DRC: Bukavu, the story of three generations marked by violence

Audio 02:39

By William Basimike Congolese people are thirsty for peace after the violence and the noises of arms that have punctuated the 60 years of independence of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Our correspondent looks back on three generations that were marked by this violence, those of 1960, 1996 and before the 2018 elections.

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In 1960 Victor Basinza was only 17 years old at independence. His joy was only of short duration because some time later, the weapons will resound:

“  What I remember is the Mulele war in 1964 which cost the life of my first wife. We took refuge in the hills of Muhungu and there, a shell fell very close to our refuge while she was trying to collect wood to prepare us to eat. Unfortunately the splinters had touched my beloved Consolata, and it was over for her. It was a very bad day !

Of course I remarried, but each time I look on this hill, everything comes back to my mind and I see the scene again, I can still hear this detonation as if it were yesterday. I hope that this old age that brings me closer to death will deliver me from this trauma . "

Like Victor, this housewife Chanceline Nabintu Bahaya, lost her father in 1996 among thousands of civilians who perished in the so-called liberation war under the leadership of ex-president Laurent Désiré Kabila. To date, his father's body has never been found :

"I 'm thinking maybe one day he can come back. I don't know if we killed him, I don't know if he was drowned, I don't really know. Maybe one day he will come back. We had fled the fighting as far as the village of Nyangezi, I was 6 years old. Today I am 31 years old I have never seen my father and it really affects me. I am married, I already have children who ask me where their grandfather is. In any case, it affected me a lot because in 1997, I had not studied for lack of means.  "

Chanceline Nabintu regrets that things have not changed to date: “  There is a lot of violence. People are killed here and there, there are bandits who attack houses ... There is no peace in the Congo, there is no liberation. We are going to celebrate June 30, but we do not know what we are going to celebrate, because there is no peace !  "

After the elections deemed democratic in 2006 and 2011, although punctuated by violence, armed groups remained in the forests of South Kivu, while in the town of Bukavu demonstrations were suppressed.

Hippocrates Marume is the president of the Civil Society of the commune of Kadutu, victim: “  When we were asking for the electoral calendar, I was shot in the right foot. I was hospitalized for three months in a medical structure because we were in the process of demanding work-study in our country, the rule of law. My blood that had spilled that time was to demand freedom of demonstrations and for the moment I have not yet seen it ; certainly there was alternation but in a format that nobody controls and in the current context we do not see what we campaigned for. On the security level, we want, 60 years after our independence, to see the current authorities get involved to stabilize the security situation in our country.  "

During his visit to Bukavu last October, President Félix Tshisekedi said he was ready to die for peace in eastern DRC.

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