Maboya-Loya, on the Butembo-Beni road (North Kivu). Without the school sign bearing the name of the village and the advertisement for its famous pineapples, sold in a shed by an influential organisation of women farmers in the region, at the road level, the Maboya-Loya escarpment might go unnoticed by those travelling on the Butembo-Beni road. Yet this is a historic spot, identified as the site of one of the heinous crimes committed by Ugandan soldiers deployed in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in November 2000, a quarter of a century ago. They were supporting the rebellions that had sprung up three years earlier when Laurent-Désiré Kabila came to power in the DRC. Today, banana trees have grown on the rubble of burnt-out huts, but the inhabitants have remained impoverished.
“There used to be a great atmosphere in our village. There were homes and bars selling kasiksi (an indigenous drink brewed from bananas), which was a delight for commuters on the Butembo-Beni road (54 kilometres), who could decide to spend the night here to have a few drinks and eat some of the good cow meat that came from the surrounding farms”, says Kakule Luhimbo, one of the traditional chiefs of Maboya-Loya, who has lost his energy. “When the Ugandan soldiers attacked us, they killed around ten civilians, some of them burnt to death in their huts, and they set fire to at least 40 houses,” he recalls.
When we arrived in the village on a Sunday in October, the survivors of the Ugandan crimes had gathered to prepare for the commemoration of the 24th anniversary of the attack. A mass and prayers for the souls of their loved ones was planned on 1 November 2024, the date of the attack on Maboya-Loya by Ugandan soldiers (UPDF). A heavy silence hung over the huts lost in the banana trees of this village, which has suffered another deadly attack, this time by the Ugandan-born Islamist rebels of the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) who, on 20 October 2022, set fire to the hospital centre and killed seven people, including a nun who was working as a doctor.
A black Wednesday
According to the United Nations Mapping Report, which lists more than 600 serious crimes committed in the DRC between March 1993 and June 2003, “on 1 November 2000, Ugandan soldiers killed between seven and eleven people during an attack on the population of the village of Maboya and Loya, 16 kilometres north of the town of Butembo”, in retaliation for the death of four of their men, killed a few hours earlier by Mai-Mai militiamen. The UN investigators noted that the Ugandan soldiers had indiscriminately attacked the inhabitants of the village, also injuring 43 people. “Some of the victims were shot dead, while others were burnt alive,” reveals this report, which has been quoted several times by the judges of the International Court of Justice, who have ordered Uganda to pay more than 320 million dollars in reparations for its illegal activities in the DRC.
In Maboya-Loya, victims and survivors still have fresh memories of the crimes committed in 2000. Emmanuel Sivanzire, 52, remembers that it was on a Wednesday, a market day, that the village was struck. “We woke up nicely: some had gone to the fields, others to the market, and the school-age children were at school. As in most of our villages, the market day is a day of rest for the farmers, who take advantage of this day to sell their crops and stock up on essentials. I left the field very early and made my way with militiamen who had obviously taken cows by force from a farm to bring them back to their headquarters in Mabuku (7 kilometres away). They knew that the Ugandan soldiers were coming to the market for supplies, so they ambushed them to stock up on weapons,” he says, revealing that at least five Ugandan soldiers perched on a lorry were killed in that ambush.
Retaliation operation
Panic-stricken, some inhabitants had fled the village. Others who were still there were surprised by Ugandan soldiers who had come from Beni and Kabasha in the north to avenge their brothers in arms. “They accused our village of being a militia district. Without mercy, they broke down the houses’ doors, looted the livestock and killed civilians, some of whom had hidden under the beds. Then they set fire to at least 40 houses. It was a very quick operation that only lasted an hour, from 5pm to 6.30pm, and then they left again,” recalls Emmanuel Sivanzire, sitting on a chair next to the place where his family’s hut was.
During the reprisal operation, his neighbour Dominique Kagheni, who was hiding in a straw hut, decided to leave the house when he saw the fire burning the ceiling. “I said to myself that it would be better to die from a bullet in the head than to be burnt alive. I went outside and threw myself into a nearby banana plantation. A neighbour whom we were hiding with in the house couldn’t get away. She had already been shot. She was burnt to death,” he says.
Gervais Maliro was three years old, but remembers being abandoned. “My parents were out in the fields, and our neighbour had taken me and some other children from the village to try to get us to safety. When the soldiers arrived, he ran away. They were Ugandan soldiers. Some threatened to kill me and others said I was a poor innocent child. They spared me. And when I got back to our hut, I found it burnt to the ground, I saw dead bodies and a neighbouring family burnt to death: it was an old woman, the village grandmother and her grandsons, my friends,” he says. “I didn’t understand anything. It was a terrible thing to go through at my age.”
Georgette Nyumu is a village leader who watched the whole thing from a farm opposite. “It was mean. I was following everything from a distance and I could see smoke coming out of the burnt-out houses,” she tells Justice Info. “When we arrived in the village, it was a disaster: they had shot pigs and goats and killed our relatives. The next morning, together with village elders and government officials, we began searching through the rubble to recover the bodies. Just as we were about to bury them, we saw the Ugandan soldiers returning. They were in their Mamba vehicles, well-armed. We feared they would come back to continue their work. Fortunately, I had a Red Cross flag that I raised. They saw it and left,” she says.
