***Photo Mvemba Phezo Dizolele – Pro-Bemba Rally, Mbandaka, Equateur

Par Pascal Kambale  

Eldoret, c’est la petite ville du Rift Valley kenyan que le président Daniel Arap Moi choisit pour réunir le 3 juin 2000 ses homologues rwandais Paul Kagame et congolais Laurent-Désiré Kabila autour d’un sommet sur « la situation politique et sécuritaire dans leurs pays respectifs et dans la région des Grands Lacs. » Un communiqué pauvrement écrit et long de quatre petits paragraphes avait des difficultés à cacher le fait que le sommet, convoqué quelques mois seulement après les accords de Lusaka, ne visait aucune initiative diplomatique importante. En fait, nombreux au Kenya ont soupçonné qu’en réalité le président Moi voulait ce sommet pour des besoins de marketing politique personnel.

***Photo Mvemba Phezo Dizolele – Tribunal in Tchomia, Ituri

By  Fidel Ayu Lumeya

Introduction 

Any given society or community confronted by crimes and conflict has an obligation to face them directly, to eradicate them rather than ignoring them. There exists many ways of responding to crimes and any given society has to make a choice. These choices vary between what Zehr (1998) has called the three R’s of justice: Restorative, Retributive or Revenge. Many countries around the world have chosen revenge and retribution as the dominant form of legal justice in response to the crime they are facing. The outcome of such a choice is that, according to many recent studies on the modern justice system, the incarcerated population grows rapidly rather than decreasing.

This paper explores (1) the wisdom of African traditional society, before the colonial period and the way they dealt with the victims of injustice, offenders and the whole community. The values of Restorative Justice that led them choose between Restorative, Retributive and Revenge as model of justice (2), what they had in mind to achieve by choosing the RJ, its goals (3),

I. Restorative Justice: The Wisdom of African traditional society

*** Photo Mvemba Phezo Dizolele - Kadutu Market in Bukavu

Contributed by Fidele Lumeya

After 4 years of an intermittent civil war that started in 1996 and 5 years of a transitional government, the enduring tribulations of the war to peace transition and political process seems to forecast a less than positive socio-political future for the Congo and the entire Great Lakes Region.  As it has been said, there cannot be peace in one of the Great Lakes countries without peace in the entire region. One can explain this phenomenon by pointing out that the Great Lakes countries such as Burundi, the DRC, Rwanda, and Uganda present symptoms of failing states in Post-independence Africa and the non-achievement of the complete Nation-State process.

Burundi, the DRC, and Rwanda were ruled by the same master: Belgium.  What was referred to by Patrice E. Lumumba as the “Africanization” or “indigenization” of Post-Independent African political institutions turned out to be a superficial, rather than radical, transformation. The armies, called “national,” were such only because the top elite were African.  Yet all the structures remained a carbon copy of the Belgian army- even its philosophy, as a repressive machine, remained the same.