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Congo and child protection, a real challenge

The promulgation, on January 10 2009, by the President of the Congo Democratic Republic, Mr Joseph Kabila Kabanga of the “law for the protection of the child” deserves our special interest

First of all because it creates a legal framework meant to exercise a real protection for each child in the R.D.C., which in the Congolese context, same as everywhere else, is certainly not trivial.

Furthermore, because this promulgation is the outcome of a mobilisation by different actors from varied horizons.

A mobilisation which is getting stronger today within the frame of the effective implementation of the law, amongst others through a partnership between the R.D.C. and the Belgian French Community. A law remains a theoretic frame the intentions of which could remain a “dead letter” should there be no will to see it applied. Let us bet that for a large number, the superior interest of the child remains or becomes a priority.

Certainly, a law for the protection of the child in RD.C. existed already. In this case, it concerned in fact a colonial decree dating from October 13 1950.

At the time, this decree is, on the one hand revolutionary because, prior to the majority of the European countries including Belgium, the colony defines the penal majority of minors at the age of 18 and no longer at the age of 16.

On the other hand, this decree only mentions the delinquent child. Consequently the child in danger is not mentioned.

As to the African States, they have adopted in July 1990 the African charter of the rights and the well-being of the child to ensure a protection and take especially into account the critical situation of numerous children throughout the continent.

However, notwithstanding these 2 reference frames, in R.D.C. numerous children continue to be mistreated, discriminated, accused of sorcery, infected or affected by the VIH/AIDS or are the victims of traffic.

They are deprived of their succession rights, health care and education.

Even worse, many children live in the street, victims of social exclusion, economical and sexual exploitation, whereas others are associated to the military forces and armed groups. UNICEF declares that the R.D.C. is the country with the largest number of child soldiers in the whole world. It would seem that they are about 30.000 to fight or live with the armed forces.

The urgency to draw up a new law is obvious. In so doing the Congolese State takes the political responsibility to protect the child in danger, which was previously not really the case. The juridical void leaving the door open to all manners of visible and invisible mistreatments.

The Congolese torment

The Democratic Congolese Republic remains, just after Sudan, at the head of the most vulnerable countries in the world. The social situation of the populations remains very worrying. The health and education sectors are in a dire state. The extent of the task is beyond the public authorities since they only have inadequate logistic and financial means. The populations live in infra human conditions. Nearly 80% of the 60 million inhabitants live with less than one dollar a day.

The war which has devastated the Democratic Congolese Republic between 1998 and 2003 has caused the death of nearly four million people and been the stage of numerous atrocities committed against the civilian population. Notably, the collective rape acts were exercised at a large scale. This conflict, which had a regional character – it has implied nine African countries – is the most murderous since the Second world war. Still today, the Eastern regions of the country remain insecure.

The majority of the victims belong to the civilian populations who were, either direct victims of violence, died from malnutrition or illness caused by the displacement of the populations or the collapse of the health services and the humanitarian assistance. Thousands of women, children, boys and girls included, were victims of rapes accompanied by extreme violence, without precedent in the human history.

Diamonds, gold, copper, cobalt, forests, stream, petrol, … The Democratic Republic is rich of natural resources. But if the jackpot of former Zaïre has always whetted numerous appetites, the populations, where they are concerned, never had any share in it. On the contrary, the Congolese paid a heavy tribute to the covetousness aroused by so much wealth.

“The sorcerer child”

This is the context in which sects and churches proliferate.

In Kinshasa, there is not one neighbourhood which doesn’t have its “reawakening church”.

Sometimes financed by American conservative and religious lobbies, these Pentecost churches give a lot of attention to the image of Satan, the devils and the fight against evil.

It is inside these churches that most parsons take part in the accusation of child sorcery. And to propose a redeeming, prayer and exorcism sessions particularly cruel and expensive. Without money, these children are banished and sometimes murdered.

The phenomena is worrying and insidious as it concerns a great number of children. It takes source from an African traditional cultural conception which attaches an enormous importance to the invisible world. A second world which, in the past, has always played a regulation part and which is still alive in certain villages. The sorcerer, un old man, a wise man, sometimes appreciated, sometimes feared, seldom a child in the African tradition, played the part of a mediator between the 2 worlds of the visible and the invisible, a balance existed for the better and the worse. Today, in its majority, the Congolese public opinion is convinced that the invisible world is hostile and is full of demons at war against the inhabitants of the visible world. Demons who take the appearance of a child in order to better deceive them.

This fear of the invisible, of the sorcerer and the child considered as such, expresses a tension between tradition and modernity, but it is also a sign of deep aguish on the part of the Congolese regarding their “destiny”. The Congolese who then think they will find some comfort and protection inside the fundamentalist churches.

In the Congo the number of orphan children is increasing, notably due to AIDS. It is often in the frame of a family regrouping, that numerous tensions appear which allow the stigmatisation of one or several children. With an endemic poverty which prevents certain families to feed only every two days, a child quickly become an excessive mouth to feed.

One observes here, how the absence of the State in its mission of protection leaves a wide gap to all sorts of the most irrational slips.

Get together the actors concerned in order to take up the challenge

If today some people complain that the Congolese State is slow in taking up its prerogatives and that the individual (and/or tribal) interest too often comes before the collective interest, it should also be reminded that the colonial reality, introduced and applied by the missionaries, was the fact of an actual segregation the purpose of which was to maintain the native populations in their inferior and subordinate place within the established colonial order. The question of the enhanced ethnical belongings often coincides with the negation of the other
ones.

The whole of Africa risks for yet a long time to undergo the effects of this model of society which persists without the knowledge of the populations concerned.

There exactly resides the stake of a possible collective and solidarity mobilisation; “Let us question this model of society both North and South”.

To achieve this education in the large sense and the solidarity between the people seem to me of the essence.

The seminar on the rights of the child in RDC, held recently in Kinshasa from 2 to 5 March 09, is exemplary of a collective mobilisation of actors who otherwise would never have been in touch.

In RDC since over 3 years about fifty field associations for the defence of the child’s rights, schools for social training mobilised to create a platform (Committee for the support of social work in RDC) to plead in favour of a legal frame for the protection of the child. This platform was given support by Dynamo International.

In the Belgian French Community field actors, the department for youth assistance, the general Delegate for the child’s rights, universities, … do the same to reinforce this plea and establish a supportive and durable partnership.

In a global marketing context where competition makes blind and has even contaminated social and educational sectors, the example deserves our attention.

A protocol of agreement, which enforces this partnership in the follow up and the implementation of the new law for the protection of the child, was signed during this seminar by both the Congolese and the Belgian Ministers having this competence in their duties and this, with the kind patronage of the local delegation Walloon-Brussels.
 

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