The homes of the barrio of Comuna 13, tightly packed improvised brick and concrete structures that take on a semi- rural nature the closer one gets to the murky swift-moving Río Cauca, blanket the hills of the western edge of this city of 2.5 million.

A district of some 135,000 inhabitants, Comuna 13 represents the complicated renaissance of a city famed for producing both Colombia’s most famous painter (Fernando Botero) and the world’s most notorious drug trafficker (Pablo Escobar).

Abutting this grindingly poor area is the Parque Biblioteca José Luis Arroyave, a sparkling new multipurpose complex that features a library, an exhibition hall and a community- run cafeteria. Within view of its doors, a new metrocable system ferries commuters to and from their hillside dwellings at dizzying heights in a series of cable-propelled eight-passenger pods, cutting travel time for community residents in half.

“In a zone very affected by violence and poverty, we wanted to organise this project and work trying to reclaim public space and benefit the population here,” says Mauricio Mejía, who works with the Proyecto Urbano Integral, an urban development project based on similar initiatives in Brazil and originally spearheaded by Medellín’s former mayor, Sergio Fajardo.

Along with the city’s former director of urban projects, Alejandro Echeverri, in 2009 Fajardo – in office from 2003 until 2007 and currently running for vice president on a ticket with former Bogota mayor Antanas Mockus – was awarded the Curry Stone Design Prize, an eminent architectural award that cited the duo’s “bold and ambitious public works plan” for Medellín as having “helped revitalise its poorest neighbourhoods”.

The award set out for particular commendation the city’s 42,200-square-foot Orquideorama (a botanical garden topped by a wooden meshwork roof somewhat resembling unfurling flowers), and the nearly-prehistoric looking obsidian Parque Biblioteca España.

However, Medellín continues to exist as a paradox: On one hand a lush, green city vibrating with life and stunning modern architecture, and on the other hand a place of frightened people who speak in whispers of criminals they refuse to even name. And it has remained quite a deadly place for many of its inhabitants.

During the first three months of 2010, Medellín’s murder rate increased 54.8 percent from the previous year. Only steps away from the Parque Biblioteca and in other barrios around the city, drug gangs continue to dominate, the fallout, many locals say, of an incomplete or ineffective demobilisation process of the country’s far-right paramilitary groups undertaken by the government of outgoing President Álvaro Uribe.

“This is a war where impunity reigns,” says a church worker who has been active in Medellín’s poorest neighbourhoods for many years and who did not wish to be named. “There is silence, fear, and people can’t talk about what’s going on.”

An umbrella group of paramilitary factions, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), were formed by Carlos Castaño in 1997 and thereafter acted as a ruthless counterpoint to the Colombian state’s war against Colombia’s two rebel groups, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) and the smaller Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN). During the most violent years of Colombia’s civil war, it was the AUC, not the Colombian army, that succeeded in driving the FARC and ELN from the comunas around Medellín.

Linked to dozens of massacres throughout the country, the AUC began a demobilisation process in 2002 whereby significantly reduced sentences were offered in exchange for paramilitary members confessing their crimes, making amends with their victims and ceasing criminal activities. Castaño himself was murdered in April 2004, allegedly in a dispute centered around the AUC’s deepening involvement in the drug trade, and his body recovered two years later.

In Medellín, this demobilisation process took on a particularly chaotic and violent nature.

One of the most powerful leaders of the AUC, Diego Murillo Bejarano aka Don Berna, was (like Carlos Castaño’s brother Fidel) a former close associate of the drug trafficking Medellín Cartel, having acted as one of the top enforcers for a faction run by the Galeano family, who were eventually dominated by sectors loyal to the late drug kingpin Pablo Escobar.

Having commanded the AUC’s Bloque Cacique Nutibara, which had around 1,000 members, as well as the Bloque Héroes de Granada, which was thought to have numbered slightly over 2,000, amidst demobilisation Murillo Bejarano’s faction of the AUC fought a brief, vicious war of attrition in Medellín’s slums with the Bloque Metro of Castaño loyalist Carlos Mauricio Garcia, alias Double Zero, who was found murdered in May 2004.

Following the demobilisation process – which many in Medellín claim was largely a charade where non-paramilitary actors were recruited from around the city to go through the motions of pacification – Murillo Bejarano, despite sitting in a Colombian prison under the terms of the country’s Justice and Peace Law, is said by residents and authorities to have become the dominant criminal figure in the city.

