Tracked down for several years by the Central Office for the Fight against Crimes Against Humanity, the former leader of a Congolese rebel movement has been imprisoned in the prison of Health.
By and
Roger Lumbala spent the New Year in a French prison. At 62 years old, this former Congolese warlord suspected by the United Nations of massacres of civilians – but also of rape, torture, cannibalism and looting – was arrested in the street in Paris on December 29 by the Office Central Office for the Fight Against Crimes Against Humanity (OCLCH).
At the end of a 96-hour police custody, partly spent in a secure room at the Hôtel-Dieu in a precarious state of health, Mr. Lumbala was indicted on Saturday 2 January for “participating in a group formed for the preparation of war crimes” and “complicity in war crimes”.
The acts alleged against the former warlord took place between 2000 and 2003 in the provinces of Ituri and Haut-Uélé, in the northeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). At the time, Roger Lumbala was the head of the Rassemblement congolais pour la democratie-National (RCD-N), a rebel movement supported by neighboring Uganda.
The Second Congo War (1998- 2003), a deadly regional conflict, rages on. The rebel, who reigns through terror in a remote and difficult to access region, takes advantage of the conflict to orchestrate the exploitation of minerals (gold and diamonds in particular) and the killings of civilians, the poaching of elephants, according to several Congolese witnesses. and foreigners.
Looting, rapes, murders
“He was a general, had the weapons, the money and administered his area with a kind of government and a brutal army capable of killing for no reason, “recalls an activist from Haut-Uélé. According to a Western humanitarian, Roger Lumbala had been particularly threatening towards a Swiss NGO which had the only operational pharmacy in the region. An establishment which was looted and ransacked by combatants under his orders, thus depriving the population of healthcare. However, many of the millions of victims of the conflict have died of disease and hunger.
The men of the RCD-N were also involved in Operation Erase the Table launched in October 2002 with elements of the Mouvement de liberation du Congo (MLC) led by Jean-Pierre Bemba to conquer territory controlled by an enemy group. The UN teams evoke, in a report from February 2003, “A Pattern of Looting, Murder, and Rape as a Tactic of War”.
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