Congo | 55 killed in two guerrilla attacks – Two provinces under siege

Defence Redefined

01/06/2021

On May 31, two attacks resulted in the deaths of at least 55 people in villages in eastern Congo.

The army and a local civil rights activist group have blamed the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), an Islamist militant group, for raiding the village of Tchabi and a refugee camp near another village, Boga. Both are located near the Congo-Uganda border.

Homes were burned and civilians abducted, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a statement.

Albert Basegu, head of a civil rights group in Boga, told Reuters he had been alerted to a scream at a neighbor’s house.

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“When I got there I found that the attackers had already killed an English pastor and his daughter was also seriously injured,” Basegu said.

The May 31 attacks were the deadliest since 2017. The ADF is believed to have killed more than 850 people in 2020, according to the United Nations, in a series of attacks on civilians since the military launched operations against it last year.

President Felix Tshisekedi declared a state of siege in Congo’s North Kivu Ituri province on May 1 in a bid to curb growing attacks by paramilitary groups.

According to the constitution of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the president can declare a state of emergency or a state of siege “if serious circumstances directly threaten the independence or integrity of the national territory or if they interrupt the regular operation of the institutions”.

It is estimated that 122 armed groups of various sizes operate in the eastern DRC, which is rich in minerals, an area where several conflicts took place in the 1990s.

Uganda announced earlier this month that it had agreed to share information and coordinate operations against insurgents, but it would not deploy troops to the Congo.

The ADF militias are Ugandan Islamist fighters who have been operating in the eastern DRC since 1995

The ADF paramilitary group has killed more than 1,200 civilians in the Beni region alone since 2017, according to the Kivu Security Tracker (KST).

The army has been conducting operations against insurgents in the area since October 2019, but has not been able to stop the massacre of civilians.

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With information from: africa.cgtn.com