What would you do if armed government soldiers came into your home, greeted you formally, and announced they were taking your twelve-year old daughter? She would be a “military wife,” available for sex, cooking, washing, carrying heavy goods, and other chores that soldiers will not do.

Last week, soldiers did this to families of two schoolgirls in Kashenda village, which CPT visited last weekend with its partner Groupe Martin Luther King. The girls are friends--one in the last grade of primary school, the other in the first year of secondary school. Their families are heartbroken. Their parents are afraid to leave their homes. 

Goma is very quiet. From the news, one might think that bullets are whizzing by our heads in this city in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is hard to imagine that militias and Congo’s army are conducting a war 30 miles from here, and that armed men are raping women, abducting children as soldiers, and shooting unarmed men.

Christophe Mutaka, from Groupe Martin Luther King, told us that visiting Goma is almost like being in North America—you can't really see the impact of the conflict without going to the villages and internally displaced persons (IDP) camps surrounding the city. War has displaced 250,000 people since August 2008, due to the recent surge in the conflict among General Laurent Nkunda's militia, the national army, and other groups who struggle to control this resource-rich area.

Uganda is recovering from the violence of civil war. How does a victim community reconcile with those members who have done the killing?

Twenty years of war between the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the government forces in Northern Uganda drove all the people off the land and into IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) camps. Now fragile peace talks are in process, resettlement on the land has begun and LRA soldiers are returning to their communities with amnesty. The LRA abducted many of the soldiers from these communities as children but they have committed horrible massacres. Is reintegration possible? How can justice prevail?

In 2007, members of CPT's Great Lakes team met with David Kato and two of his colleagues at Sexual Minorities Uganda.  His murder on 26 January 2011 is a significant loss to the LGBT community in East Africa.  Kato was an outspoken activist and faced numerous threats to his life, the most recent after he successfully sued a Kampala newspaper for publishing his (and others’) photos with a message that they should be hanged.  His funeral took place on 28 January.  An obituary is available here.

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) recently integrated rebels from the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP) into the country's military.  President Kabila also invited the Rwandan military to join an operation against militias of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR).  Some FDLR combatants are considered responsible for the Rwandan genocide, and they control many of the mines in South and North Kivu Provinces.  Planners hope this operation stops the conflict engulfing eastern DRC for fifteen years.  But nonviolent activists are seeking to reframe the conflict, so that they, rather than violent actors, hold the initiative.

Friday 2 January -- Accompanied by GMLK members, the team visited Mugunga 1 and Mugunga 3 camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs). They talked to families who had been forced to leave their homes because of fighting by rebel National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP) soldiers. Several of the women willing to share their stories had been raped by CNDP soldiers. Young men told of CNDP and Rwandan soldiers forcibly taking children from their villages to be trained as soldiers. IDPs are living in banana-leaf huts, in deplorable conditions, with little to fill their time. Some have taken refuge in Mugunga 1 for over a year, while others fled their homes during the conflict last fall.