In 2002, Victoire (name changed) suffered a double punishment after being raped, she was repudiated by her husband. Twenty-three years later, she shares her story from the house she lives in alone in Mombasa, Ituri, in the north-east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo). She hesitated for a long time before speaking out, a sign of the code of silence that still reigns over this particularly dark period in the history of the province, ravaged by three decades of conflicts.
“Even if you ran away, they would follow you into the bush and rape you, even in front of your children and your husband. They beat my husband. They took me to their hotel, where six soldiers took turns raping me.”
Her sister, Victoire recounts, suffered the same fate. Infected with HIV/AIDS, she died a few years later. “Out of shame, she didn’t approach the health facilitates receiving medical follow-up.”
Victoire identifies the perpetrators of those rapes as notorious rebels in the regions. “They called themselves “Erase the Board”: they were Roger Lumbala’s soldiers. If they saw you with oil, rice or other food supplies, they would steal from you and leave you starving.” For the actions of these militiamen, the Congolese Roger Lumbala, detained in France since January 2021, is being tried this Wednesday, November 12, before the Paris Court of Assizes for complicity in crimes against humanity, under the principle of universal jurisdiction1.
The bloody operation “Erase the Board”
To understand Roger Lumbala’s role, we need to go back more than twenty years. Between August 1998 and June 2003, the Democratic Republic of Congo was torn apart by the Second Congo War2. No fewer than eight countries were involved in the conflicts: the DRC, opposed by its neighbours Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi; and Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Chad, which supported the Congolese armed forces. In 1998, Rwanda and Uganda supported the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD), a rebel movement that seized the main cities of Kivu, Orientale Province and North Katanga and which split into two groups in March 1999: the pro-Ugandan RCD-K/ML and the pro-Rwandan RCD-Goma.
It was at this time that Roger Lumbala, a native of Kasai who had been in political exile in France for ten years, entered the scene. He took the lead of a small group, the Congolese Rally for Democracy-National (RCD-N), and allied himself with two other movements active in the area, with the support of Uganda: The Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC) and its armed wing, created by Jean-Pierre Bemba, now Deputy Prime Minister of the RDC; and the Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC), led by Thomas Lubanga.
Together, these three movements launched Operation Erase the Board in October 2002, with the aim of taking control of Beni and Butembo in North Kivu, as well as Mombasa and Komanda in Ituri, two road junctions between Uganda and the major Congolese city of Kisangani. Beni and Butembo were then held by the RCD-K/ML, led by Antipas Mbusa Nyamwisi, a warlord from the Nande ethnic group. As such, the militiamen of Operation “Erase the Board” systematically attacked the Nande, but also the Pygmies, who were also suspected of supporting the RCD-K/ML.
“You are Nande, we must eliminate you.”
For three months the “erasers” as they called themselves, carried out particularly violent abuses, described in the United Nation’s Mapping Report3, which lists, in 2010, the most serious violations committed in the DRC between 1993 and 2003. The investigation attributes 173 summary executions to the “erasers” alone between 12 and 29 October 2002 in Mombasa and the villages along the Mombasa–Beni axis. An undetermined number of rapes, mutilations and lootings are also attributed to them.
As early as July 2003, in a report entitled “Ituri: Covered in Blood”4, Human Rights Watch raised the alarm about these abuses. In this document, a Nande victim recounts :
We had fled over there, but they found us. They asked us our names. If the names sounded like Nande names, they took the people away. I was captured at the same time as my elder brother. They tied our arms behind our backs with rope and took us to the Mombasa cemetery… They made us lie down on the ground. They said, “You Are Nande, and we are against the Nande. So, we must eliminate you.” » […] We were lucky because after about ten minutes, APC soldiers (the military wing of the RCD-K/ML) appeared and the MLC soldiers fled.
On the scale of horror, the fate reserved for the Pygmies is even one notch higher. Because of the magical powers that the “Eraser” militiamen attributed to their flesh, they became targets of acts of cannibalism. In a note dated June 20035, a United Nations investigation team was dispatched to the area a few weeks after the events recorded twelve cases, including several instances of victims’ hearts being consumed.
“The Pygmies had practically disappeared.”
Marc-Andre Lagrange was a humanitarian worker for the NGO Premiere Urgence in Mombasa and Komanda in 2004, two years after the events. Regarding the toll of the abuses, the now consultant and specialist on the Great Lakes region explains:
Indigenous peoples’ advocacy organisations, including those representing Pygmies, put forward figures that are on a completely different scale: they speak of several tens of thousands of deaths, which is simply unverifiable. All I know, personally, is that two years later, I witnessed that the Pygmies I encountered in the area had practically disappeared or were living in hiding, in terror.
Under international pressure, Rwanda and DR Congo signed the Pretoria Agreement on 16 December 2002, which aimed to end the Second Congo War. On 30 December, the factions in the north-east of the country signed a ceasefire agreement. The soldiers involved in Operation Erase Board were subsequently integrated into the Demobilisation, Disarmament and Reintegration (DDR) programme and joined the Congolese army.
As for the leaders of the “erasers”, their fates led two of them before international courts. In 2012, the International Criminal Court tried Thomas Lubanga6, the head of the UPC, and found him guilty of war crimes for recruiting children under the age of 15 and forcing them to take part in the conflict. He served fourteen years in prison before being released in 2020.
