Uvira, October 13, 2020

Concerns: reaction to the Declaration of His Excellency Bishop Sebastien-Joseph MUYENGO MULOMBE, Bishop of the Diocese of Uvira in Uvira / DRC in the Municipality of Minembwe and the installation of its animators.

Your Excellency Bishop,

At the outset, as a Christian I greet you in the name of Jesus Christ and peace be with all of us and to the people of the highlands of Fizi, Uvira, Mwenga who have suffered the throes of an unjust war for almost four years.

My reaction to your statement given in Kinshasa on October 1, 2020, will consist first of all in circumscribing the region concerned by your statement and expressing my points of view as and when I analyse it.

Highland region, called the Itombwe Highlands.

The region is a strip of land stretching from north to south straddling four administrative territories of Uvira, Mwenga / Itombwe and Fizi and a small part of Walungu (Kahya) for at least 200km; its ridges form the dividing line of the waters of the basins of the Ruzizi plain by several rivers in the east which take their sources there, on the one hand and those of the basin of the rivers Elila and Ulindi to the west , on the other hand.

This landlocked region is one of the highest extended altitudes of the DRC or even the tropical inhabited world, some peaks sometimes reaching nearly 3,500 m above sea level on some peaks and night temperatures in the dry season sometimes reach -5 ° C in some parts.

Apart from these physical characteristics which make it a natural region, there is also a population made up of Banyamulenge herders practicing agriculture complementary to herding, the bafulero, the babembe mainly farmers, hunters and to a certain extent the Banyindu. I will spare you another controversy around the gradual occupation of people around the 1900s to this day of these hostile lands because of their harsh, cold mountain climate once a predilection for wild animals including lions. From childhood memory, as the son of a shepherd, I saw a vestige of a hunted lioness, accused of having devoured, again our cows, around 1963 in Rugezi in the Chiefdom of Kaziba, still our cows today decimated, this time, by human savagery.

Land hostile to agriculture but with the savannah part conducive to breeding which explains the late arrival of farmers; Thus the MILIMA Group, a local NGO including Müller Ruhimbika, a young national of the prestigious higher institute for rural development, ISDR / Bukavu, succeeded in introducing new seeds adapted to potatoes and maize in the 1990s which will make it more viable more in addition to breeding.

From local veterinary service sources verified by us in 2011, 170,000 doses intended for the FAO cow vaccination campaign were not enough for a herd estimated at 210,000 head. From this we can deduce that within 10 years the herd would have exceeded double and estimated at more than 500,000 cows. These animals belonged mainly to the Banyamulenge and to a lesser extent, to the Bafulero. More than half today are wiped out by the unheard-of cruelty of armed groups.

The Municipality of Minembwe, let’s talk about it Excellency Mgr,

This common object of controversy of all passions is one of the Communes and cities created by the decree of June 13, 2013, a suspension of which was decided later for lack of means for their implementation and some technical difficulties, at the national level, me it seems, linked to the limits which had to be corrected by the competent services of the Congolese State.

It should be recalled that Minembwe, as an agglomeration to be raised into a Commune, had been unanimously proposed to the provincial assembly of South Kivu by the deputies of the electoral district of Fizi all from the Babembe community. The document exists.

As can be seen today in the speeches hostile to its installation of the current provincial assembly, the same ethnic reasons which presided over its rejection by the former team of this provincial assembly obeying the principle of “the same causes produce the same effects ”, persist and sign. From now on, the Municipality is considered as land to be given to foreigners who are the Banyamulenge.

Bishop,

At the various stages of this process, the national authorities decide to trust and take into account the initial proposal of the provincial deputies of Fizi, accused of all the evils today of having committed a mistake of granting land to “foreigners”.

Subsequently, 2018 the power of the time decided to lift this suspension for some entities of South Kivu by the Tshibala decree n ° 18/020 of May 30, 2018 of the provisions of the decrees conferring the status of cities and towns to certain agglomerations. Four entities in South Kivu namely Uvira, Kamituga and Baraka as towns and the Commune of Minembwe are made effective in this decree, the mayors of cities alone will be installed and the Commune left at the bottom. An already suspicious approach that borders on unfair treatment of these four entities. To qualify this decision at this level of institutions as fraudulent is to implicate the whole Republic.

