Pygmies in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have not let the massacre of about 40 pygmies go unnoticed last week during an attack attributed by the Ituri provincial authorities to Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) fighters against the village of Abembi.
Anger, emotion and indignation… Yesterday, the Dynamique des groupes des peuples autochtones (DGPA), a civil society collective that defends the rights of pygmies, called for a three-day national mourning session against a backdrop of feelings of abandonment by the authorities.
Crying out to the press and members of civil society in Kinshasa, the collective is categorical: there are massacres in Ituri targeting their villages. Patrick Saidi is the coordinator of the DGPA. “No later than January 14, 2021, at 9am sharp, 46 indigenous Pygmy men, women, old people and children were mercilessly slaughtered by machetes. Ethnic cleansing or, worse, genocide,” he said.
For this defender of the pygmies, the thesis of the ADF attack does not hold up at all. “We know the modus operandi of the ADF. The motivations have never been territorial. It’s in a vision of the occupation of space. They don’t use weapons but in this attack, weapons were used. A well-organised artistic blur. »
The provincial authorities sent a mixed mission to the village of Abembi, an area that is difficult to access. At this stage, all the theses are plausible, according to the very analysis of Adjio Gidi, Minister of the Interior of the province of Ituri. “Did the ADF want to settle in the locality and the pygmies would have been inconvenient witnesses? There are several hypotheses. »
Of the 40 or so bodies of the victims, only 36 have been recovered, others were in a state of decomposition, according to the minister.