Murillo Bejarano’s omnipotence over what is colloquially referred to as the Oficina de Envigado (named after the Medellín neighbourhood where many narcotraffickers live) extended to such an extent that the tit-for-tat slayings and turf wars that have marked the city over the last two decades gradually decreased as he solidified his control over many of the city’s criminal gangs. There was even a term used by locals for the enforced calm Murillo Bejarano brought to the city’s criminal underworld, donbernabilidad, a mordant pun on the Spanish concept of gobernabilidad, or governability.

It was, however, a consolidation that had deadly consequences for those who questioned it. A number of community leaders in Medellín, such as Haider Ramírez from Comuna 13 and Alexander Pulgarín from the La Sierra neighbourhood, have been murdered in recent years, with the latter killing being characterised in a report by Colombia’s government as “a premeditated act” designed to silence a voice that would not go along with criminal system being put in place in the slums.

When Murillo Bejarano was deported to the United States in May 2008 along with a slew of other top AUC leaders to face drug trafficking charges, the Oficina de Envigado is said to have badly fractured. One of the group’s chieftains, Fabio León Vélez Correa, alias Nito, was murdered in September 2009 and two remaining factions have formed with guns drawn behind one of two leaders, known by their aliases as Valenciano and Sebastian.

Colombian government estimates say that the groups operate in of Colombia’s 32 departments and boast around 400 members.

It is the chaos of this power struggle, residents say, that has led to the palpable spike in violence as ever- diminishing and reorganising groups of traffickers vie for control of the city and access to the Río Cauca, a key conduit for cocaine and arms smuggling, as well as human trafficking.

Despite the palpable sense of hope in Colombian cities such as Medellín these days, the incomplete demobilisation of the paramilitaries, along with the continued threat of the not- yet-vanquished rebel groups, will continue to present a serious challenge to whoever wins this month’s presidential contest to succeed the eight-year tenure of Álvaro Uribe.

“These groups basically took the generous offer of demobilisation by Uribe,” says Bruce M. Bagley, the chair of the Department of International Studies at the University of Miami and a longtime Colombia observer. “But demobilise is a relative term.”

*Michael Deibert is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies at Coventry University and the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press). His blog can be read at www.michaeldeibert.blogspot.com

Rolling through this mountainous region of central Colombia, the brown waters of the Río Cauca wind through mist-shrouded hills before joining up with the larger Río Magdalena and emptying out into the Caribbean Sea.

In this area, known as Bajo Cauca and characterised by campesino farms and gurgling waterfalls, the dusky hues of the river are an apt metaphor for the violence that has had residents here existing in fear since the beginning of the year.

“We’ve never lived what we’re living through now,” says Fernanda Márquez (not her real name), whose son was kidnapped by the larger of Colombia’s two main rebel groups, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), 13 years ago. “They kill innocent children, throw bombs, kidnap. It’s terrible.”

For much of the last year, groups of warring drug traffickers have battled for control of this strategically important city and surrounding towns along the river. As Colombians go to the polls this month to choose a successor to President Álvaro Uribe, the groups continue to wage a scorched-earth battle to determine dominance over the smuggling of narcotics, weapons and people along the river.

According to police, between Jan. 1 and May 26, there were 74 murders in the Bajo Cauca region, and at least 24 grenade attacks, though other sources say the number of the latter is closer to 44.

During one recent week alone here, six people were killed during the invasion of a farm, gunmen killed a mother and her nine-year-old son, a 14-year-old boy died during a grenade attack, a 21-year-old labourer disappeared and the home of Leiderman Ortiz, the crusading publisher of the La Verdad de Pueblo newspaper, was damaged by yet another grenade.

All of this occurred despite a massive police and military presence in the region and recent arrests of dozens of individuals believed to be linked to the groups.

Ground zero for this turf war has been the riverside town of Caucasia, a ramshackle place with a metropolitan population of around 120,000 and where two groups – Los Rastrojos and Los Urabeños (both aided by a subset of a gang known as Los Paisas) – are vying for control. Anonymous pamphlets in town regularly threaten death to the groups’ perceived enemies.

“There are alliances between these criminal gangs and the subversive groups, particularly the FARC,” says Colonel Luis Eduardo Herrera Paredes, chief of Bajo Caucau’s Comando Operativo de Seguridad. “We have seen a panorama where the criminal bands organise the distribution (of cocaine) and the FARC protect the cultivation process. The majority of these murders are among these criminal groups.”

