War crime convicts walk free
KINSHASA: Two Congolese former militia warlords have been released in the capital Kinshasa after serving long terms for war crimes handed down by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Germain Katanga was set free on Monday, 24 hours after the release of Thomas Lubanga, who in 2006 became the first person to be arrested under a warrant issued by the ICC in The Hague.
They were both jailed for playing a role in an ethnic conflict in the country’s northeastern Ituri region which killed tens of thousands of people between 1999-2003.
Lubanga went on trial in 2009, accused of enlisting child soldiers. In 2012 he was sentenced to 14 years behind bars. He was greeted by about 100 supporters on his release from a jail in Kinshasa on Sunday.
Katanga arrived at the ICC in 2007 and was sentenced in 2014 to 12 years in prison for war crimes and crimes against humanity over a brutal attack by his forces on an Ituri village in 2003, in which some 200 people were killed.
Katanga’s nephew, Jeannot Malivo Kagaba, and a local NGO both confirmed that he was released on Monday.
Now 42, Katanga, nicknamed Simba (“Lion” in Swahili) for his ferocity, was promoted to brigadier general of the Congolese army in 2004 in exchange for his militia surrendering. He was then arrested by Congolese authorities in 2005.
In December 2015, Lubanga was transferred from the ICC prison to Kinshasa to serve out the rest of his sentence with Katanga.
The pair’s release comes at a time of unrest in his native region of Ituri, in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s volatile east.
Lubanga headed the ethnic Hema community of herders and traders in deadly clashes with Lendu people, mainly settled farmers, between 1999 to 2003.
The fighting overlapped with the Second Congo War of 1998-2003, a conflagration that brought more than half a dozen foreign armies on to the country’s mineral-rich soil on rival sides.
More than 700 civilians — mostly ethnic Hema — have been killed in Ituri since 2017. UN officials have characterised these killings as a possible crime against humanity, which it blames on an extremist militia, the Cooperative for the Development of the Congo (Codeco).