Searching for human rights in the Republic of the Congo

Congo-Brazzaville, an African nation of just 3.5 million with sufficient resources, remains mired in corruption, police torture and roadblocks to residents getting educated and moving forward.

By TAMARA BARAAZ
Congo's President Denis Sassou Nguesso (photo credit: REUTERS)
Congo's President Denis Sassou Nguesso
(photo credit: REUTERS)
Next to the headline-making Democratic Republic of Congo (Congo-Kinshasa) lies a quiet neighboring country with a similar name, the Republic of the Congo (Congo- Brazzaville). The latter faces a problem similar to that of its neighbors: Being ruled by a dictator who is supposed to step down, but is doing everything he can to hinder the transition of power.
Due to a state of affairs that is less chaotic in comparison to surrounding countries, Congo-Brazzaville’s quiet dictatorship is being ignored by the international community, and human rights activists receive little coverage. This Congo is a “regular” African country, with all the usual syndromes: bad infrastructure, poverty and corruption.
Engaging in activism for human rights and exercising freedom of the press may result in arrest and torture.
Despite that, there are people who insist on their freedom of speech.
IMAGINE YOURSELF as a law student in the capital city, Brazzaville. You are enrolled in the country’s only state-funded university, Marien Ngouabi. You’ve come a long way to get there; your parents have saved every franc throughout their lives to fund your future studies, and you’ve worked hard as well.
This is because you wanted to be somebody; you wanted to be among those driving nice cars and wearing nice suits. You don’t want to sell fried dough balls in the street for a living.
So you get up at 2 a.m. and start preparing for the day. You suddenly hear a downpour hit the roof, and you know the journey to the university will be a nightmare. On a clear day, the ride is half an hour long; on a rainy day, it takes two hours.
In Brazzaville there are two or three proper roads; the rest are marked by huge potholes that become water pools on rainy days. Green cabs, minivans and crowded buses all cram into the muddy alleys, trying to bypass the huge water holes. Some get stuck in the pools, others fight with fellow drivers or the cop who’s blocking their way. Behind those arguing, an impatient line of cars is honking nonstop, expressing the general frustration.
You arrive late to the university. “Late” is 5 or 6 a.m.; the class will start hours later, but seats are already occupied by students like you who woke up early to catch the available space. The student population has steadily increased since the university’s establishment in 1971, but classrooms and the number of seats have remained the same for over 45 years.
Those who arrive later will climb up the windows to see inside, or stand outside; from these positions, they will try in vain to hear the professor and take notes.
After school, you write your papers at the costly cyber cafe. The Internet works slowly and disconnects frequently; you wait three minutes for every email you send and you can forget about Skype or YouTube, they never work. After you’ve waited for an available computer and completed your assignments, you go back home and try to shower and get to sleep early, because tomorrow you’ll wake up again at a crazy hour.
But again, as every day, there’s no water in the tap. You stay awake, waiting for the water to return, then give up and go to sleep.
Yet despite the daily struggle and your good grades, it’s not certain you’ll receive a degree – as Atipu Fronki, a student and human rights activist, details.
“The university professors have absolute power over their students. A professor can covet your girlfriend, and if you refuse his demand none of you will graduate. My female friend was harassed by her professor, who tried to extort sex in exchange for a degree; she had to quit her studies. I have friends who have had their professor extort bribes from them.
“Once, when grades were published, we noticed a few names with no grade attached, just a question mark. When the students approached the vice president, he told the girls: ‘You know what you have to do.’” Do you ever protest? “We once held a demonstration in the streets because the government did not pay the student scholarships for six months. It’s not easy to get these scholarships; only those who have connections and bribe the officers will get it, and even then you end up paying your tuition.”
What were the results of the demonstrations? “The cops threw a grenade at the crowd and a student lost his hands.
Others were arrested and tortured for two days.”
And then, you face a dilemma: You can accept your situation, which is relatively tolerable. It’s better than life in neighboring countries, like the DRC (Kinshasa) and the Central African Republic, two war-torn countries plagued by poverty, banditry and rape. It’s better than the life you had in your childhood, when the Republic of the Congo was thrown into a civil war and the streets were covered with corpses and vultures clouded the sky.
You know that your country, full of natural resources and inhabited by a small population (3.5 million citizens) could have developed – if not for the corruption. You know that your president, Denis Sassou Nguesso, has a hundred accounts abroad and shady deals with foreign companies.
They mine the land’s resources, he receives the profits in cash.
You hear stories about huge amounts of the country’s money being stored in the private bedroom of some minister or army official. This money will later demonstrate itself in the form of brandname clothes, fancy cars and lavish parties.
Sometimes these stories appear in the papers, but most of the time they are kept secret and become the subject of rumors.
All this is happening while your country is lacking roads and clean water. You can clench your teeth and move on in the rat race, fighting for your personal success against bad infrastructure and dysfunctional systems.
Or you can become an activist.
AND THEN, you can try to motivate a tired and indifferent crowd against a strong president who has influence over his surroundings. Moreover, you can try to fight a corrupt police system that acts according to its own whims.
Mangoto Samson’s story demonstrates how easy it is to get thrown into police torture rooms.
“It all started when I visited my friend at the cellphone company,” recalls Samson.
“When I entered the company’s building, another man entered behind me. Later I would discover that he had climbed to the top floor while I was conversing with the receptionist, and stolen a laptop.
“The day after, when I returned to the office, I was stopped by the police.
