The minister of justice said the government’s congress should remove former chairman Joseph Kabila’s immunity so he can encounter costs of supporting a rebel rebellion in the country’s east.
Justice secretary Constant Mutamba told investigators in the region’s capital Kinshasa on Wednesday evening that Congo has amassed strong proof of the former president’s involvement in “war atrocities, crimes against humanity, and murders of peaceful civilians and military workers” in the south.
Mutamba claimed the attorney general of the Congo’s army had requested that Kabila’s congress withdraw the life immunity from prosecution that he enjoys as an ex-president and senator.
The justice minister added that the former president is accused of” treason, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and involvement in an insurrectional action.”
Kabila disputed Kabila’s say that the Rwanda-backed M23 insurgents were “preparing an insurrection” with them, according to Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi next year.
Kabila led the Congo from 2001 to 2019, taking department at the age of 29 and extending his authority by halting primaries for two years after his term ended in 2016. Laurent Kabila, his father, was killed in 2001, according to his parents.
He left in 2023, and he returned next month to the Congo, in part as a result of his deteriorating ties with the president’s state. One of his colleagues claimed that he had arrived in the rebel-held southeast city of Goma and that he intended to “participate in peace work.”
The M23 separatists advanced and seized the proper city of Goma in January, followed by the city of Bukavu, which they took in February. This escalated the decades-long conflict in Congo. Around 7 million people have beendisplaced, making the fighting the worst of what was already one of the largest philanthropic problems in the world, and it has already killed about 3, 000 people.
M23 is one of about 100 armed groups fighting for a foothold in the mineral-rich northeast Congo close to Rwanda’s borders. According to UN experts, the insurgents are supported by about 4, 000 forces from Rwanda’s neighbor.
Fighting continues in the eastern state of South-Kivu despite the agreement between the Congo’s troops and M23 to operate toward a ceasefire earlier this month. The justice president’s actions volume to “relentless persecution,” according to Ferdinand Kambere, the People’s Party for Reconstruction and Democracy’s deputy secretary-general.
” These errors that those in authority keep making against the original president- believing they are degrading or intimidating him- basically show that the regime is about to stop,” the authors claim. They have nothing to apply against Kabila, Kambere told The Associated Press.
