18 11 13 IRIN: Congo-Kinshasa: Obstacles to Return in Eastern DRC

But for many more Congolese
uprooted by conflict a homecoming is still a distant prospect.

The UN Office for the
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported on 6 November a "progressive return or a
wish to return" among internally displaced persons (IDPs) from Nyiragongo
and Rutshuru territories, where the M23's last holdouts were captured by the
DRC army last week.

The report suggested that
around 40,000 IDPs, and 10,000 DRC refugees in Uganda, might soon return to their
homes in the two territories.

But the other four
territories in North Kivu are still prey to
armed groups, and are still seeing population displacements, OCHA said.

Official figures in August
suggested there were some 135,000 IDPs from Rutshuru and Nyiragongo, out of
just over one million in the whole province, and some two and a half million in
the country.

Privately, some NGOs
contest those figures, which they say are exaggerated. The real figure is
likely to rise, however, at least temporarily, as the Congolese army and the UN
mission in Congo (MONUSCO) attempt to neutralize other "negative
forces".

Analyst Thierry Vircoulon
of the International Crisis Group predicts that the neutralization of the more
than 20 remaining armed groups in North Kivu
will be "a long and complex task".

The day before the M23's
last bastion fell to the Congolese army, refugees a few kilometres away in Uganda spoke of
the difficulties that may still confront them.

Innocent Nyonzima, a young
man from Rutshuru, told IRIN: "When we go back, there will still be a
problem.

"Many of us have been
refugees since 2007, and in Rwanda
there is a Congolese population that left nearly 20 years ago.

"It will be difficult
for families to regain their rights and their land or even to recognize their
homes," he said. "They may find they have lost everything."

Zawadi Mwamini, a
28-year-old woman from Masisi
Territory, now living in
a camp outside Goma, has already been through this experience.

"We fled the war in
2007," she told IRIN. "In 2009 we went back to our village and found
our fields had been occupied by another family. They said 'this is not your
home' and chased us away."

Zawadi said the village was
not in a war zone but she and her husband had had to return to the camp.

"We didn't have any
money or work so we came here for assistance."

 

Family squabbles over land

Gabriel Hanyurwa, a
displaced farmer and teacher living in the same camp, told IRIN he could go
back to his village in Rutshuru but he would not sleep easily.

"I am afraid to go
back to my home because I don't get on with my family," he said. "If
I go back there my elder brother could have me killed. Families are eating each
other in the villages – quarrelling over their fields and inheritances."

He said it was common for
whole villages to be divided against each other by these kinds of disputes,
even where villagers are all from the same ethnic group.

"Among 100 families
there are perhaps 50 who are hated and 50 who aren't… Yes I could go back to
the village, I could cultivate my field but I would always be worried that they
would come for me in the night."

Similar fears are shared by
many in eastern DRC, says Christophe Beau, protection adviser for the UN system
in Goma.

"Even when a zone has
been made secure," he told IRIN, "people always fear to return to it
because they could still be threatened by people who were in the armed
groups."

It is not clear what
proportion of refugees and IDPs believe they could be targeted if they go home,
but it seems likely these fears will be strongest in areas where armed groups
have created or exacerbated inter or intra-community tensions over land, power
and resources.

The researcher Severine
Autesserre, in her study "The Trouble with the Congo: Local Violence and the
Failure of International Peacebuilding", (2010), writes that land disputes
have often been a cause of tension for displaced people trying to return to
their villages in eastern DRC.

"Returnees often find
their land occupied by new groups, usually of a different ethnic origin. This
practice of usurpation occurred in similar ways throughout eastern Congo."

Detailed reports compiled
by the RRMP (Rapid Response to Movements of
Population),
a joint UN/NGO initiative in eastern DRC, give an idea of where these kinds of
tensions are most serious.

Out of 40 localities
assessed by the RRMP recently, nine were found to feature land and community
conflicts that in some cases contributed to preventing IDPs returning home.

This may understate the
scale of the problem for IDPs and returnees in general. The RRMP focuses on
population movements to new sites, and probably under-reports movements to
established camps, which are mainly sited near areas with the worst community
and land conflicts.

 

Overcoming the obstacles

UNHCR's Beau argues that to
overcome IDP fear to return home, "first of all it's important to support
armed group members' return to civilian life and to encourage their social
integration.

"We need more
programmes to achieve this in North Kivu. The
government should put these kinds of programmes in place as soon as
possible."

This should be accompanied
by dialogue and "transformative activities", he added.

Oxfam's humanitarian
coordinator in North Kivu, Tariq Riebl,
agreed. He said "the Congolese government needs to rapidly adopt a strong
and comprehensive disarmament, demobilization and reintegration
programme," which regional governments and international partners should
support.

Oxfam is also calling for a
political process, alongside any military action, "that addresses
deep-seated issues including land, livelihoods, control of resources and
representation of all communities" and includes local-level dialogue.

The head of civil society
for the mineral rich Walikale Territory, Prince Kihangi Kyamwami, echoed this plea
at a mining conference in Kigali
on 20 November.

"The traditional
chiefs in the territory have appealed to the five armed groups in our territory
to lay down their arms, and most of them have agreed," he told the
conference. "We ask the authorities to promote dialogue rather than using
force and to track down only those armed groups that have not agreed to
dialogue."

The conference also heard
that a meeting of Mai-Mai armed groups was held recently at Itebero in Walikale
where it was agreed to "pacify" the mines and increase production,
and that another meeting with Mai-Mai leaders is planned in Shabunda, a gold
mining territory
of South Kivu.

Shabunda and Walikale are
not in fact areas where ownership of farmland is strongly contested, (expect
where it contains minerals). Two community dialogues involving armed groups
were held in Masisi early this year but the territory's land conflicts were not
a major item on the agenda of these meetings which mainly concerned combatants'
conditions for integrating with the army.

The government has begun
revising its land law but shows little sign of favouring agrarian reform (i.e.
land distribution), a process that might trigger violence. In the absence of
strong government initiatives, UN Habitat and several NGOs have tried to
resolve local land disputes in the Kivus, but so far the acreages involved have
been very small.

 

A model to follow?

In contrast to the DRC,
neighbouring Rwanda
has managed to alleviate land shortages and increase production through
large-scale agricultural programmes. At a conference last month Rwanda's
agriculture minister, Agnes Kalibata, attributed much of the increased
production to hill terracing which reduces erosion.

In the past decade Rwandan
smallholder farmers have been paid under government programmes to terrace their
own land, and in the past six years the government has also awarded more than10
million land titles.

In the DRC very few farmers
have land titles and few hillsides in the Kivus are terraced.