IRIN Web Special on Ituri in Eastern DRC

Ethnic land disputes fanned

The region of Ituri is a district of the vast Orientale Province and has a population of about 4.5 million, according to aid agencies working there. Figures of the make-up of the population differ widely. The town of Bunia, swelled by displaced families, is thought to hold at least 300,000 people. The main ethnic groups are the Alur, Hema, Lendu, Ngiti, Bira and Ndo-Okebo. On the key question of the relative size of these communities, there are conflicting figures. The Alur are often regarded as the biggest community in the region, but some figures indicate the Lendu are the largest group. The comparative size of the Hema and Lendu is unclear. Confusingly (and ironically, given the hatred that has been whipped up in the name of ethnic identity), the northern Gegere clan of the Hema speak the Lendu language.

The ethnographic database produced by the Summer Institute of Linguistics provides the following estimates for the size of larger communities speaking the following languages across all of the DRC, not only in Ituri: Lendu: 750,000; Alur: 500,000; Hema: 160,000; Bira: 120,000; Ndo-Okebo: 100,000 and Ngiti: 100,000. Human Rights Watch, which has researched the Ituri conflict in detail (see Web Links), estimates that the Hema and Lendu account for 40 percent of the total population of Ituri.

There are other smaller ethnic groups indigenous to the region, including the Twa and a wider diversity of groups from other regions, particularly in the towns. Generally speaking, the Hema are associated with livestock rearing and business, and the Lendu with agriculture. A key Lendu grievance is a perception of unjust accumulation of land in Hema hands, inasmuch as Belgian colonial administrators favoured the Hema at independence with large land concessions. As the conflict has escalated, Hema leaders, on their side, have expressed fears of being targeted for "ethnic cleansing" or even genocide. In the ethnic ideology which has poisoned the Great Lakes region, the two are sometimes seen (however inaccurately) as representing two sides of a Bantu-Nilotic clash. A Human Rights Watch researcher has said that "the two groups are now identifying with the Hutu-Tutsi categories that figured in the Rwandan genocide. The Lendu are now thinking of themselves as kin to the Hutu, while the Hema are identifying with the Tutsi."

Clashes between Hema and Lendu over land ownership and rights over land for grazing have broken out on several occasions in the last three decades. However, the deadliest phase of the tensions between the two communities started in May 1999. Each group attempted to expel the other from contested areas in a policy of local "ethnic cleansing".

A local NGO suggests that weaknesses in the 1973 land law, which allows occupied land to be purchased and occupants to be evicted two years later without legal recourse, encouraged the strategy of wholesale expulsion. Typically, in order to grab land, loot resources, or chase away the other community, villages, farms and livestock are attacked, looted and burnt. Civilians, including women and children, have been killed and mutilated with traditional weapons (machetes and bows and arrows). Both sides have gained increasing access to conventional weapons backed with communications equipment and more organised command structures. Attacks have become more brutal and barbarous - notoriously, severed heads were reportedly displayed on pikes in city streets in Bunia in January 2001, and human rights testimonies and video footage amply support accounts of devastating violence and cruelty in attacks by all sides. An attack on Nyankunde hospital in September 2002 included the killing of women and children patients in their beds.

Faction leaders battling for political power and territorial control have needed recruits for their forces, and have used ethnic resentment as a way of motivating and inciting their forces, say political sources from the region. Communities are whipped up into a state of fear or resentment to be ready to serve the interests of faction leaders . "Those who do not have, want to acquire by all means. Those who have, see themselves as victims, so a cycle of violence [ensues]," Ruhigwa Baguma, a former administrator with one of the rebel factions, told IRIN.

The clashes between Hema and Lendu have sucked in other ethnic groups in the region, especially the Ngiti, who have fought alongside the Lendu, and the Bira, who have been associated with the Hema. The Alur ethnic group has on the whole kept out of the conflict. Several peace initiatives in the region have recommended that the governor of the region should be of neither ethnicity, to build confidence in the impartiality of the administration. A period when an Alur, Ernest Uringi Padolo, was governor of the region was regarded as relatively peaceful, partly for this reason.

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