2023-11-10 20:12:54
Roger Lumbala, February 6, 2013. ISAAC KASAMANI / AFP
This will be the first trial of a politico-military leader of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) before a national court – and not the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague – under universal jurisdiction. Roger Lumbala, 65, in pre-trial detention in France since his indictment on January 2, 2021 in Paris, will be tried for “complicity in crimes against humanity” and “participation in an agreement with a view to committing crimes against humanity”, committed in the north-east of the DRC between July 2002 and December 2003.
Roger Lumbala is thus accused of having ordered or assisted in the commission “massive and systematic torture or inhumane acts”, according to the indictment order of the judge of the genocide and crimes against humanity division of the Paris judicial court. The order, dated November 6 and that The world was able to consult, also lists “summary executions”, “rape”, “theft or looting” et “enslavement in the form of forced labor or sexual slavery”.
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If Roger Lumbala will soon find himself in the box of a French court, it is following the report to the courts, in July 2016, of the director general of the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons (Ofpra) under of article 40 of the code of criminal procedure. Ofpra had received a request for political asylum from Mr. Lumbala four years earlier, which had been refused. Nevertheless, the one–he had not been expelled to the DRC, where he was at the time the subject of an international arrest warrant, because France considered that he did not benefit from guarantees of a fair and equitable trial in his country. He was hunted for several years by the Central Office for the Fight against Crimes Against Humanity (OCLCH), before being arrested on December 29, 2020 in Paris.
In the grip of a triple war
We must go back to the Second Congo War (1998-2003) to place in context the facts with which Roger Lumbala is accused. At the time, the latter was at the head of a rebel group founded with the support of Uganda, the Rassemblement congolais pour la democratie-National (RCD-N), allied to the Mouvement de liberation du Congo (MLC) by Jean-Pierre Bemba. Both are at war against the central government of President Joseph Kabila, who succeeded his father Laurent-Désiré in January 2001, who was assassinated by one of his bodyguards.
The immense country of the DRC was then in the grip of a triple war: foreign countries which supported Kinshasa (Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Chad) or opposed it (Uganda, Rwanda) clashed; rebel groups, including that of Mr. Bemba, seek to overthrow central power; finally, rebel groups, like that of Mr. Lumbala, fight among themselves for control of the territory and the riches of the soil and subsoil (gold, precious wood, oil, etc.).
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