Bukavu,
Democractic Republic of the Congo:
After a period of relative calm, fighting has
erupted once more around the town of Bunyakiri in South Kivu, in the eastern
Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Reports from the area suggest that in early
June, members of two armed groups burned down villages of their opposing
constituencies following a dispute. In the subsequent days, further skirmishes
evolved, ultimately including a third rebel group based in the area. The
violence involved a militia called the Raïa Mutomboki clashing with Nyatura, a
Hutu armed group allied to the Congolese army, and with the Mayi-Mayi Kifuafua,
a former splinter group of the Raïa Mutomboki.
The Raïa Mutomboki are a frequently discussed
militia group in reports of conflict in the DRC. But who are they, what are
their origins and what are their motivations?
Who are the Raïa
Mutomboki?
The Raïa Mutomboki – meaning ‘citizens in anger’
in Kiswahili – are a mix of localised self-defence militia and decentralised
rebel army. Made up of many loosely-affiliated units, the Raïa Mutomboki
emerged in 2005 among remote rural populations in the disputed eastern DRC, a
region in which the Congolese government and army have been largely absent for
long periods of time. Raïa Mutomboki’s membership is fluid and is mostly made
up of civilians who take up arms at specific points in time. This makes
estimating the size of the militia difficult, but there may be as many as a few
thousand members.
The Raïa Mutomboki purportedly emerged as a
means of self-defence following the massacre of 12 civilians in the village of
Kyoka by the FDLR, a Rwandan Hutu rebel group predominantly made up of
the genocidaires who
fled into eastern DRC from Rwanda following Rwanda’s 1994 civil war.
The Raïa Mutomboki engaged in a relatively quick
and successful campaign against the FDLR in the mid-2000s, gaining in strength
as they went along. As Rémy Kasindi, founder of the Congolese think tank CRESA,
points out, “successful attacks on FDLR yielded weaponry for the Raïa Mutomboki
that only fought with spears and arrows in the first place”. After managing to
establish their dominance over the FDLR, the Raïa Mutomboki lay largely dormant
for a number of years.
In 2011, the group re-emerged as a decentralised
franchise once more, in response to increased insecurity. This time the
regional security vacuum was partly caused by a reshuffling process within the
government army (the so-called regimentation process).
How is the Raïa
Mutomboki organised?
The movement’s founder and spiritual head is
local healer Jean Musumbu. According to combatants, Musumbu’s dawa –
a magic potion believed to render them invincible – is particularly strong and
has helped them defeat better-equipped enemies, such as the FDLR in 2005.
However, asides from this figurehead and a few
other known commanders, the Raïa Mutomboki do not really have an established
organisational structure. The Usalama Project’s Jason Stearns refers to the group as a series of “armed
franchises” due to the vague diffusion of the Raïa Mutomboki label.
Although similar to the Mayi Mayi groups that
have partaken in the Congolese conflicts for decades, and even referred to as
‘Mayi Mayi Raïa Mutomboki’ by various media, the group differs from other
militias in the Kivu provinces. While most armed actors have more or less
centralised structures of command, Raïa Mutomboki is extremely decentralised. A
Bunyakiri-based commander explained to Think Africa Press that the group is
fluid and has a flat hierarchy, in part due to the way in which the Congolese
government has managed to co-opt or buy off leading commanders in an attempt to
decapitate different groups.
Nevertheless, the Raïa Mutomboki do have a
system of swelling their ranks, called arsenal. Under this
strategy, once a village is defended or liberated from FDLR or other
‘Rwandophone’ militants, males from that village are initiated into the
movement, creating a sort of snowball effect. If a subsequent neighbouring
village is then attacked, new recruits are expected to lend a helping hand. In
a sense, local social pressure plays a more important role in the spread of the
movement than forceful recruitment.
What role does
the Congolese government play in all this?
The Congolese government is intertwined in these
dynamics in a number of different, complex, and sometimes contradictory ways.
As mentioned above, one of the reasons for the
emergence of the Raïa Mutomboki was the insecurity in South Kivu in the
mid-2000s. This was again the reason for the group’s re-emergence in 2011, when
the government’s attempts to undermine the influence of former CNDP rebels in
the national army backfired. In the security vacuum left behind by this failed
policy, the FDLR was able to regain territory that had previously been lost and
re-start terrorising civilians.
The Raïa Mutomboki can also be seen as one
particularly stark manifestation of the government’s failed policy of
disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration (DDR). As part of the Sun City
peace agreement of 2002, which negotiated the end of the Second Congo War,
thousands of combatants were to be integrated into the national army whilst others
were to be demobilised and reintegrated into civilian life. Corruption in DDR,
however, was rampant, and thousands of demobilised combatants never received
any assistance to return to non-military professions, especially those in the
most remote areas. To an extent, the re-emergence of a militant group in the
area such as Raïa Mutomboki was somewhat predictable in the face of failures to
demobilise former militants.
Not only have disarmament policies brought
perverse incentives to create or maintain armed groups, in order to be awarded
the funds to then demobilise, but their uneven implementation has also created
imbalances in the fragile local contexts, sometimes pitting communities against
one another.
How have local
dynamics played a part in the militarisation of communities in the region?
The militarisation of communities in the eastern
DRC can partly be seen as one of the logical consequences of long-term governance without government – whereby
non-state actors take on some of the roles of the state or blend into the very
same – in the region.
The failures of reintegration have also
contributed to the dynamics of militia formation. As Verweijen and Baaz have shown, lukewarm efforts at army integration have
been marred by irregularity and caprice. Integration into the Congolese
military has typically either deprived communities of their own defences or –
when applied inconsistently – allowed some groups to maintain their military
strength over others. For example, many former CNDP rebels were awarded key
positions when integrated into the national army, an imbalance the failed
regimention process was attempting to address. While by contrast, various Mayi
Mayi were redeployed outside Kiv,u leaving their communities at the mercy of
other potentially hostile local militia.
In these local security contexts, militia such
as Raïa Mutomboki have emerged again and again. They engage in warfare for the
sake of deterrence and revenge whilst aiming to maintain their relative
strength over other possible enemies in the region.
What is the
latest security situation in the eastern DRC?
The last few months in the eastern DRC have been
particularly volatile. In North Kivu, the stalemate between FARDC and the M23
rebels ended with fighting restarting around the provincial capital of Goma, further north, the Allied Defence Forces, an
Ugandan militia operating in the DRC, have caused thousands of refugees to flee
to neighbouring Uganda, while Masisi territory has been marred by fighting
between APCLS and Sheka militias – two local militia groups.
In South Kivu, a faction of the Raïa Mutomboki
clashed with FARDC in Mwenga territory, while members of Raïa Mutomboki have
fought with Nyatura and Kifuafua rebels in Kalehe. Towards mid-July 2013, the
clashes moved into Southern Walikale territory of North Kivu. One of the main
dangers now is that these dynamics in North Kivu somehow merge with the
Masisi-related events.
In the meantime, there have also been reports of
smaller units of Raïa Mutomboki effectuating a merger in order to better
coordinate their politico-military futures. Whether this alleged new coalition
will emerge as a more uniform movement or not is as yet unclear.
Coalition-building of this sort, however, has seldom proved to be a step
towards peace
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