Amisi Kumba aka Tango-Fort is the number two most senior officer of
the FARDC, after Gen Didier Etumba, the General Chief of Staff.
With Laurent Nkunda, Gen Tango-Fort engineered the 2002 massacre in
Kisangani of civilians and police recruits then being trained by the
ex-MONUC. The massacre came in the wake of a failed uprising against
Rwandan occupation of Kisangani. The uprising was carried out by a
resistance group of the city's Mangobo Commune called "Etats-Unis"
[United States].
This crime against humanity was contemporaneously documented by Human
Rights Watch, which put the death toll at more than 160.
The massacre was particularly barbaric, with troops led by Tango-Fort
and Nkunda--backed by Rwandan special forces flown in from
Kigali--going door to door killing civilians who had nothing to do
with the uprising. There are factual accounts of pregnant women
disemboweled with bayonets and of police trainees suffocated in
containers.
The massacre was also "streamlined" afterwards when the perpetrators
collected bodies, put them in sacs weighed down with stones and
thrown into the Tshopo River--in a lame attempt to cover up the
killings.
When the rotting bodies emerged from the waters of the Tshopo River,
triggering the wrath of the people of Kisangani, Nkunda and Tango-Fort
ordered their troops to fire in the air to disperse the outraged
bystanders, to collect the corpses, and to bury them in communal
graves...
In 2003, after the integration into the Congolese army of the
Rwandan-backed rebel outfit RCD to which he belonged, Tango-Fort was
"laundered" into the FARDC. And today this war criminal and profiteer
is the Chief of Staff of the ground forces of the FARDC.
Tango-Fort's appointment was unavailingly decried by human rights
groups and the civil society.
(This instance of outrageous impunity is by no means unique in this
country with a "fractionated sovereignty" of an "unhinged and
dislocated state": to name just two of these infamous war criminals:
Gen Jean-Bosco Ntangada who, despite an ICC arrest warrant issued
against him, is the deputy coordinator of a major anti-FDLR military
operation in North-Kivu where he continues to assassinate his personal
enemies [again, a BBC report commented in this blog]; and Gen Charles
Bisengimana, also from the RCD, who massacred civilians in the Kivu
provinces and who is the acting police boss of the DRC after the
suspension of Gen John Numbi pending the conclusion of Flori Chebeya
murder investigation [see one of my posts in this blog on this war
criminal]).
Anyway, according to a BBC report previewed today that will be aired
tomorrow in its "Assignment" program, Gen Tango-Fort strong-armed the
"Socagrimine" gold mining company into abandoning its venture at Umate
in February of this year.
In its stead, Tango-Fort placed at the mine "Geminaco," a company
owned by one of his associates, under the full protection of army
personnel. In exchange for his muscled intervention, Tango-Fort has
secured a 25-% share of the gold being extracted by Geminaco. Little
wonder then that this plunderer is building two high-rises downtown
Kinshasa!
In September, the Raïs banned mining in the three eastern provinces of
North- and South-Kivu and Maniema. But strangely, Geminaco continues
mining gold at Umate where its mine teems with FARDC soldiers who are
wont to beat up recalcitrant diggers, according to one of the latter
quoted in the BBC report!
Gen Tango-Fort refused to speak to the BBC "Assignment" reporter,
directing him to contact the army's spokesman who, in turn, told the
reporter he had no business investigating the profiteering general!
Well, as some had predicted, the ban by the Raïs on mining in the
three eastern provinces turns out to be a silly joke that just shows
what this land has become: the African version of the wild, Wild West!
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