Forensic investigators bring DR Congo victims closer to justice

The team had suspected that the ‘tshiota’ had been used as a place of detention and summary execution, but they had not pushed their investigations further. However, the military prosecutor wanted to come back to corroborate allegations made by returnees who had fled to neighbouring Angola during the massacres.

“We spent three months in the bush before we returned. The mayor of the city pleaded with those who had fled to return,” said one witness, who guided the team during their visit.

During one of its first visits to the village, the investigative team was made aware of a possible mass grave not far from the ‘tshiota’. Under the bamboo trees in a ravine, they had found two human skulls and during their latest visit, one of the witnesses of the massacre said that the Kamuina Nsapu militia had disposed of some of the bodies of their civilian victims in that ravine.

Years of anti-government conflict in the Kasai

The situation in the Kasai region deteriorated significantly during 2016 following a conflict over chieftaincy between the central Government of Kinshasa and supporters of the traditional leadership system. In April 2016, the refusal of the central authorities to recognize Jean-Pierre Mpandi – alias Kamuina Nsapu - as hereditary chief of the Bajila Kasanga chieftaincy in Kasai Central, and the decision to replace him with a Government-appointed chief, provoked an insurrection by Kamuina Nsapu.

Kamuina Nsapu had instructed other traditional rulers to join him in the revolt against all symbols of the State, and ordered that every village send him groups of young people to be initiated and trained to form a militia that would take actions aimed at destabilizing the Government.

The killing of Kamuina Nsapu on 12 August 2016 by soldiers of the Forces armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC) during operations against the insurgency marked a turning point in the crisis.

The UN Joint Human Rights Office (UNJHRO) in the DRC reported serious abuses by the Kamuina Nsapu militia in the context of the rebellion, as well as serious human rights violations by State agents, mainly FARDC soldiers, during operations against the militia. Since August 2016, the conflict has caused thousands of victims, including two UN experts who were summarily executed in Kasai Central while investigating the violations in March 2017.

Precision as an imperative

“We have to understand that people may not remember clearly the exact location of graves. In Tshisuku, for example, during our last intervention, many places where we dug turned out to be empty, but we later found bodies buried just three or four meters away,” added Pierre Perich, former Forensic Doctor in the Technical Assistance Team. “In addition, witness testimonies are often conflicting, and the incidents happened three years ago, minimum.”

At the beginning of the investigations, the context was particularly complex, today the technical assistance team have a better understanding of the various dynamics of the cultural and social process and the ways of understanding death.

The team managed to find the steep path that led them to their gruesome discovery. Looking at the terrain, Colonel Michel remarked that there must have been much heavy rain since his last visit. One of the witnesses ventured to say that the bodies may have been dug up and moved to another resting place. Perich stressed once more the importance of precision.

“We would like to see what is down there because we like to be exhaustive. The problem is the vegetation and time - the time that has passed,” Perich said.

“What we need to do is to try to explore and find out whether there are any remains because, in fact, this is not a burial site but rather a mass grave, a place where bodies were disposed of,” he added. “These bodies have quickly deteriorated because they were left outside, of course, and with the rain, the gullying, everything must have fallen to the bottom [of the ravine]. It would still be worth confirming all of that.”