Demonstration in Brussels to bring the mass grave to public attention

After the ban on demonstrating at Kinshasa on Friday, around a hundred Congolese expats demonstrated in front of the porte de Namur and the European parliament in Brussels. The demonstration took place between 3pm and 6pm on Saturday. Those present were calling for the exhumation of the bodies buried in a mass grave discovered in Maluku, in the east of Kinshasa. The demonstration disrupted traffic on a small ring-road near the rue du Trône. According to the Congolese opposition, the 424 bodies found in the grave are the victims of the Kinshasa troubles, which occurred in January. These troubles started during a demonstration against a project to reform the election law.

Joseph Mbeka, president of the International Congolese Council (ICC), says there is evidence to corroborate this theory: “Bonenge Def Mbungu is a young student who was shot during the troubles on the 19th, 20th and 21st of January. He is living proof of what the President Joseph Kabila’s Republican guard did. His mother said secret service agents went to the hospital to locate the victims. She managed to send her son to India. He is seriously injured. We would ask that everything possible is done to save him and have his version of what happened heard”.

On the 8th of April, the Foreign Affairs minister Didier Reydners asked for an immediate credible independent inquiry. The Development cooperation minister Alexander De Croo gave the United Nations Bureau for Human Rights 1.5 million euros (UNBHR) towards this.

(Source: Belga)


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