The groups have their roots in Colombia’s long and bloody internal armed conflict, where far-left rebels of the FARC and the smaller Ejército de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Army or ELN) have squared off against the Colombian state and paramilitary groups allied with localised political and economic interests. Critics charge that the paramilitaries often worked as little more than a ruthless wing of Colombia’s official security services.

Formed in 1997, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (United Self-Defence Forces or AUC) represented the coalescing of these localised militias.

Largely under the aegis of Carlos Castaño, whose father had been kidnapped and killed by guerillas and whose brother, Fidel, was a major paramilitary leader and drug trafficker before he allegedly died in combat in 1994, the AUC went from a series of largely autonomous collectives to a tightly-organised combat-ready outfit that moved through the country like a murderous scythe, depriving the guerillas of safe havens and murdering, often in quite ghastly fashion, any whom they suspected of supporting them.

In addition to the drug trade, despite its designation as a terrorist organisation by the United States and the European Union, and the credible linking of the AUC to dozens of massacres, the group was also able to derive income from international firms doing business in Colombia, who continued to make payouts to the AUC to protect their business interests. Chiquita Brands International, for example, was fined 25 million dollars by the U.S. government in 2007 for doing so.

Operating as anti-subversive shock troops for the first five years of its existence, by 2002, when the AUC started negotiating potential demobilisation with the Colombian government, the group was increasingly consumed by the business of drug trafficking, leading to violent schisms between leaders.

Castaño, who was known to have objected to the AUC’s deepening involvement in the drug trade despite his own past links to traffickers, disappeared in April 2004. His body was found two years later, allegedly the victim of a plot orchestrated by his brother, Vicente, who himself later disappeared and was believed to have been murdered.

The antecedent of the two of the current groups warring in Bajo Cauca, the Rastrojos and the Urabeños, to the AUC are direct and vivid.

At its height, one of the most numerically significant wings on the AUC was its Bloque Central Bolívar, which numbered around 6,000 combatants and was led by Carlos Mario Jiménez, better known by his nom de guerre, “Macaco”.

After the Bloque Central Bolívar demobilised at the beginning of 2005 under Colombia’s Justice and Peace Law, which required paramilitary members to confess their crimes, making amends with the victims and cease criminal activities in exchange for substantially reduced sentences, Jiménez entered a Colombian prison. However, charging that they broke the terms of their deals by continuing to be actively involved drug trafficking, Colombian authorities extradited him and several other top AUC leaders to the United States in May 2008 to stand trial for conspiring to import cocaine.

In Caucasia, local residents and authorities say, the current leader of the Rastrojos, who goes by the alias “Sebastian”, was an active member of Jiménez’s Bloque Bolívar. A 2009 Colombian government memorandum concluded that the Rastrojos were active in 10 of Colombia’s 32 departments and had around 1,400 members.

Until his arrest in early 2009, the Urabeños were led by Daniel Rendón, known as Don Mario, a former member of the AUC’s Elmer Cárdenas bloc, which never even perfunctorily went through with the demobilisation process.

“It’s only about money,” says Jesús Alean Quintera, the director of the Fundación Redes, a human rights organisation that works in the Bajo Cauca region and has extensively documented that activities of the groups, particularly with regards to minors, both in Caucasia and the neighbouring community of Nechí. “The recruitment of children into these groups has become a real problem.”

Now, with even the thinnest veneer of ideology stripped away, groups such as Los Rastrojos, Los Urabeños, Los Paisas and Las Águilas Negras (thought by some to be a front group for Los Urabeños) are free to collaborate with Colombia’s rebel factions in the service of a more tangible reward, and the people of Caucasia wonder when their situation will change.

“There are a lot of killers of 13 or 14 years old these days, both boys and girls” says Leiderman Ortiz, the local journalist who survived the grenade attack. “We’re living through a war, though terrorism here, and we think that all the authorities, from the president on down, need to understand how grave this situation is.”

*Michael Deibert is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies at Coventry University and the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press). His blog can be read at www.michaeldeibert.blogspot.com

By Michael Deibert
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jul 3 2009 (IPS)

Haitian Prime Minister Michèle Pierre-Louis assumed office in September 2008. Born in the southern city of Jérémie in 1947, she left Haiti with her family in 1964 following a pogrom by dictator François Duvalier against his perceived enemies in her town.