If special treatment was to be called a sin for Minembwe, it had to be the same for all four entities. That’s not the case today. Only Minembwe is delivered to popular vindictiveness, ” crucify him, crucify him … ” to the point of being qualified as cancer to be eradicated from the DRC according to Mr. Valentin Mubake in his press release of October 05, 2020, serious remarks liable to legal proceedings. And Martin Fayulu to add “if we leave Minembwe in the hands of these occupiers, tomorrow we will have no more countries. We will be the first people of Africa to be colonized by another people of Africa “. Clearly, by Martin Fayulu, the tone is set to drive out the occupants. Your Excellency Mgr, such a speech deserves condemnation and support from you.

BOUNDARIES OF THE MUNICIPALITY OF MINEMBWE, let’s also talk about it: the originals consulted in the development of this work of boundaries are fine connoisseurs of this environment, have done this document very well on the basis of the law. The 10km Commune by bird’s-eye is established exactly within the limits of part of the Territory of Fizi. These are the correct and precise indications to be found in Decree number 13/029 of June 13, 2013 conferring the status of town and municipality to certain agglomerations of the Province of South Kivu, Official Journal of the DRC, service of the Presidency of the Republic of June 20, 2013, col. 198
APPENDIX 3: THE LIMITS OF THE MUNICIPALITIES LISTED IN ARTICLE 8 (page 103 of the said decree)

10) Municipality of Minembwe

NORTH :

Kalungi stream and Minembwe river;

SOUTH :

Sara stream and Kabanja river;

TO THE EAST :

The Mukoko range and the Rugmero Forest;

WEST :

The Mateganya River;

With these clarifications, we formally deny and challenge anyone to prove otherwise.

Your Excellency Bishop, I do not understand for what purposes did you decide to support the false words of the Honorable Jean-marie Bulambo, Justin Bitakwira and especially the appeal of Mr. Valentin Mubake president of the UDPS / THE PEOPLE who considers Minembwe to be cancer and calls on all Congolese to ensure its eradication from the DRC?

Two paragraphs of your post pose a serious ethical problem. Extend its limits on, I quote points 2 and 3 of your statement:

2. “While most of the rural Communes are erected within a Territory, the new Commune of Minembwe extends over the three Administrative Territories and Pastoral Zones, integrating a good part of the Itombwe Nature Reserve, in horse on Fizi and Mwenga and a good part of the Chiefdom of Bavira, towards Bijombo, Kagogo, Kishembwe etc… ”.

For our populations, the Municipality of Minembwe is the last stroke of the master after the failure of the power of the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie (RCD), of Rwandan obedience at the time, to create a whole territory in the province for our brothers. Banyamulenge, identified as Congolese of Rwandan origin and Tutsi ethnicity. Yesterday it was the issue of nationality, today it is the land issue. But if one can attribute the nationality to whom it asks and deserves it, one does not distribute the land under any condition. Also, rather than talking about a rural commune, our populations consider that we are talking about “occupied lands or territories” by challenge. Which constitutes a humiliation for them.

Your Excellency Bishop, can we together reflect on these two paragraphs which in reality underpin the theories distilled since the years 1982 around the question of the nationality of Congolese Tutsi, rather of the Banyarwanda in general and the Banyamulenge in particular.

The latter, their candidatures were refused in the elections of 1982, 1987 and in the Sovereign National Conference, CNS in acronym, on the grounds that they are foreigners. The logical consequence of this exclusion is the non-participation in the Parliament resulting from these meetings, the HCR-PT (High Council of the Republic-Transitional Parliament). The architect of this policy was again and always a local son, the Honorable Anzuluni Bembe Isilonyonyo from Fizi, former President of this institution with the full support of elected officials from Kivu as it is still today around the issue. Minembwe, 38 years later.

