wfn.org | Congo-Brazzaville Faces Annihilation, Pastor Warns

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19-February-1999 
99067 
 
    Congo-Brazzaville Faces Annihilation, Pastor Warns 
 
    by Edmund Doogue 
    Ecumenical News International 
 
GENEVA--A Protestant pastor in the Republic of Congo -- commonly known as 
Congo-Brazzaville -- has warned that his country faces total annihilation 
if the international community does not take immediate action to halt 
factional fighting which has caused the 
deaths of several thousand people since violence erupted in mid-December. 
 
    Speaking by telephone from Pointe-Noire, the country's main port where 
he, his family and many thousands of other people have taken refuge from 
the factional violence that has engulfed much of the country, the pastor 
told ENI: "If the international community does not  intervene, 
Pointe-Noire, the only town left in the country, will go up in flames.  If 
Pointe-Noire is hit, the result will be the destruction of Congo. 
Pointe-Noire is the only remaining refuge." 
 
    The pastor, who is originally from the capital, Brazzaville, asked not 
to be named because, he said, those in Pointe-Noire who spoke to foreigners 
about the tragedy risked death at the hands of the "loyalist" forces 
supporting Congo's President Sassou Nguesso.  He expressed deep regret that 
foreign governments and media were ignoring the tragedy overtaking his 
nation. 
 
    "There is no news about my country because France, which brought Sassou 
to power, does not want its candidate to be tarnished," the pastor said. 
He added that because Congo was a small country (population about 2.5 
million) and mainly French-speaking, the international media had little 
basic knowledge about it. 
 
    The region has had strong links with France since the expeditions by 
Italian-born French explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza in the 1870s. 
Congo gained full independence from France in 1960, but has had a troubled 
political history since, including several coups d'etat.  Pointe-Noire is a 
major base for the French petroleum company, Elf-Aquitaine, which has 
extensive operations in Congo-Brazzaville.  Oil is the main export. 
 
    Denis Sassou Nguesso seized power in October 1997 after a five-month 
civil war.  Since then the ex-prime minister, Bernard Kolelas, has lived in 
exile.  On Dec. 18  last year, fighting broke out between those loyal to 
Kolelas and to former president Pascal Lissouba, on the one hand, and the 
Cobras (militia) supporting Sassou Nguesso, on the other.  However, 
observers have pointed out that the conflict is rapidly becoming an ethnic 
war, as has happened in other nations in central Africa. 
 
    The pastor told ENI that after rebel forces took up arms in December, 
the Cobras had engaged in various atrocities against thousands of people in 
Brazzaville and nearby.  In a church in the capital, people at prayer had 
been rounded up by the Cobras, and 16 laymen and a pastor were killed. 
 
    Whole villages in the area had been destroyed and many people -- from 
infants to the elderly -- had been murdered by the Cobras.  "But on the 
radio, not a word was said, as if nothing had happened," the pastor said, 
adding that when Red Cross officials in Brazzaville had asked for 
permission to count the bodies of the dead before burying them, the 
authorities had refused. 
 
    The pastor said that "genocide" was the only word that could describe 
the situation in Congo-Brazzaville.  He expressed special concern for the 
"hundreds of thousands" of people who had fled into the forests near 
Brazzaville and elsewhere to escape the violence.  "They can neither eat, 
nor drink, nor cultivate crops because of the bombs falling on them," he 
said, adding that they must be facing death by starvation. 
 
    International humanitarian agencies in Congo have declared over the 
past few days that they are unable to locate between 100,000 and 150,000 
people who have been displaced by the fighting. 
 
    The world's biggest ecumenical organisation, the World Council of 
Churches (WCC), has been in communication over the past week with the 
Evangelical Church of Congo, which has about 145,000 followers and is a 
member of the WCC.  The WCC's general secretary, Konrad Raiser, wrote this 
week to his counterpart at the United Nations, Kofi Annan, expressing 
support for efforts to bring the troubles to world attention, and to the 
French president, Jacques Chirac, pointing out that France was in a better 
position than any nation to mobilize the international community into 
action. 
 
    The WCC executive staff member in charge of relations with member 
churches, Huibert van Beek, told ENI on Feb. 4 that the WCC was anxious to 
get "some sort of justice" into the international community's perspective 
on Congo. 
 
    Asked whether the WCC believed that events in Congo-Brazzaville were 
more deserving of immediate attention than those in Kosovo -- which is 
dominating newspaper headlines -- Van Beek said: "There is no intention of 
reducing the concern for Kosovo, but, in terms of numbers of people 
being massacred, it's probably worse than Kosovo."  Van Beek was critical 
of the media, especially the French media, for their poor coverage of 
events in Congo.  Alerting the international community to the situation was 
a priority for the WCC, he said. 
 
    The president of the Protestant Federation of France, Jean Tartier, 
this week expressed his organization's solidarity with churches in 
Congo-Brazzaville and expressed its deep concern about developments to the 
French government. 
 
    On Feb. 2 a leading French newspaper, "Le Monde," reported that a 
missionary priest, Lucien Favre, aged 37, who had just returned to Paris 
from Congo, said that the situation in Pointe-Noire was potentially 
explosive.  He feared that it would suffer the same fate as other towns 
where the Cobras had shot in cold blood hundreds of young people suspected 
of supporting former president Lissouba.  Favre told Le Monde that 
President Sassou Nguesso was relying heavily on mercenaries, including 300 
Cubans who had come from neighboring Angola. 

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