Haitian PM Michèle Pierre-Louis Credit: Photo courtesy of the office of the Prime Minister

Studying in the United States and France before returning to Haiti in 1977, she has been a close confidante of Haitian President René Préval for over 40 years. After having worked in a variety of private and public sector jobs in Haiti, she and Préval opened a bakery which catered to the poor in Haiti’s capital in 1982.

Active in the first government of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Pierre-Louis was among the first to denounce the 1991 military coup against Aristide during an interview with Radio France Internationale.

After Aristide’s return by a U.S.-led multinational force in 1994, Pierre-Louis opened the Fondasyon Konesans Ak Libète (Knowledge and Freedom Foundation or FOKAL) in 1995 with support from businessman and philanthropist George Soros’ Open Society Institute.

An organisation conceived to support sectors in Haitian society most likely to bring about social change, FOKAL has been responsible for the creation of a network of over 50 community libraries throughout Haiti, a cultural centre and library for economically disadvantaged children and youths in Haiti’s capital, a debate programme for young people, and an initiative to supply running water to the nearly 80 percent of Haitians who don’t have regular access to it.

Since her installation as Prime Minister, Pierre-Louis has presided over a stabilising of the security situation in this often politically unstable country, weathered the fallout and relief efforts after a trio of hurricanes killed at least 600 people last year and traveled both within Haiti and internationally to plead her government’s case.

IPS contributor Michael Deibert sat down with Prime Minster Pierre-Louis in Port-au-Prince on Jun. 21 to hear her thoughts about where the country is heading.

IPS: Could you speak a little bit about your background? MPL: I was born in Jérémie, and my parents were people extremely dedicated to the country. My father and my mother were raised during the U.S. occupation, and that whole generation was very nationalistic, it was very important to be proud of your country, to love your country, to know your country.

My involvement started very early because I was involved in youth groups against Duvalier, which at the time was very dangerous. There were lots of groups that were fighting clandestinely against the dictatorship, and I lost a lot of friends who disappeared.

One day you would hear that [the government] got them and put them in jail and you would never hear from them again. So I was marked by this situation, and even when I went to study abroad, Haiti was always in my mind

IPS: How did you find your involvement in the first Aristide government? MPL: It was very exhilarating, at the beginning. Everybody in the world was saying finally Haiti is going to come out, finally democracy is going to be built…When the 1991 coup occurred, I was probably the first person to give an interview and say, no matter what, the coup was unjustified. Aristide was our president and he was elected democratically and we’re going to fight for him to stay in power.

Those were very long years, and something happened to the country and to the president. When he came back, I think things got really rough, we really started going down the drain. Somehow, something very deep happened in the mind of this country, and we have not really put our finger specifically on it.

IPS: What did you feel was different after the return of Aristide in 1994? MPL: The man himself had changed. He was married, he was into money, he was into corruption. He invented the Petits Projets de la Presidence. [a corruption-riddled system of presidential largesse]. I don’t think he had escaped from the Haitian president’s syndrome, which is stay in power by all means.

There are many Haitian presidents who have fallen into that trap. Once that is your perspective and that is your project, all means are used…I don’t think we know our history very well, and we fall into the same trap over and over again. It’s unfortunate that we keep making the same mistakes

IPS: What political lessons should Haiti and the international community draw from the collapse of the second Aristide government in 2004 and the international intervention that followed? MPL: For a long time, a lot of the elite would say that Haiti was not ready for democracy, and I was totally against that. It’s not because people are poor and they are illiterate that they are not ready for democracy. When you go to the people at the bottom, I have a deep feeling that these people really want things to change, and they are waiting for the leadership that will not bring miracles but will show them the way and not lie to them.

All the elites – the mulatto elites, the university elites, the union elites, the peasant elites – are like a huge elephant sitting on this country and you cannot move it, because there is no political class, because there are no political parties, and everyone becomes corrupted and perverted. If you can’t go into that system, the system rejects you. And so far we have not found the wrench that will move this thing.

IPS: Do you think the presence of the United Nations mission is important, and how are relations between your government and the mission? MPL: From 1991 to 2008, there have been seven U.N. missions here, and they have all been asked for by the Haitian government. That means there is a problem.

When people say it’s a matter of sovereignty, I say that Haiti is a sovereign country and nobody change that. But in two areas, we have lost the exercise of our sovereignty: Control of the territory and food security.

We are dependent on outside forces, outside markets, for both. If we really want to do something, let’s work to recover the full capacity of our sovereignty now. That would mean really building a national public security force, and making sure we could massively invest in agriculture, which would be justice to the Haitian peasant.