Excellency Bishop, History repeats itself. Floribert Anzuluni, son of the father, of the citizen movement Filimbi, screen of Kivutian politicians, faithful heir to the ideology of his father’s project to complete the work that the family began in the early 1990s, has never ceased to hold Remarks in support of the mayi mayi against the municipality of Minembwe. Like father like son, they say!
At that time, a commission of inquiry called “Vangu Mambweni” was instigated and the conclusions were to be no different from the original objective, that of denationalizing the Banyamulenge. Your predecessor, Mgr Jérome Gapangwa paid the costs and was targeted by this commission composed mainly of extremists selected for this purpose, leads to a parody of Resolution where the Bishop from the Banyamulenge community is declared a foreigner for reasons of want to create the imaginary “Hima-Tutsi Empire”. This was the argument of the time to politically hunt down his community and balkanization is now under the spotlight to justify the war raging around Minembwe. Subsequently a demonization machine was set in motion by civil society to the point where the Holy See fell into the trap, withdrew it. His community will suffer all the horrors linked to this campaign of hatred under the alliances of local communities with the Burundian and Rwandan refugees of 1993 and 1994, including the genocidaires who added to hatred their secular ideology.

It was in this context that the 1996 war broke out with a triple convergence of interests.

i. first, all of us Congolese indiscriminately tired of 32 years of Mobutu rule; then the Banyamulenge declared foreign in their own country and offered for deportation and iii. in the end the international community through regional countries including Rwanda who wanted to resolve the security problems of the genocidaires who camped at its borders in a state which is disrupting its country as well as the powers which wanted another leadership at the head of Zaire.

Let us recall that the detonator of this war in 1996 was the unfortunate decision of the HCR-PT to expel the Banyamulenge from the DRC that Mubake Valentin calls today in veiled terms of a high linguistic level “to eradicate the Minembwe cancer of the DRC “.

1996, the successive rebellions manipulated by the regional military powers continued to deal a fatal blow to cohabitation by exacerbating ethnic conflicts by their intentional instrumentalization against the Banyamulenge.

Meanwhile, resentment against the Banyamulenge based on what is seen as the extremists’ failure to see the return to the national fold of the Banyamulenge after the comprehensive and inclusive agreement resulting from the negotiations in Sun City and Pretoria, South Africa of 2002. This waking up the demons in hibernation of the Mulelist years, the Mayi-Mayi spirit, militias from neighbouring communities who advocate the exclusion or even the expulsion of the Banyamulenge from the DRC, take the hair of the beast. Unknown figures such as Mulongeca, Emmanuel Rumonge and many others at home and abroad are illustrated in social networks, now openly relaying calls for the extermination of the Banyamulenge. This deserves condemnation Mgr!

We said so in the Memorandum of the Banyamulenge Community in Kinshasa on May 25, 2019 on the war that has raged in the highlands since April 2017, which saw the birth of an unnatural alliance of Burundian rebels supported by Rwanda to join forces with mayi mayi (mayi-mayi) to uproot the Banyamulenge, destroys more than 80% of this land under deafening silence from leaders of all layers of our province except a few isolated cases of timid denunciation. Several tens of thousands of systematically looted cows are sold throughout the province, and even state services collect the taxes.

The latest arrest, under the clamour of the populations of Minembwe, of the FARDC officers for having distributed ammunition to the Mayi Mayi in order to attack the Banyamulenge villages, should be condemned by all.

Excellency Mgr,

Let us come back to paragraph 2 of your statement. You said things that are not true and easy to verify. We allow ourselves to inform you that these limits of the Municipality indicated in the Decree are not a fiction as you seem to believe. A municipality that extends over the localities mentioned in your message does not exist in the Matata Decree of June 13, 2013; therefore, this is utter confusion on your part.
Excellency Mgr, as the church of the Catholic parish Mater Dei of Minembwe in your pastoral zone is less than 300 m from the Commune Office, it would have been enough to take the care to bring the Decree in question and call a faithful of your parish to inform you instead of engaging in a perilous exercise of politics to which the leaders of Kivu have often accustomed us, the lie to appease the ethnic hatred with populist utility. Hatred calls for hatred.

Your statement runs the risk of being indicted as an incitement to ethnic hatred and liable to prosecution.

