Doors and locks broken down, electrical installations looted, no fuel, no food, no water or electricity: such is the fate of the Congolese police deployed at the end of February in the Ruzizi plain to replace the peacekeepers of the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUSCO).
The first phase of the “orderly, responsible and sustainable” withdrawal of MONUSCO, demanded by the authorities in Kinshasa, who now consider it unnecessary and undesirable, was to end on April 30, with the departure of UN troops from South Kivu, one of the eastern provinces of the DRC plagued by armed violence.
To date, according to the provincial authorities, four of the ten bases in the province have been transferred to the Congolese authorities, including that of Kamanyola (in the Ruzizi plain), which, two months after the departure of the Pakistani peacekeepers, looks more like a slum than a police station.
“We have nothing to eat here! », exclaims Bruno, one of the local police officers. Surrounded by three colleagues, in civilian clothes and sandals, he prepares foufou (corn or cassava paste) in a pan placed on the ground that he “begged” from a Protestant church in the city. “If I don’t share, my colleagues will starve,” he says.
“Cardboard houses!” »
After cooking, the small group wanders around what was a UN base just two months ago. They pass by the old helicopter landing zone, where the corn plants they cultivate reach more than two meters.
Bruno loses his temper: “I abandoned my wife and children in Uvira [75 kilometers further south], they suffer there and we are left in these cardboard houses! “, he emphasizes, banging his fist against the partition of one of the prefabs that serve as their dormitories. Inside, sitting on a mattress, a man in civilian clothes smokes a joint of cannabis. He too is a police officer from the “special intervention unit” deployed in Kamanyola.
He explains that he and his colleagues stole mattresses during the handover ceremony, organized on February 28 in front of an audience of Congolese officers and senior UN officials. “If we hadn’t done it, today we would only sleep on these boards and they have nails,” the policeman shows.
By the end of April, more than half of the 115 police officers supposed to occupy the base had deserted, a journalist from Agence France-Presse (AFP) noted. And those who remain complain about their living conditions and the lack of pay. “A police officer who goes two days without eating even though he has a weapon, it becomes easy for him to attack peaceful citizens” to get supplies, denounces Joe Wendo, an actor in local civil society.
“The disengagement process is progressing well”
He remembers that Monusco offered the police “three Jeeps”, but that the Congolese authorities never delivered any fuel. “When there is an intervention to be done, how can they get around? That’s the problem,” worries Joe Wendo.
The Ruzizi plain, on the borders of Rwanda and Burundi, is renowned for being a hotspot for robberies and kidnappings. “The MONUSCO disengagement process is progressing well,” Gaston Cissa Wa Numbe, provincial minister responsible for liaison between the government and the UN in South Kivu, told AFP. He acknowledges that there are “some challenges, linked in particular to the supply of electricity and drinking water”, but assures that “a solution has just been found”.
The second phase of MONUSCO’s disengagement plan will concern North Kivu, where the M23 rebellion, supported by units of the Rwandan army, has taken over large parts of the province over the past two years.
At the beginning of April, several MONUSCO bases dedicated to the defense of the provincial capital, Goma, were taken over by the rebellion, after Indian peacekeepers abandoned them, against the orders of their hierarchy.
After twenty-five years of presence, the departure of the peacekeepers was recorded in December 2023 by the UN Security Council, despite its concerns about the escalation of violence in eastern Congolese. On the eve of the launch of the disengagement plan, MONUSCO had around 15,000 men. In January, Kinshasa wanted the withdrawal to be complete by the end of this year. The Security Council, for its part, has not set a deadline.