As for Jean-Pierre Bemba, he was sentenced in 2016 to eighteen years of imprisonment for murders, rapes and lootings committed by the MLC in the Central African Republic. He was acquitted on appeal in 20187. Since then, he has been appointed Deputy Prime Minister of the DRC…
Supporter of the M23 Group
However, no charges were brought against RCD-N leader Roger Lumbala, despite references to his role since 2003 in the United Nations investigation report. According to Marc-Andre Lagrange, this is because “the RCD-N is really a very small component. Unfortunately, there have also been no prosecutions against ant of the Mai-Mai leaders who committed atrocities,” he said.
The RCD-N had “a few hundred men, and it was mainly Jean-Pierre Bemba’s MLC that provided the leadership and logistical support,” explains Marc-Andre Lagrange. “Roger Lumbala, for his part, provided fighters […], sent them, gave them directives and supplied them with logistical means – fuel, food to carry out these abuses in the Mombasa area in particular.” Roger Lumbala’s Parisian lawyer, Maitre Philippe Zeller, maintains that his client “did not have troops” and “was not aware of the acts being carried out on the ground.” The RCD-N is a political group that was indeed present in the theatre of events for which this trial is taking place, but [Roger Lumbala] never claimed to be the head of the military grouping.”
After the signing of the Pretoria Agreement, Roger Lumbala became Minister of Foreign Trade in the so-called ’1+4′ transitional government, led by Joseph Kabila. He held this position from 2003 to 2004. He was then elected as a deputy and later as a stance in favour of the newly formed M23 rebellion, which was supported by Rwanda. Roger Lumbala sought refuge at the South African embassy in Burundi before moving to France, where he submitted a new application for political asylum – having lost the status he had obtained in the 1990s due to his voluntary return to the DRC.
Victims Present During the Trial
At the time, Kinshasa issued an arrest warrant against him for “high treason” and requested his extradition in 2013, without Roger Lumbala necessarily being aware of it. In December 2014, his asylum application was rejected by the French authorities. However, Paris did not deport him to the DRC, citing, “the absence of guarantees of a fair and impartial trial in his country of origin.”
On 3 November 2016, following a report by the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons, the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office opened a preliminary investigation against Roger Lumbala on the charges of crimes against humanity, complicity in these crimes and participation in a conspiracy to commit these crimes. The Central Office for the Fight against Crimes Against Humanity began searching for him and pursued him for several years. On 29 December 2020, he was finally arrested by the police in Paris. He was remanded in custody on 2 January 2021, indicted and then charged on 6 November 2023, after a 27-month investigation.
“Once the news of Roger Lumbala ’s arrest in Paris reached the DRC, and when he affected communities understood that it concerned an ongoing case for the crimes against humanity committed in their region between 2002 and 2003, they expressed a desire to participate,” recounts Daniele Perissi of the Swiss NGO Trial International. This organisation, which specializes in combating impunity for international crime, had a branch in South Kivu, DRC. It established contact with local NGOs. Together, they collected testimonies from residents identifying themselves as victims and documented evidence. “We transmitted this information to the investigating judge during the inquiry, says Daniele Perissi, and it was he who deemed it appropriate to invite some of these people in order to hear them.”
This work is all the more necessary given that the investigating judge himself did not visit the site due to the security situation, marked by numerous attacks by armed groups present in the area.
“We track people down and judge them”
This lack of on-site investigation is used as an argument by Roger Lumbala’s defence. In a statement dated October 7, which Afrique XXI was able to consult, his lawyers describe the inquiry as “detached from reality, conducted more than twenty years after the events, 8000 kilometres from the theatre of events, without any investigator dispatched to the DRC.”
Philippe Zeller questions above all the exercise of universal jurisdiction in this case. For Marc-André Lagrange, a former humanitarian worker in Ituri and now a consultant specializing in the Great Lakes region, “at a time when the International Criminal Court is highly controversial, it is important that countries such as France and the Paris public prosecutor’s office can assert that war crimes and crimes: we will seek out the perpetrators and bring them to justice.”
For the civil parties, this is also a trial for history. “These crimes committed twenty years ago are unfortunately very similar to what is happening today in eastern DRC,” says Daniel Perissi of the NGO Trial. “Militias, which were created and are supported by neighbouring countries, continue to terrorise civilian populations. […] And, just as back then, there are peace agreements and negotiations that fail to address issues of justice, reparation, dignity and human rights…” He sighs at the risk of repeating the mistakes of the past.
1Universal jurisdiction allows a state to prosecute and trial perpetrators of serious crimes, even if they were committed outside the national territory, by one or more foreign victims.
2Following the First Congo War, it was motivated in particular by the presence in the east of the country of former genocidaires who had fled from neighbouring Rwanda after the Rwandan Patriotic Front put an end to the genocide and regained power in Kigali in June 1994. Their presence in the neighbouring country was unacceptable to the new Rwandan government, which launched an offensive.
3“Mapping Project Report on the Most Serious Violations of Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law Committed between March 1993 and June 2003 in the Territory of the Democratic Republic of Congo”, August 2010, available in PDF here.
5United Nations Security Council, Report of the Special Investigation Team on the Mombasa Events, 31 December 2002-10 January 2003, 25 June 2003.