Paul Keenan
A troubled nation may face more testing times, writes Paul Keenan
The dying days of March proved to be a dreadful period for the Church in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
On March 20, a much-respected Assumptionist priest, Fr Vincent Machozi, was gunned down in his parish in North Kivu Province in the east of the country. Well known for his outspoken criticisms of abuses inflicted on workers involved in the mining of coltan (a key element in mobile phone manufacture), it is believed the priest, already targeted multiple times previously, was killed for championing exploited workers. Said exploitation, it has been alleged, often occurs with the connivance of elements of the DRC’s army, whose members have now been implicated in Fr Machozi’s murder by witnesses.
Also on March 20, in an ambush elsewhere in North Kivu, a priest identified only as Fr Jonas of the Adorno Fathers was seriously injured when gunmen, allegedly from the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), sprayed his car with machine-gun fire, the second such attack in as many months.
Bandist
Then, on March 25, a Caritas worker was slain, execution-style, when bandits held up a vehicle transporting wages to teaching staff in Fizi Territory, also in the country’s east.
Despite surrendering his vehicle and all of the cash, the worker was shot at point-blank range in the head and died before reaching hospital.
These incidents, allegedly involving corrupt soldiers, roving militias and bandits, are symptomatic of an ongoing malaise within DRC caused by years of conflict in its eastern reaches, and bringing the agendas of neighbouring Rwanda and Uganda violently into play too. All of this despite billions of euros in United Nations aid towards democracy-building and a peacekeeping force of some 20,000 towards a measure of stability.
Where the nation, and its backers have fallen repeatedly short, the Catholic Church has sought to step into the fray for the better protection of the rights and wellbeing of DRC’s citizens. At least 40% of DRC citizens are Catholics.
Thus, priests like Fr Machozi become targets for assassination, while Caritas vehicles are singled out due to the fact that DRC’s Department of Education viewed Caritas as a good answer to corrupt practices in paying wages to teaching staff.
The Church is now challenged the more by a growing discontent within DRC which is, based on all-too-familiar evidence from elsewhere, spiraling into a fractious and violent outcome.
To find the seeds of this discontent, one needs to cast back through the two-term presidency of Joseph Kabila to perceive discomfiting moves within political circles towards upending the democratic process.
Following re–peated denials stretching back as far as the start of his second term in power in 2011, that the president would not seek to alter the constitutional limit of a two-term presidency, it became abundantly clear by the start of 2014 that he was, in fact, most keen to find a way of altering the nation’s constitution to allow for a run at a third period in office (even before the 2011 election, Mr Kabila altered the constitution to end the practice of election run-offs in favour of a candidate securing the largest percentage of votes to claim the leadership position, even if that percentage fell below 50% – in his first run he scored just 45% of a bitterly contested election).
Wrangling
None of this political wrangling went down well among ordinary civilians. As far back as 2014, international media were reporting that Congolese were looking with keen interest towards the nation of Burkino Faso, where street protests in October of that year against then-President Blaise Compaoré’s attempt to rewrite the constitution towards an extension of his 27-year term drove him from office and the country.
The same Congolese now recall that when protestors against legislative changes to election laws in DRC took to the streets of Kinshasa and Goma in January of 2015, police fired into their ranks, killing at least 38 in the capital and five in Goma. In follow-up operations, democracy activists were detained and jailed, with two, still held, announcing a hunger strike in March.
Such was the government’s answer to peaceful protest.
In November, responding to growing suspicions of Mr Kabilia’s intentions, the National Episcopal Conference of Congo (CENCO), led by led by Cardinal Laurent Monsengwo Pasinya, Archbishop of Kinshasa, issued a statement calling on the electorate to “prove their vigilance in the spirit of (constitutional) Article 64 [which] stipulates that ‘All Congolese have the duty to thwart any individual or group of individuals that takes power by force or exercises it in violation of the provisions of the present constitution’.”
Meeting
Then, in January of this year, CENCO members held a closed-door meeting with government representatives, details of which have yet to be revealed.
However, the meeting was closely followed by an announcement from prelates of the formation of a monitoring committee to watch over the electoral process and, more important now, to bring the main political representatives together in dialogue so as to avoid further violence.
All too aware of the temptation to meet fire with fire after the police massacres of 2015, the Church has stepped up its lobbying of government to reassure the people on the ‘Kabila issue’, remaining the one body in DRC with both access to government and the network to faithful Congolese in appealing to those who would plunge Congo into civil conflict.
Make no mistake, the Church is not over-reacting to matters. Human Rights Watch has laid the growing tensions within DRC directly at the feet of President Kabila in his drive for extended power. And, on March 30 the United Nations announced that it had reversed an earlier decision to reduce the numbers on its DRC peacekeeping mission in light of growing turmoil and the threat to stability.
Meanwhile, seven opposition groups, ejected from the political process for daring to question Mr Kabila’s intentions, have banded together to form the so-called G7 group, offering their own presidential hopeful, Moise Katumbi, a former provincial governor who quit Mr Kabila’s party over the very issue of an extended presidency.
Mr Kabila now has it in his sole power to pull DRC back from the brink. But should he give in to the hunger for power that seems now to afflict him, that unenviable task will fall to the Catholic Church.