(JED/IFEX) – On 31 December 2002, at about 2:00 p.m. (local time), seven soldiers claiming to be from the Congolese Armed Forces’ (Forces armées congolaises, FAC) Military Intelligence Branch (Detection militaire des activités anti-patrie, renseignements militaires, DEMIAP) arrested Kadima Mukombe, a journalist from Radio Kilimandjaro, which broadcasts in Tshikapa (a diamond-rich city in West Kasai […]
(JED/IFEX) – On 31 December 2002, at about 2:00 p.m. (local time), seven soldiers claiming to be from the Congolese Armed Forces’ (Forces armées congolaises, FAC) Military Intelligence Branch (Detection militaire des activités anti-patrie, renseignements militaires, DEMIAP) arrested Kadima Mukombe, a journalist from Radio Kilimandjaro, which broadcasts in Tshikapa (a diamond-rich city in West Kasai province). Mukombe hosts a radio programme in the local language that focuses on development issues in the region. The journalist was first taken to the DEMIAP post. He was transferred to the Tshikapa central prison on 2 January 2003, at 5:00 p.m.
According to information collected by JED, Mukombe is accused of “insulting the army”. In his 30 December programme, the journalist criticised a number of local military officials who have reportedly become diamond traders and allow their troops to steal from the local population. In the course of his radio programme, the journalist interviewed self-employed diamond miners who denounced the harassment they face from certain military officials. Eyewitnesses in Tshikapa told JED that the journalist received 50 lashes at the time of his arrest and had his head shaved with an old razor blade.
Intelligence agents from the National Intelligence Agency’s (Agence nationale des renseignements, ANR) Tshikapa office previously arrested Mukombe on 23 December, after the broadcast of a radio programme in which he denounced the poverty faced by Tshikapa’s local population, while thousands of carats of diamonds are mined in the city on a daily basis. Before his release that same day, Mukombe was forced to sign a document in which he agreed to no longer “set the population against the established authorities.”
