The President of the DRC Félix Tshisekedi
04 May 2024:
A military court in the Democratic Republic of Congo on May 3, 2024 sentenced eight servicemen, including five officers, to death for desertion and cowardice, as DRC forces battle M23 rebels.
Prosecutors had requested the death penalty against 11 soldiers, but the Goma court acquitted three of them, ruling that the charges against those soldiers were “unfounded”.
The military was fighting against the M23 (March 23 Movement) rebels, mostly made up of Tutsis, who took up arms again at the end of 2021, conquering large areas of North Kivu province.
“They never fled from the enemy or abandoned their position, on the contrary,” said Alexis Olenga, lawyer for one of the five accused officers.
Olenga said the soldiers were serving at Lushangi-Cafe, a federal army post near the strategic town of Sake, 20 kilometers from North Kivu’s capital, Goma.
These are the first death sentences since the authorities decided, on March 13, to lift the suspension of executions in force in the country since 2003.
The army’s inability to stop the advance of the M23 rebels raised suspicions that there had been infiltration of the security forces.
Several soldiers, but also politicians and businessmen were arrested and accused of “complicity with the enemy”.
Over the past 20 years, death sentences have been handed down in the DRC, especially in cases involving military personnel or armed groups, but have been systematically commuted to life imprisonment.
Human rights groups and the Catholic Church have called on the government to abolish capital punishment for all crimes.
(Source: AFP, 03/05/2024)