Not a penny of reparation
For 25 years, the survivors have managed to keep the traces of these crimes: the mass grave in which the victims were buried is well marked and the village pays its respects there on each anniversary of this sad event. Customary chief Kakule Luhimbo told Justice Info that a monument to the victims would be erected in this area.
The victims are aware that an operation to compensate victims of crimes committed by Uganda in the DRC has begun, but fear they will be forgotten by the authorities - who seem to be targeting only victims in Kisangani and Ituri. “More than 100 million [USD] in compensation is a lot, more than the 10 million allocated to the victims of Thomas Lubanga and the one million for those of Germain Katanga. If they give us even one million, it could wipe away our tears and help us rebuild our village,” says Emmanuel Sivanzire who, while he is waiting, has begun identifying the victims and the damage they suffered.
In its 2022 judgment ordering reparations, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) deplored the fact that “the DRC did not provide, as the Court had invited it to do so, a satisfactory explanation of its method of calculating the damage allegedly caused to property in Kisangani, Beni and Butembo, places where it is known that the UPDF operated”. It noted, however, that “with regard to UPDF operations in Beni and Butembo, the Mapping report confirms several cases of considerable material destruction” and further requested that “for the purposes of distributing compensation, the administrators of the fund [be] encouraged to also consider the possibility of adopting measures benefiting all the communities affected”, meaning also in North Kivu.
From one crime to another: the case of Kikere
A week after the Maboya-Loya massacre, the Ugandan soldiers were involved in another crime, this time in Kikere, another village in Beni territory, about ten kilometres north-west of Butembo. As in Maboya-Loya, in Kikere, it was a Wednesday when Mai-Mai militiamen attacked a convoy of Ugandan soldiers who were escorting trucks carrying illegally mined minerals.
The Mapping report notes that in retaliation, the Ugandan soldiers were guilty of murder and looting in the immediate aftermath of the incident. On 9 November 2000, they “indiscriminately killed 36 people in the village of Kikere, near Butuhe, north of Butembo. The soldiers fired indiscriminately at civilians with rifles and rocket launchers. Some civilians were burnt alive in their homes. The soldiers also systematically killed domestic animals and destroyed civilians’ property,” notes the report.
In Kikere, the survivors still remember the day in November when the wedding of a village son was ruined by violence. “It was a Wednesday morning. We had just fetched water for our brother’s wedding. As soon as we got to the roundabout leading to Muhila and Rwaha, we saw Ugandan soldiers who immediately fired in our direction. When they arrived, they saw a shed set up by the elders for the wedding celebration. At the time, in our villages, we used to build sheds covered with banana leaves. They thought it was a fetish house for the militia. It was a disaster,” says Kavugho Mwamini, who had just given birth to her first baby who was two months old. As a result, soldiers began looting some houses, setting fire to others and killing civilians, mainly men they accused of being militiamen.
Ngunza Mapasa, who was 24 years old at the time, claims to have lost four of his relatives in the attack, including his older brother. As he was about to go to school, he says he heard heavy gunfire, forcing him to return to his parents’ hut. “Dad and I were alone in the village. He had already gone out to graze the goats when the Ugandans came. It was around 6 o’clock. From a distance, I saw smoke coming out of the burnt-out huts. I headed for Butembo via the bush. The house where I was hiding had been burnt down, and when my father returned to the village, he thought I had been burnt alive. Fortunately, not,” he reveals.
The soldiers withdrew from the village with a dozen women, whom they took to their prison in Butembo. “They accused us of being the wives of militiamen. In prison, they told us that they had already killed our husbands. It was an incredible trauma. What’s more, they tortured us, we had wounds all over,” says Mwamini Kavugho, one of the prisoners of war. “In the vehicle that took us to the prison, there was blood everywhere, cattle and other looted goods such as bicycles, which represented our wealth at the time,” she adds.
The village gone
More than 20 years later, the village has disappeared. The houses have given way to banana and eucalyptus trees that hide the traces of crime. When you ask Kakule Kayenga, who has been living in his field in Luke ever since, he says without hesitation: “When I go through Kikere, bad memories come to mind. Since that day, I’ve been living like a displaced person, and I can’t go back,” says the 60-year-old, who has lost his two brothers in the attack.
“At the moment, many of my fellow villagers are wandering around for lack of an address. We’re paying rent whereas we had our houses and were happy in our homes. They should help us to build, perhaps somewhere else. In Kikere, that won’t be possible. We have bad memories and the trauma persists,” says Marie Vuvuya, a teacher in the village.
North Kivu: have the victims been forgotten?
In Butembo, the association Colibri RDC is helping the victims in their quest for truth, justice and reparation. It is supporting them in the process of identifying all the victims and the damage they suffered, to help them benefit from the reparations currently underway in Kisangani.
“Uganda has already paid three of the five instalments agreed. Millions of US dollars are already available for reparations. We would like the victims in North Kivu to also be taken into account just like those elsewhere where similar acts attributable to the Ugandan army were committed,” says the association’s Congolese lawyer, Richard Ndekeninge. He is worried that those in charge of the Special fund for the distribution of compensation to victims of Uganda’s illicit activities in the DRC (FRIVAO) are not paying attention to the situation of the victims in North Kivu.
Contacted, the Fund’s managers did not answer to our request for questions.
