HRW: 'The M23 armed group has deported over 1,500 people from eastern DRC to Rwanda'
13:12
Issued on:
13:12 min
A new report by Human Rights Watch says that the M23 rebel group in eastern Congo has forcibly deported over 1,500 people to Rwanda. This act, which is allegedly backed by Rwanda, could constitute a war crime and has raised international alarm.
Also, Over six decades after the assassination of Congolese independence hero Patrice Lumumba, Belgium is taking steps to put 92-year-old former diplomat Etienne Davignon on trial for his alleged involvement in the killing.
And last month, the Central Bank of West African States blocked transactions from several fintech companies offering money transfer services, citing non-compliance with regulations. This has had a widespread impact: more than half of Senegal's population of 18 million use mobile payment apps, and Senegalese fintech companies claim to be incurring major losses as a result.
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France 24
2 days ago
- France 24
HRW: 'The M23 armed group has deported over 1,500 people from eastern DRC to Rwanda'
13:12 Issued on: 13:12 min A new report by Human Rights Watch says that the M23 rebel group in eastern Congo has forcibly deported over 1,500 people to Rwanda. This act, which is allegedly backed by Rwanda, could constitute a war crime and has raised international alarm. Also, Over six decades after the assassination of Congolese independence hero Patrice Lumumba, Belgium is taking steps to put 92-year-old former diplomat Etienne Davignon on trial for his alleged involvement in the killing. And last month, the Central Bank of West African States blocked transactions from several fintech companies offering money transfer services, citing non-compliance with regulations. This has had a widespread impact: more than half of Senegal's population of 18 million use mobile payment apps, and Senegalese fintech companies claim to be incurring major losses as a result.
France 24
3 days ago
- France 24
Belgium seeking to put ex-official on trial over killing of Congo's Lumumba
Belgian prosecutors said Tuesday that they were seeking to put a 92-year-old former diplomat on trial over the 1961 killing of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. Etienne Davignon is the only one still alive among 10 Belgians who were accused of complicity in the murder of the independence icon in a 2011 lawsuit filed by Lumumba's children. If he goes on trial, Davignon would be the first Belgian official to face justice in the more than six decades since Lumumba was murdered. A fiery critic of Belgium's colonial rule, Lumumba became his country's first prime minister after it gained independence in 1960. 02:09 But he fell out with the former colonial power and with the United States and was ousted in a coup a few months after taking office. He was executed on January 17, 1961, aged just 35, in the southern region of Katanga, with the support of Belgian mercenaries. His body was dissolved in acid and never recovered. Davignon, who went on to be a vice president of the European Commission in the 1980s, was a trainee diplomat at the time of the assassination. He is accused of involvement in the "unlawful detention and transfer" of Lumumba at the time he was taken prisoner and his "humiliating and degrading treatment", the prosecutor's office said. But prosecutors added that a charge of intent to kill should be dropped. It is now up to a magistrate to decide if the trial should proceed, following a hearing on the case set for January 2026. "We're moving in the right direction. What we're seeking is, first and foremost, the truth," Juliana Lumumba, the daughter of the former Congolese premier, told Belgian broadcaster RTBF. The prosecutor's decision is the latest step in Belgium's decades-long reckoning with the role it played in Lumumba's killing. In 2022, Belgium returned a tooth -- the last remains of Lumumba -- to his family in a bid to turn a page on the grim chapter of its colonial past. The tooth was seized by Belgian authorities in 2016 from the daughter of a policeman, Gerard Soete. A Belgian parliamentary commission of enquiry concluded in 2001 that Belgium had "moral responsibility" for the assassination, and the government presented the country's "apologies" a year later.
France 24
3 days ago
- France 24
Male victim breaks 'suffocating' silence on Kosovo war rapes
The father-of-three was raped by a Serbian policeman during the bloody conflict between Albanian guerillas and Serbian armed forces in 1998 and 1999 that eventually saw Kosovo break away from Belgrade. Officials estimate Serbian forces raped up to 20,000 women during the war in which 13,000 people -- mostly ethnic Albanian civilians -- died. Human Rights Watch said Albanian fighters also raped Serbian, Albanian and Roma women in a 2000 report documenting widespread abuse by the combatants. But the precise number is buried by "a deeply entrenched social stigma, which still overshadows wartime rapes", said Bekim Blakaj of Kosovo's Humanitarian Law Center. Nishori told AFP that he hopes his own "difficult" journey -- which at times left him suicidal -- will help others find the strength to cast a light into the darkest corners of the war's atrocities. The 48-year-old said he would not have been able to come forward without his family's support. "It has given me strength. It has played a very, very big role," he said. 'I walked and cried at night' But he knows that the war, which only ended when NATO bombed the Serbian forces into submission, has left many more struggling alone. "I was suffocating. I would leave the house at night. I would feel like screaming. I would walk and cry," he told AFP. The Kosovo government acknowledged the suffering of the victims of wartime rapes by paying them a pension of 270 euros ($313) a month. But 11 years after it was set up, only a few hundred women get the payment. Nishori will be the first man to receive it. Activists say many survivors will never come forward due to the shame attached to rape in Albanian society. "Rape is perceived by our society more as a violation of family honour," said Veprore Shehu from Medica Kosova, which has given psychological support to some 600 female survivors. Nishori's nightmare began when he was pulled from a refugee column in September 1998. He was taken for interrogation to a police station in Drenas -- about 23 kilometres (14 miles) west of Pristina. "When it was my turn to be interrogated, around midnight, two policemen took me to the toilet, where one of them raped me," he said, taking deep breaths as he slowly recounted his ordeal. "When another policeman wanted to do the same, a third policeman came, and perhaps because of my screams, snatched me away from them and returned me to a cell." 'Weapon of war' Blakaj said the vast majority of sexual abuse was perpetrated by Serbian forces on ethnic Albanian women. By the end of the conflict, it had become "a weapon of war" used to create terror among civilians, he said. "Rape by police, paramilitaries and armed forces became widespread and almost routine," a 2017 Amnesty International report into the war concluded. A Serbian army deserter quoted in the report described sexual violence as "normal like taking a shower and having breakfast". On Tuesday, a Pristina court sentenced a Kosovo Serb to 15 years prison for rape during the conflict after a closed trial. It is just the second prosecution for rape during the Kosovo war, a mark of how slow the road to justice has been for victims of crimes now decades old. When Nishori finally revealed his abuse to his family, his oldest daughter, Flutura, urged him to go public. "Dad's story needed to be revealed to show that it wasn't just women who were victims of sexual violence, but men too," the 23-year-old theatre student said. "Nothing has changed in the family since the secret was revealed," she told AFP.