When Aristide left and the interim government came in, the police were corrupt, politicized and inefficient. It takes a while before you can reverse that trend, but I think if there is one area today where we can feel the progress, it’s the police.

As Prime Minister you are also are chief of the Conseil Superieur de la Police Nationale d’Haiti, and I take that very seriously, because security is a major issue. We lack training, munitions and arms, but I think we have done a great job. It’s embarrassing to have foreign forces in your country, I am not happy about that. But if we don’t make the effort to regain our capacity to control our territory, they will stay forever.

IPS: What are your thoughts on the recent mid-term elections in Haiti? MPL: In 2006, the population responded with dignity and order, and were proud to be part of [the elections]. And I have told those in parliament: “You are young. You want to have a career? Remember that in the past elections 95 percent of you were not returned to office. You think the people are not watching, that they are not judging? They are watching. They are not stupid.”

There are hands that didn’t want these elections to take place, because it changes the configuration of the senate, which is now very powerful. Chaos is good for a few sectors, and the most destabilising factor here today is drug trafficking, whether by plane or by ship. And it’s polluting politics

The recovery of Haiti – justice system, health, education – should be planned over 10, 15, 20 years. We now have a good relationship within the region, with Argentina, Brazil and Chile, and it’s a new paradigm for regional cooperation. They have their own interests, of course, but let’s make the best of the opportunities that are offered to us.

Michael Deibert is a Senior Fellow at New York’s World Policy Institute and the author of “Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti” (Seven Stories Press).

Excerpt:

The Garífuna culture, a “masterpiece” of human heritage according to UNESCO, could disappear as the result of the privatization of Central America's beaches.

Women of the Tocamacho community celebrate 210 years since the arrival of Garífunas in Honduras. - Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras

Barrios, 67, a former soldier, speaks proudly of his ethnic group, whose members are scattered across Belize, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.

“Before, we had 200 or 300 Garífuna living here; now there are only a few,” he tells Tierramérica.

“They went to the United States for work, and other places,” he explains with a note of regret, gazing back at the collection of thatched-roof huts lazing under palms trees that front the crashing surf.

In the tumultuous history of Europe’s incursion into the Americas and the trafficking of slaves from Africa to its shores, their are few stories as dramatic or moving as that of the Garífuna.

The group's genesis can be traced back to the sinking of two Spanish galleons off the coast of the Caribbean island of Saint Vincent in 1635. The Africans who survived the shipwreck intermarried with members of the local Carib tribe that was the dominant population on Saint Vincent at the time.

Adopting an Amerindian language from the Arawak family, the Africans’ discourse eventually gestated into the language that is today recognized as Garífuna.

Although it contains some French elements, the language is quite apart from the Creole spoken in current and former French possessions such as Haiti and Martinique, and other languages like Spanish. Garífuna remains unique as it is still primarily Amerindian in its roots, as opposed to African.

Because of their intermarriage with local tribes, in fact, the Garífuna themselves were often referred to as “Black Caribs.”

In 1797, amidst disputes between Britain and France over Saint Vincent, the Garífuna were banished from Saint Lucia by exasperated British colonial authorities to the island of Roatan, today part of Honduras. Nearly 3,000 Garífuna and their descendants subsequently spread out to mainland Honduras and along Central America's Caribbean coast, from Nicaragua to Belize.

Scorned by many as outsiders, the first record of a Garífuna presence in Belize, for example, is an 1802 letter complaining to a local British magistrate about some 150 Garífuna in a settlement along the Belize River.

“The general impression among the magistrates was that these people were dangerous,” says E. Roy Cayetano, a founding member of the National Garífuna Council of Belize, at his home in Dangriga, a southern town that is a center of this culture.

However, over time, the group’s unique ethnic and linguistic heritage came to be viewed as worthy of protection.

An important figure in the development of Garífuna consciousness was the Honduras-born journalist Thomas Vincent Ramos, who was strongly influenced by the Jamaican black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association.

Ramos migrated to Belize in the early part of the 20th century and founded the Carib Development and Sick Aid Society, and established the first Garífuna Settlement Day Celebration in 1941, which celebrates the first arrival of the Garífuna people on the shores of that country.

Later, other hazards emerged, which the Garífuna are trying to face down today. Whereas there was no travel by road to Toledo, Belize’s southernmost district, until 1965, today drivers can zoom through the region on their choice of two highways.

