By Chris Lang
A new report by Minority Rights Group documents a three-year campaign of violent forced evictions of the Indigenous Batwa of Kahuzi-Biega. The report, “To Purge the Forest by Force: Organized violence against Batwa in Kahuzi-Biega National Park” is written by investigative journalist Robert Flummerfelt.
Minority Rights Group’s research team compiled testimony from more than 550 people. They report that the paramilitary guards of the Kahuzi-Biega National Park, together with soldiers from the Congolese Army, have carried out large-scale attacks on the Batwa communities living inside the park. The campaign involved three waves of violent attacks: in July-August 2019, July 2021, and November-December 2021.
Kahuzi-Biega National Park’s colonial roots
The Kahuzi-Biega National Park is in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo and was established in 1970 by Adrien Deschryver, a Belgian conservationist and son of the last Belgian Minister of the Colonies. Deschryver asked the Batwa communities to help guide him through the forest as he studied the gorillas that lived there.
Minority Rights Group’s research team spoke to an elder Mutwa man (Mutwa is the singular form of Batwa) who was a child when Deschryver came to the forest. The elder said,
That white man came and asked for our help: he wanted to see the animals; he wanted us to show him different locations in the forest. He acted like he was a friend of the community, and we trusted him. Then he left, returned to Europe, and used the information we gave him to plan to expel us. When he came back to the forest, he came with soldiers, told us that our home is now the property of the state and that we have to leave. We cried, said to him ‘We were the ones who showed you this forest!’ But the soldiers forced us out.
As many as 6,000 Batwa were evicted from the national park when it was expanded in 1975.
“A decades-long process of brutality”
In 1980, Kahuzi-Biega was listed as as a World Heritage Site. Since 1997, it has been on UNESCO’s list of World Heritage in Danger.
The evictions and violence against the Batwa was continuous. Minority Rights Group writes that,
Organized violence since 2019 has been the culmination of a decades-long process of brutality, marginalization and immiseration that has wrought the immense cultural, societal, spiritual and in some cases physical destruction of the Batwa people and their traditional lifestyle.
In 2017, park guards shot and killed a 17-year-old Mutwa boy. The boy’s father was also shot but survived. They were searching for medicinal plants on ancestral Batwa lands. The father wrote to Wildlife Conservation Society, which has been working in Kahuzi-Biega for more than 20 years.
“We struggle to find enough to eat and are forced to cope with new diseases and the loss of many forest medicines,” he wrote. “Yet no one has ever come to seek our consent for the Kahuzi-Biéga National Park. Why then does WCS continue to fund and support it?”
Extreme violence
In October 2018, several Batwa communities returned to the forest and reconstructed their villages inside the national park. As many as 2,000 Batwa people were living in the forest.
The Batwa were subjected to extreme violence.
Park guards and soldiers burned villages to the ground, used mortars and rocket-propelled grenades to shell villages, killed and maimed unarmed villagers, raped dozens of Batwa women at gun point, burned several Batwa alive, and mutilated Batwa corpses. In at least one case, park guards killed a villager at short range, execution-style, while family members watched.
At least 20 people were killed. The total is probably higher, because it does not include people who disappeared after fleeing into the forest to escape the attacks. These were mostly elderly Batwa and children, who are presumed to have starved to death while in hiding.
In 2021, 15 Batwa women were gang-raped by eco-guards and soldiers. One of the survivors of gang-rape was 17 years old. Two of the women subsequently died. One woman who was raped by eco-guards said, “We live in the forest. When they confront us, they rape us. Those of us who will die, will die, but the forest is where we will stay.”
Mariel Müller, a journalist with DW, spoke to two park guards who confirmed the villagers’ reports. “They want to remain anonymous,” Müller writes, “because a colleague who had previously criticized the park management had been found dead.”
In the November-December 2021 operations, park guards and soldiers deliberately burned two Batwa children alive in their home. Müller spoke to the mother of the children who gives a harrowing description of what happened.
Hundreds of Batwa have been forcibly evicted – often repeatedly. Some Batwa returned to rebuild their villages. Others have fled and live in informal camps for displaced people, living as squatters in host communities outside the national park.
International support from Germany, the US, and Wildlife Conservation Society
The report notes that the Kahuzi-Biega National Park receives the majority of its funding from international organisations including KfW, GIZ, USAID, and Wildlife Conservation Society. These international supporters have been told in writing about the human rights abuses committed by the park guards that they funded, equipped, and trained.
Before the July-August 2019 operation, the guards received paramilitary training from unidentified private military contractors and the Congolese Army. Park guards that Minority Rights Group’s research team spoke to called the military contractors “white mercenaries”.
Minority Rights Group’s report states that,
To the extent that international backers with knowledge of human rights abuses continued to fund or otherwise support park guards and, in particular, the PNKB [Parc National de Kahuzi-Biega] paramilitary unit that conducted these operations, they are complicit in these abuses.
In a statement, Robert Flummerfelt, the author of the report said that,
“These international supporters of the park were notified repeatedly that their funding and material support was translating into massive abuses against civilian populations.
“They cannot plead ignorance or claim their support was insignificant. The evidence uncovered during this investigation clearly indicates that they were complicit in abuses that likely rise to the level of crimes against humanity.”
Caroline Pearce, Director of Survival International comments that,
“A racist and colonial model of conservation that sees human beings and their rights as disposable will never succeed in its objectives. Governmental and non-governmental funders must immediately cease all funding to these fortress conservation projects – including the plan to designate 30% of the earth as ‘protected’ by 2030 – and instead recognise Indigenous land rights, which is a far more effective way to safeguard the environment. Otherwise, they will continue to be complicit in such atrocities.”
PHOTO Credit: Minority Rights Group