SUMMARY
The Ituri province, a region in the north-eastern parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo (Zaire) has been a focus of fierce conflicts and violence targeting civilians. Most of the violence, perpetrated by a vast number of more or less organized groups, sprung from a land conflict between the Hema and Lendu ethnic groups but evolved more and more into a regional conflict over resources. The Lendu are one of the largest ethnicities in Ituri, with a size of between 750 000 and 1 million people, whereas the Hema are remarkably smaller with a size of between 300 000 and 400 000 people.
Tensions between the Hema and Lendu can be led back to pre-colonial times, although most of the time they lived peacefully alongside each other. The first violence between the groups was reported already in 1880, although the oral history in the region often state 1911 as the first main clash between the groups. Under the Belgian colonizers the Hema were favored. They had access to higher positions and got better chances for education. The Lendu were mainly treated as a manual labor force. When the decolonization process started, the Hema minority remained in place as the elite, with at times even employing the Lendu as their servants. Tensions between the Hema and Lendu led to violent conflict in 1973, 1990, and 1997. The major conflict in Ituri started however in 1999. In that year, a commander of the Ugandan army, General James Kazini created a separate province of Ituri with Bunia as its capital. He then appointed a Hema as the province top-administrator triggering the violence.
The magnitude of violence after 1999 cannot be compared to the conflicts in earlier years. The different ethnicities in the province started to organize themselves, first into ethnic militias, then into rebel groups, allied to regional players in the DR Congo intrastate war before splintering and forming new alliances across ethnicities. While the conflict over land and local power has been the prime reason for violence, the presence of gold and other minerals in Ituri has been the reason for the continuation of fighting. Ituri’s war officially ended with peace agreements in 2005 and 2006, but some armed group activity persisted most of it by groups just as opposed to the disarmament process.
In all the conflicts that were ongoing in Ituri in the early 2000s, civilians were often targeted, simply for belonging to the ‘wrong’ ethnicity. Often these attacks at civilians were linked to fighting between two different rebel groups. The victorious rebel group mostly took it upon them to massacre all people in the just acquired territory that belonged to the ethnicity of the losing rebel group.
In the case of the one-sided violence carried out by the Lendu FNI, FRPI (Front Nationalist et Integrationist, Front for National Integration; Forces de Résistance Patriotique d’Ituri, Patriotic Force of Resistance in Ituri) civilians belonging to the Hema ethnicity were the main targets. They were attacked in two gruesome instances:
In the first instance, the FNI, FRPI attacked the village of Bogoro. This town was an important trading center, which lied in the middle between Bunia and Kasenya. Bogoro citizens were predominantly Hema. In February 2003, the FNI, FRPI indiscriminately killed hundreds of people, raped and subjected to sexual slavery numerous women, and pillaged the village. Furthermore, the FNI, FRPI recruited many children under the age of 15 in this village. While the FNI, FRPI stated that its goal was to get rid of the UPC in Bogoro, it appears as that the killing was indiscriminate and possibly aimed at erasing the village altogether. The attackers surrounded the village from four sides, and did not leave any possibility for civilians to escape.
In a second instance, the FNI, FRPI attacked Kachele, a small village in the Djugu region of Ituri. This attack also appears to be mostly aimed at targeting Hema civilians.
The FNI, FRPI coalition first became active as a one-sided actor in UCDP data in 2003, when the one-sided violence resulted in over 25 civilian deaths. The threshold was reached in February when the coalition massacred over 250 civilians in Bogoro village.