In Honduran villages like Miami, situated along idyllic stretches of sea and sand where the Garífuna made their home, outside developers and commercial interests are encroaching, seeking to lure the Garífuna away from their traditional way of life.

For now, the only thing this village has in common with the popular U.S. tourist city in Florida is the name and the Caribbean Sea.

Near the Central American Miami, a sign proclaims that the land is property of the Honduran Tourism Institute and that a beach and golf resort are slated for construction. Local residents say that the government of President Manuel Zelaya recently sold the land to developers.

In recent years, one of the most poignant voices in defense of the Garífuna’s vanishing way of life was that of Belizean musician Andy Palacio, who died earlier this year.

Palacio described the Honduran village in a 2007 song of the same name, where, over a deceptively jaunty paranda beat, he sang in the Garífuna language about how he “took a trip to the river near Miami/When I looked, I was surrounded by soldiers/They were asking me for my papers.”

“There’s clearly been a lot of cultural erosion, and erosion of the language,” says Cayetano, speaking of the forces that lure young Garífuna away from the traditional lives of fishing and farming.

“The youngest people are not learning the language anymore, and the average age of the people who can speak Garífuna is getting older and older… We find ourselves having to deal with a wage economy and we have difficulty with it. It seems to promise a lot, because we see that people with money have power,” he adds.

Some steps are being taken to address this decline. The National Garífuna Council of Belize, for example, was formed in the early 1980s to help promote and preserve Garífuna culture in that country, and recently was instrumental in helping to construct the Gulisi Primary School.

Named after a Garifuna heroine who survived the deportation to Roatan, the Gulisi school promotes Garífuna language and culture alongside a standard curriculum.

In 2001, the dance, music and language of the Garífuna were declared “Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity” by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization).

Surveying the beach at Miami, and the future of the Garífuna, one thinks of a local hymn, “Baba” (father), whose message seems tailor-made to the difficult times the Garífuna find themselves in today.

Anihein baba wama, furíeigiwamá lun Wabúngiute
Íderalámugawa lídangien sianti
Anihei baba wama, furíeigiwamá lun Wabúngiute
Dúsuma lámuga wachara ya ubóuogu…

(The Father is with us. Let us pray to our God.
That he may help us out of the impossible.
The father is with us. Let us pray to our God.
That our wrongs may be less here on earth…)

On a broad hillside high above the meandering flow of the Mpozo River, a handful of policemen guard a ruin.

A member of the Police Nationale Congolaise stands guard over the ruins of the BDK compound at Matadi. Credit: Michael Deibert/IPS

The flag of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) flutters weakly over scattered bricks and broken crockery, mute witness to a power struggle that has erupted in this western corner of the country, pitting a sect seeking to restore a lost ethnic kingdom against a government that seems determined to crush any challenge to its authority.

“Here are their arms, their fetishes, you can see them here,” says Edmond Bunga, a local commander of the Police Nationale Congolaise (Congolese National Police, PNC), pointing towards what he claims are poisoned arrows used to attack police in the devastated compound of the Bundu dia Kongo (BDK) or “Kingdom of Kongo”, as Congo is spelled in the local Kikongo language.

The BDK, led by Ne Muanda Nsemi, a member of Congo’s parliament who hails from the region, have stated that their goal is nothing less than to reunify the Kingdom of Kongo. Made up of the Bakongo people – found in the DRC and neighbouring states – this empire existed in various incarnations for nearly 500 years until the early 20th century, encompassing swaths of what is now Angola, Gabon, the Republic of Congo and the DRC.

However, the government accuses the group of attempting to mount a rebellion in the Bas-Congo province, immediately west of the nation’s capital, Kinshasa.

With state authority largely absent in many parts of the province, the BDK’s feared enforcers – known as “makesa” – have been credibly alleged to act as something of an unofficial police force, handing out punishments that include floggings for infractions such as adultery.

Local police also charge that the group has regularly tortured its opponents; those suspected of witchcraft are even said to have been burnt alive.

But residents of the neighborhood of Belvedere in Matadi, the capital and largest city of Bas-Congo, look out on where the Bundu dia Kongo compound once stood, and paint a somewhat different picture of the now three-week old crackdown.

“It wasn’t a conflict, it was an attack – an attack by the police – and it went on for about 40 minutes,” says Adolphe Nkuti, referring to fighting that took place on Mar. 8, as he and his family stand in front their home, which has been pock-marked by large calibre bullet holes.

