UNION
POUR LA DÉMOCRATIE
ET LE PROGRÈS SOCIAL

GENOCIDE ALERT: ACT NOW TO PREVENT HUMAN SLAUGHTER IN CONGO'S KASAI REGION

LEJA BULELA
1456 East 17th Court
Des Moines, IA 50316
(515) 264-0907

PRESS RELEASE October 23, 1998

I am sending this letter to you with the hope of preventing a bad situation from turning into a catastrophy for the people of Congo (former Zaire). You are aware that this country has been the victim of a rebellion/invasion that has affected the fragile lives of its people in a very profound way since August 2nd.

As I am writing this letter, the rebels are headed toward the East Kasai province of Congo and many observers fear that thousands of civilians will perish in clashes with the rebels. These rebels broke off from the government of Congo in August. The people of East Kasai have been opposed to the decidedly dictatorial tendencies of the government (current officials and officials-turned-rebels). As such, a clash between the rebels and the government troops in Kasai will result in nothing short of a genocide for the civilian population of Kasai.

Besides the animosity between the people of Kasai and armed troops (government or rebel), two other factors indicate that clashes in Kasai will be bloody. First, the Financial Times indicated in a recent article that both the government and the rebels are motivated by business deals. Mbuji-Mayi, the provincial capital and largest city, is the diamond-mining center of the Congo. With a collapsed economy, Congo's government depends solely on proceeds from the sale of diamonds. As such, the government will deploy thousands of troops and will put up a fierce resistance at Mbuji-Mayi in its quest to maintain control of the diamond mines. Second, more than two thousand women and children of ethnic Hutus have found shelter in Mbuji-Mayi after fleeing for hundreds of miles from the advancing Tutsi rebels in 1997. Now the same ethnic Tutsis are fighting as rebels and the probability of a genocide of the ethnic Hutus is extremely high.

The population in this province has had a long history of devastation through wars inflicted by others. In 1959-60 over a million of them migrated from Western Kasai as a result of a civil war. By the end of 1960 thousands were killed by soldiers sent by the Kinshasa government. The 1960 killings were characterized as genocide by the then UN General Secretary and the UN Security Council. In 1993-94 about 800,000 people of Eastern Kasai origin who had spent their entire lives in the Katanga province were expelled through ethnic cleansing to Eastern Kasai where they had to resettle without any international assistance whatsoever. This population has gone through a lot to be able to sustain yet another war, another suffering.

I am writing this letter to draw your attention to these facts and to ask you to intercede for the people of the Congo in any way you deem necessary and to prevent an impending disaster.

Sincerely,

Musau Wakabongo, Phd.
President, Leja Bulela, Inc.
1456 East 17th Court
Des Moines, IA 50316
(515) 264-0907

For further information please contact:

Dr. Musau Wakabongo
(at telephone number listed above)

or

Tshimanga John Metzel
Congo Educational Council
P.O. Box 77273
Washington, DC 20005
(703) 534-3702