They interrogated me and claimed I had helped the thief by distracting the receptionist. I insisted upon my innocence but to no avail, and they took me to the police station. On the way to the station, the cop told me: ‘You talk too much and ask too many questions. You will see what I’m going to do to you!’ “The officer then said to the head of the station, ‘Give us a cell, we want to fight with him,’ and the chief gave his approval.
“They undressed me, cuffed my hands behind my legs in a spider’s position and hung me in the air on a metal bar. They tortured me all day as I was screaming and begging to be taken to court.
‘You will never get to court,’ they told me, ‘no one will come to your rescue.
We will ruin you until you confess to stealing the laptop.’ They handcuffed me so tightly that the skin peeled off my hands and they bled nonstop.”
Samson’s family managed to pull together connections and make someone important take an interest in his situation.
When his hands were ruined, skinless and shapeless, someone remembered to check the cellphone company’s camera. The police were surprised to see one of the company workers escort the thief out the back door. Samson was released, and he later sued the police.
The trial has been dragging on for more than a year, and Samson sees no light at the end of the tunnel. He is unable to work and is struggling to get surgery, which no one will fund. But he is luckier than many others who suffered a similar fate.
“I spent 11 days in detention,” says Raymond Malonga. “I met detainees who were waiting years for their trial, despite this being forbidden by the law.
They are crammed like sardines in the cells, unable to lie down or sit properly.
Some of them die from lack of air or disease.
There’s no shower, no bathroom; they defecate in the cells and force a weak prisoner to scrape up the feces with his hands and hurl it out.”
Malonga has a disheveled working- class appearance, clad in shabby clothes and old sunglasses. An observer can be fooled into thinking he’s a street vendor, but he’s a senior journalist, a cartoonist and the founder of the local satire newspaper Sel-Piment. Back in the ’90s he covered Congo’s civil war and was caught by the “Ninja” rebels, who assumed he was a spy.
Since the beginning of his career he has been walking a tightrope, navigating between his desire to expose injustices and the need for self-preservation. He works cautiously, monitoring every word in the paper, but one slip caused his arrest and the newspaper’s closure for nine months.
“I was approached by a family whose son died in jail,” Malonga recounts.
“The jailers tortured him, disfigured his face, killed him and dumped his corpse at the hospital without notifying his family about his death. They accidentally found out about it from the medical staff. The police paid them the burial expenses so they’d keep quiet, but they didn’t want to comply. So they came to me, and I published their story.
“A short time afterward, I was kidnapped in the middle of the street and brought to the police station. I was released after two days on the condition that I deny the facts and publish an apology. I did not do so, so I was detained again for 11 days and the newspaper was shut down.
“These days the paper operates regularly, but I keep getting phone calls and threats from the police. They send ‘visitors’ that come to my office. Some journalists cooperate with the police and spy on their colleagues, so I can’t trust anyone.”
YAVE AND Martial, now in their mid- 20s, started their rapping career in their teens. Toward the end of high school they started expressing political opinions, and their rap songs became social statements.
Their parents begged them to stop.
“I grew up in a family of 10 brothers,” recalls Martial. “Eight of them, together with my father, died of various diseases. My mother worked hard all her life and sacrificed a lot for my future. When she begs me to stop because my work is harming her, I feel like crying. But I cannot stop.”
So they keep paying the price. They change apartments periodically to hide from the police. Their girlfriends have broken up with them one after the other because of their risky lifestyle. The police have raided their families’ homes.
Yave says that if there were any other artists like them, they have all since stopped. “People are afraid. There used to be a band that sang protest songs, until one day it disappeared. When we checked, we discovered the government had offered them a job so they would stop singing, and they took the offer.
When you refuse such offers, it can end in violence. We keep getting these offers, and we always refuse.
“This is why we are having a hard time finding a stage. This country has five television channels and all of them belong to the government, which of course refuses to play our music. Once we were given a chance: We were invited to perform in front of a crowd only if we agreed to stay away from politics and sing about love. We consented and then did the opposite, embarrassing the organizers.”
JOE WASHINGTON Ebina, the founder of the Ebina a social foundation, is another activist who decided to speak up. He has been arrested three times in his life.
Ebina puts it plainly as to what led to his first arrest. “I simply told the president he has to go.”
This followed an accidental explosion of a military arsenal in the Mpila neighborhood of Brazzaville. Many of the neighborhood residents, including Ebina’s family, lost their homes as a result, not receiving sufficient aid.
“This country suffers from neglect,” argues Ebina. “When I was young, roads were maintained; now the roads are deteriorating and the government is not doing anything about it. We are only 3.5 million people with many resources, we can be a developed country!” How many activists are working in the Congo? What are their chances of overcoming a system that has been corrupt since its establishment? “We are now coordinating between 55 organizations that are trying to make a difference,” notes Dr. Anwa Nwa, a physician and a member of the M23 movement, who spent his youth in the bush in a failed revolution.
“Back in the ’70s we tried to create a democracy,” he explains, “and we failed to achieve it. We are trying again. Right now Sassou is trying to change the constitution so that he can rule another term. We know that if he succeeds there will be a war, and we are trying to prevent it. We appeal to organizations abroad, organize meetings and unite.”
Suppose Sassou steps down and the new leader continues the culture of corruption – what will they do? “We will fight again. Our goal is not to promote this leader or another, but to create a democracy.
“Congo needs democracy.”
Special thanks to Joe Washington Ebina, the founder of the Ebina foundation, who assisted with this article.