“The police stole our television, our table, even a handbag from the bedroom,” says his neighbor, Pelé Mwanda, pointing to more bullet holes where the projectiles threaded their way through his family’s fragile tin roof.

An internal report on this month’s violence from the United Nations Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, seen by IPS, noted that at least 68 people have been killed in the clashes – and suggested that elements other than local PNC forces were used in the assaults against BDK compounds throughout Bas-Congo.

The DRC has the largest U.N. peacekeeping mission in the world, numbering nearly 17,000.

Traveling in Bas-Congo, IPS frequently met men dressed in PNC uniforms speaking Lingala, the lingua franca of Congo’s army, who said that they had been sent from the capital to contain the unrest. At one country crossroads, two lorries each containing about 30 armed officers paused briefly; many of the troops were equipped with UZIs, some with their bayonets fixed as if preparing for close-quarters combat.

A local emergency co-ordinator with the humanitarian aid organisation Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) in Matadi told IPS that many BDK members had “fled to the bush” in the wake of the conflict.

The violence in Bas-Congo has to do with more than nostalgia for a past kingdom, however. It also has distinctly political dimensions as the BDK seeks not only to promote ancestral beliefs, but also to assert political supremacy in the Congo as it currently exists.

While the DRC’s eastern regions voted heavily in favour of President Joseph Kabila in the country’s 2006 elections, Congo’s western regions supported his rival: a warlord-turned-businessman, Jean-Pierre Bemba.

The ballot that returned Kabila to power was a violent one which saw at least 20 people killed in clashes between Bemba loyalists and Congolese government forces, while fighting between the two sides in March of last year claimed some 300 lives, the United Nations said in a recent preliminary report.

A slew of BDK candidates stood for office in Bas-Congo, but lost amidst allegations of vote rigging, sparking clashes between BDK militants and the government that left 10 security personnel and over 100 civilians dead.

An April 2007 report from Human Rights Watch said this episode was characterised by Congolese security forces firing “indiscriminately at demonstrators who carried rocks and sticks but had no firearms and who apparently posed no immediate threat.”

The New York-based group also accused the security forces of summarily executing people.

“The people from Bas-Congo have traditionally maintained a lot of autonomy and independence in managing their affairs,” says Theodore Trefon, who directs the Contemporary History Section at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium. “They still try and maintain firm control over their politics.”

This spirit is exemplified by historical figures such as Dona Beatriz (born of noble Kongo parentage in what is today Angola, under the name Kimpa Vita): a young woman given to receiving visions of a spiritual and religious nature in the early 1700s, at a time when the kingdom was in the grip of a seemingly endless civil war between the royal courts of Kinlaza and Kimpanzu.

Claiming to be possessed by the spirit of Saint Anthony, in what was then one of the most heavily-Catholicised regions of Africa (courtesy of the Portuguese), Beatriz preached in favour of the unification of Kongo under one ruler. She developed her own, idiosyncratic brand of the religion, which she sought to take to the territory’s far corners before being captured and burned as a heretic by a rival king in 1706.

In more recent years, Joseph Kasavubu, the first president of Congo upon its independence in 1960, ascended to power as head of the Alliance des Bakongo (the Bakongo Alliance), which became one of the driving forces in ending Belgium’s brutal, seven decade occupation of the country.

Furthermore, during the neighbouring Republic of Congo’s civil war in the late 1990s, one of a triumvirate of militias active in the country – the “Ninjas” – said they were fighting to defend the interests of Bakongo people living in that nation.

Away from the bustling port city of Matadi, a three-hour drive over rutted dirt roads and a rickety ferry ride across the Congo River, the village of Luozi has also seen its share of violence in recent weeks.

A local doctor says that at least eight bodies were deposited at the general hospital there after fighting erupted between BDK members and security forces three weeks ago. In the hospital, two victims – one BDK, one civilian – lie convalescing from gunshot wounds sustained during the upheaval.

In the BDK church, known as a “zikua”, dozens of spent shell casings litter the floor of the building as well as the earth around it, while several nearby homes have been torched and looted.

Above the door of the ruined zikua, words have been scrawled by an unknown hand.

“Pas d’autres,” it reads in French. “C’est inutile.”

Not again, it’s useless.

A warning, a threat or a vow to rebuild? As Bas-Congo waits, only time will tell.

