June there was a large military exercise in the area, and thirteen families were forced to evacuate for 24 hours. Ibrahim Fakir’s family is one of four who have not been allowed to return to their homes after the military exercise, but have nonetheless done so through the support of the community.

“First in the morning there were ten jeeps full of soldiers, and three bulldozers. They gave us two hours to collect our stuff, before they demolished our home. Then they told us to leave, and we have not been allowed to come back. I am still afraid they will come back and damage my tent. I can see no future for us, only the end.”

We also meet Khalled Sahare, who was forced to leave with his family for 24 hours. As we sit in his tent we see soldier after soldier walking by, climbing the hill and disappearing in the horizon. It is a strange sight, with the soldiers walking in the middle of the Bedouin community, a Palestinian tractor driving in the mist of the soldiers.

”I see the soldiers every day, they come every day. I ask why they tell me to go away from here, and they say ‘we will do training every day.’ Where will I go? This is my area; this is where my father is, where my children are, and my tent.”

“I want peace and to live here in peace with my children, but every day the soldiers come here to train for war.”

When we express our concern for the children, and how they are affected by the proximity of the soldiers he says: “You ask me a question, but you already know the answer. The soldiers come here every day and they train here with their guns. You know how our children are feeling. It is the same as your children would feel.”

Photo credit: Simon Ming/ EAPPI

Next we visit Yasser, who is a little more than a child at the age of 20, but already scarred for life and tired of telling his story. “Well I was grazing my camels, when I heard the shooting. Then suddenly I was shot in the breast, but it was too far away I could not see the soldier who shot me. First they took me to the military camp to check my blood pressure, then I went to the hospital in Nablus, afterwards they took me to a hospital in Ramallah where I had surgery.”

Yasser pulls up his shirt and show us his scars. Besides a ten centimeter long surgical scar, there is another visible wound of the bullet. Meanwhile a group of soldiers approach the tents, and we go out to make our presence known. On the opposite hill we see Yasser’s 20 camels, and we ask if he has gone back to his job.  He says: “yes I still graze them in the same fields, there is nowhere else to take them.”

To go back to face the same dangers day after day, always carrying the reminders of what can happen, is in my eyes rather courageous. It takes determination and makes me wonder how he sees the future. Yasser does not answer, but some of the other men do:

“It is very, very black. Every year is worse than the year before. They took all of the water, they will not allow us to use our springs, and they take our sheep and our tents. They take everything.”  

“There is no vision for the future. Nothing. In the nearby settlement of Maskiyyot they are allowed to build houses, but here they do not allow us to build a tent.”