Zaire - A Torture State

Since the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture opened its doors in 1986, hundreds of Zairian torture survivors have sought treatment and rehabilitation from us. Our physicians examined and documented many of their cases. Others received counselling, therapy and practical assistance. Shortly after the Mobutu regime collapsed in May 1997, we decided to look systematically at our case files with a view to preparing a study about the use of torture and organised violence in the former Zaire. Some 800 files were examined, of which 511 contained sufficiently specific information (details of arrest, places of detention, security agencies involved, types of torture and violence used) to include in the study.

This report has several purposes:

1. It documents the scale of the use of torture and violence by the Mobutu regime as seen in individual cases of torture. We hope and intend that this documented record, by acknowledging the cruelty that they suffered, may help individual torture survivors come to terms with what happened to them.

2. The report describes the nature of the apparatus of torture and repression that allowed Mobutu to stay in power for so long: the structure, training, special characteristics and distribution throughout the country of the different security forces as well as the interplay among them. Documentation of the entire system of torture points out the perversion of the normal role of the modern State as protector of the rights of its citizens.

3. When we began the study, in the summer of 1997, we hoped that the new government of the re-named Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), led by President Laurent Kabila, would draw a line under the human rights abuses of the previous government. Specifically, we had hoped that the DRC Government might institute a thorough inquiry into these past abuses, by way of a national truth commission or an independent investigative tribunal, with a view to bringing to justice the main security agents and Mobutu-era officials who had used and condoned torture. Such was not to be. Any notion of an investigation into Mobutu-era human rights abuses was quickly overtaken by the mass killings of Zairians and refugees in eastern Zaire during and after Mr Kabila's successful march to power. The UN mission investigating those massacres has had to leave the Congo, its mission unfulfilled.

The Medical Foundation believes that it is not too late, despite President Kabila's disagreements with the United Nations about its investigative mission, to investigate past abuses and prosecute those responsible. The Medical Foundation will present this report to the new Congolese Government, asking them to conduct such an inquiry into past human rights abuses. It is not inconceivable that the DRC Government would want to undertake such an official investigation, if for no other reason than to broaden the UN's investigation to cover a much earlier period.

Although the focus of this report remains the historical record of torture under Mobutu, we cannot ignore the mass killings that occurred in eastern Zaire and, after May 1997, in eastern and other parts of the Congo. The Epilogue to this report collates information from the many published and some unpublished reports on human rights abuses by Kabila-led forces that have been written by the major international human rights organisations. The Epilogue also draws on interviews taken in the field from Rwandan refugees and local Congolese in eastern Congo during the summer of 1997. In addition, a small number of torture survivors who suffered under the new DRC Government have reached the Medical Foundation in London.


4. Zaire, A Torture State is being published on the occasion of the UN-sponsored intergovernmental treaty conference in Rome that will probably lead to an International Criminal Court (ICC). Had such a court existed during the 32 years of Mobutu's torture state, and had it had the necessary jurisdiction and independence, it is possible that it could have served as a brake on some of the worst excesses of his regime by bringing charges against accused torturers.

Jurisdiction and independence are among the critical issues to be discussed at the ICC Conference. Like all the major human rights organisations, the Medical Foundation supports an ICC that will have jurisdiction over the international crime of genocide and other crimes against humanity. Specifically, we call upon the Conference to give the ICC jurisdiction over torture, murder, disappearances and rape as crimes against humanity whenever they are practised on either a large-scale or systematic basis. Zaire is a case where these crimes were both widespread and systematic; there are other countries, however, where these crimes are systematic but more narrowly targeted.

The ICC must be independent, both of the Member State whose officials are accused of a crime and of the UN Security Council, which all too easily could block an investigation of a particular government's human rights record. Had the ICC existed at the time, but without the powers to initiate an independent prosecution, no doubt one of the five permanent members of the Security Council would have vetoed any such investigation or prosecution of alleged Zairian torturers.


5. By establishing definitively that torture occurred on such a large scale and was so systemic in Zaire during the Mobutu period, this report should prove useful in approaches to the UK Home Office, which relies on its own country assessments to grant or deny applications for asylum in this country. To put it bluntly, the Home Office got it wrong with regard to the human rights situation in Mobutu's Zaire, which in their view was forever "improving". The consequence of this faulty analysis was the refusal of many Zairians' claims for asylum, sometimes despite the fact that they had been tortured.
To this day, the Home Office maintains that although prison conditions were appalling in Zaire and torture and beatings were reported in prisons, the main motivation for Zairians to leave their country was economic:

"Under Mobutu's regime everyday life for most ordinary people in Zaire was economically precarious and subject to uncertainty and intimidation when in contact with officialdom. Widespread abuses of personal liberty occurred, although not necessarily within the generally accepted definition of persecution covered by the UN Convention on Human Rights [emphasis added]....

"In general, however, the limited post-1990 changes led to a reduction in the level of political repression. With the exception of times of particular tension or large scale public demonstrations, opposition was generally tolerated, and there was an absence of systematic persecution [emphasis added]. Economic problems, instability and general insecurity have been largely responsible for the large numbers of Zairians seeking asylum in Western European countries, notably Belgium and France."

The Medical Foundation believes that this assessment is fundamentally flawed. Far from lessening after the limited liberalisation of 1990-91, political repression grew heavier. For reasons of increased corruption among officials, inter-service rivalries among the armed forces, new internal threats to the regime itself, and the end of the Cold War (which had previously determined Western support), the post-1990 period was especially dangerous for opponents of the increasingly unstable regime.

This is not an academic point about historical analysis. The Home Office assessment of the former Zaire informs the way they think about the current DRC and is, moreover, too typical of their analyses of other countries where they visualise improve-ments in the human rights situation that few others seem to see.

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Zaire, A Torture State is the second Medical Foundation report on torture in Zaire. In 1995 the organisation published Zairian asylum seekers in the UK: their experiences in two countries. It is a legal and medical analysis of 92 Zairian torture survivors interviewed and examined in London by Medical Foundation doctors during the calendar years 1993 and 1994.

That study showed, inter alia, that arrests continued on a large scale after the 1990 liberalisation began: the case sample of the earlier report revealed that the number of UDPS (opposition party) arrests doubled after that date. It also showed that, despite the interval between the torture and medical examination, which was more than a year in about half the cases, in 72 cases (78%) there was scarring which was considered to be consistent with the asylum seeker's allegations of ill-treatment and torture.

These Medical Foundation reports demonstrate the pervasiveness of torture in the former Zaire and the severity of its consequences for our clients and the many thousands of other torture victims. Stopping torture and other gross violations of human rights on this scale is not easy. It is a matter of political will.

Where that will is clearly lacking, as with Mobutu and his regime, it is all the more important for foreign governments and intergovernmental organisations to play an active part in pressing for improvements and safeguards to protect human rights. An International Criminal Court, if established in this 50th anniversary year of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, would be one step in that direction.

In the meantime, it is likewise important for governments, including our own, to recognise that torture and other forms of organised violence did and do occur systematically and on a large scale in countries like the former Zaire -- within the generally accepted definition of persecution. All States Parties to the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1984 Convention against Torture have binding international obligations to offer protection to refugees fleeing such torture and persecution.

It seems, however, that this too requires political will.