Excellency Mgr, in the 3rd point of your message, you open a whole long tragic page of the contestation of the citizenship of Banyamulenge. You talk about two kinds of populations. The one that you consider yours, (our) humiliated populations and the others identified as Congolese of ‘’ Rwandan ’origin and Tutsi ethnicity. A second category in search of land and in search of a nationality in distribution, specifying that, if nationality is attributed to deserving applicants, it would be inconceivable to distribute the land. These comments are extremely serious, unacceptable and likely to further oppose our communities.

Mgr, I would like to tell you as the official representative of my base at the Sun City and the Transitional Parliament meetings that I had voted, bluntly, against article 10 of the Constitution of our country when it was adopted in parliament. transition and demanded to remain on the lucky date of 1885 for the partition of Africa in Berlin. This is to warn the manipulators who would make believe in the future that in 1960 the nationality was distributed to the Banyamulenge. My words that day, “the Banyamulenge have never asked for a nationality, they do not ask for it and will never ask for it since they have been where they are since the borders of what became the Congo in 1885 did not so be it ”, had received the frantic applause of honourable colleagues in the hemicycle of the People’s Palace.

To say it another way is to touch the apple of my community, it is to turn the knife in the wound. The innuendos in your paragraph are likely to cause confusion and the worst could not be expected. These kinds of speeches have the consequence of mobilizing all the other communities of the province against the accused, thus creating a de facto minority to be hunted down by all. When these words come in addition to a personality like you, Excellency Mgr, understand that the damage is proportional to the weight of the message. The mayi mayi and their Burundian allies of Red Tabara, who have been waging a merciless war of uprooting against the Banyamulenge for almost 4 years, are only waiting for these kinds of speeches to mobilize them and intensify the massacres and looting.

Your Excellency Bishop, on September 14, 2020, I was received by you at the Bishopric of Uvira at your request, just after I reported my presence in Uvira. Thank you for your warm welcome in this beautiful setting of quite a symbol. You then gave us a good exercise to discuss your message of August 1, 2020 on the deaths of Kipupu and which had still raised, according to a certain opinion, some concerns of fairness in the treatment of condemnation of the war in the highlands . After having made the necessary comments and clearing the controversies on this subject, we had privileged to dwell on the convergences of views and to promise to continue the exchanges in synergy to prevent the misunderstandings in a situation of war and thus to contribute together to peace. in our land.

Great was our disappointment to read you in a statement that strayed from the truth and to some extent added fuel to the fire. I was counting on our contacts, which have become more or less regular since you have been at the head of the Diocese of Uvira, in order to help bring together our populations antagonized by bad policies.
In conclusion, Your Excellency Bishop, I think that it is still possible to repair the damage caused by your declaration to walk together in order to contribute to peace in the lands of Fizi, Uvira and Mwenga. People who know you as their Pastor expect a different message from the one given in the said declaration.

The Banyamulenge believe that the forces mobilized against them are enormous and that all the doors of dialogue they are calling for are unfortunately closed to them.

I wish you a good stay in Kinshasa, a safe return to take up the torch of peace. We are ready, as always, to contribute.

Enock RUBERANGABO SEBINEZA, Honorary Member of Parliament and notable of South Kivu

COPY TO:

To His Excellency the President of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Head of State (with our most deferential tributes), Palais de la Nation, GOMBE / Kinshasa;
To His Holiness, Pope Francis, Holy See, Vatican City, V-00120, ROME, c / o Apostolic Nunciature of the Holy See in Kinshasa, av Goma 81, BP 3091 Kinshasa / Gombe;
His Eminence the Cardinal, Archbishop of Kinshasa, University Avenue, B.P 8431 Kinshasa;
To His Excellency Bishop, President of the Episcopal Conference of Congo, CENCO, c / o General Secretariat, Inter diocesan Center of Kinshasa / Gombe;
To His Excellency Archbishop, President of the Provincial Episcopal Assembly of Bukavu (ASSEPB), PO 3324 Bukavu, South Kivu;
At the Nunciature, Av Goma 81, BP 3091 Kinshasa / Gombe, +243813330124 repdemcongo@diplomat.com, nonapcg@yahoo.com.