The community in this Paris suburb is waiting keenly for transformation promised by France’ new government.

Clichy-sous-Bois gained an unwelcome iconic significance two years ago following the deaths of Bouna Traore and Zyed Benna, two youths from immigrant families who were electrocuted while trying to hide from the police.

The deaths, a particularly grim chapter in a long history of simmering tension between local youths and the police, set off rioting and civil unrest around France. Almost 9,000 cars were burnt, and dozens of buildings were set on fire. Close to 130 police and firefighter staff were injured, and nearly 2,900 people were arrested.

President Nicolas Sarkozy, then minister of interior, promised to rid the banlieues, as the impoverished suburbs that ring many French cities are known, of racaille (rabble), and clean them out with a kärcher (a high-pressure hose). Residents now ask if he will be equally vehement about addressing the chronic unemployment and prejudice that they say were at the root of the upheaval.

During his campaign for presidency, Sarkzoy’ tough language on crime in the banlieues, combined with at times strident anti-immigrant rhetoric, earned him the enmity of some residents. Though the banlieues are home to many immigrants and their families, most youths who took part in the 2005 unrest were culturally and socially French.

But since taking office in June, Sarkozy has created one of the most ethnically diverse governments that France has seen. His 15-member cabinet includes seven women and many immigrants or their descendants.

Rachida Dati, daughter of a Moroccan father and an Algerian mother, raised in humble circumstances in the Chalon-sur-Saone town in the Burgundy region, was appointed minister of justice in the government of Sarkozy’ Prime Minister, François Fillon.

Secretary of State for Urban Policies, Fadéla Amara, is of Algerian descent. She grew up in an impoverished immigrant quarter in the Auvergne city of Clermont-Ferrand. Before joining the government, Amara was president of the feminist group Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither Whores Nor Submissives).

France' economically deprived suburbs are bleak and depressing. Block after block of grey high-rises stretch on into the distance, and minimal services such as shops and restaurants are on hand. In districts like Clichy-sous-Bois, the sense of isolation is also a product of a skeletal transportation system.


Amara is in charge of drafting reforms that will address the joblessness and discrimination that many see as the root of the current malaise. The government has announced its intention of conducting more than 100 public meetings on subjects concerning the suburbs. Sarkozy has outlined a plan to address the inequity at a December event at an as-yet-unnamed banlieue.

So far, little has changed.

“The problems are just the same,” says Mehdi Bigaderne, spokesperson for the Association Collectif Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, Ensemble (ACLEFEU), a community organisation formed in the wake of the 2005 unrest, and whose name is a pun on the phrase ‘ fire’.

“We see the same comportment of the police, the same discrimination, nothing has changed. The relations between the police and the citizens continue to be very, very negative. The big questions – the question of work, the question of housing, the question of discrimination – are still with us.”

Following the 2005 “social eruption”, as it is referred to in the suburbs, the government of former president Jacques Chirac appeared to lapse into somnolence as soon as the smoke from the disturbances had cleared.

Few steps were taken to address the fact that, in some suburbs, unemployment hovers around nearly 20 percent – double the national average. The figure for 21-29-year-olds stands at more than 30 percent.

A study conducted in 2004 by sociologist Jean-François Amadieu and Adia, one of the largest human resource and temporary job companies in Paris, found that job applicants with a traditionally French sounding surname or a more desirable address code were five times more likely to be called in for a job interview than a prospective employee with an Arab or African-appearing name or an address in the suburbs.

France’ economically deprived suburbs are bleak and depressing. Block after block of grey high-rises stretch on into the distance, and minimal services such as shops and restaurants are on hand.

In districts like Clichy-sous-Bois, the sense of isolation is also a product of a skeletal transportation system. A single bus route links Clichy-sous-Bois, about ten miles from the centre of Paris, to the train station in the more affluent town Le Raincy nearby.

But despite a more ethnically diverse government, flashes of tension appear between the new government’ stated desire for social inclusion and the law-and-order and occasionally anti-immigrant rhetoric that helped elect it.

Foreign Affairs and Human Rights Secretary Rama Yade, a 30-year-old immigrant from Senegal who is widely viewed as a Sarkozy protégé, received a brisk reprimand from Prime Minister Fillon following her visit to mostly immigrant squatters who had been evicted from their dwellings in the Aubervilliers suburb.

An apparently piqued Fillon told a cabinet meeting that members of the government needed to “coordinate” their decisions so as not to “interfere” with the justice system.