REPUBLIQUE DEMOCRATIQUE DU CONGO
RASSEMBLEMENT CONGOLAIS POUR LA DEMOCRATIE
RCD/Kisangani — L’organisation politique
Bureau de la Présidence
PAYING RESPECT TO JOSEPH ENEKO NGWANZA BOYOWA,
GOVERNOR OF ITURI
On Thursday November 21st, 2002, around 8 p.m., Mr. Joseph Eneko Ngwanza, his bodyguards and other collaborators were assassinated, near the town of Mahagi, in an ambush by people in civilian clothes whose identity and organizational affiliation still need to be established.
The camp of the Congolese people in its international struggle for a self determined Congo and sustained peace has lost in Joseph Eneko a great and loyal activist. Once again, the forces opposed to this noble cause and who resort to violence, heinous crime, terror and putsches, have sought to delay the popular dynamic of the laying down the subjective conditions for sustained peace in Ituri Province. In the course of his very short life as an activist, Eneko worked enormously, often under the riskiest of dangerous conditions, in order to stop the genocidal specter which never ceased looming over Ituri.
Our movement, whose name, RCD-Kisangani- Liberation Movement, continues to be tarnished by putschists opposed to the popular cause, has just been dealt a tragic and very heavy blow. We have lost a great man who really knew how to translate and put in practice the noble ideals of our movement: openly serve the Congolese people from all walks of life using as weapons dialogue, reconciliation, new politics, appealing to the humanity and ethics of truth buried deep down in everyone of us.
Mr. Eneko was a man of very great courage; he never hesitated to go toward everyone including the most extremists in order to shake and wake them up to their senses in order to help them holding firm on the sanctity of human life whoever it may be. He is a man who devoted himself to making Ituri a place from where healing events could erupt with reverberating shock waves being felt very far, in this country of ours where healers are extremely rare. Yes, here was a man who sincerely believed in an ethics guided by the necessity to make good and not that of blind warmongering against evil. He was extremely attentive at detecting, among the people from all walks of life, the capacity to make good, of practicing and defending justice, of loving your neighbor as one would oneself, of listening, in short the political capacity to guide them from there to the search for sustained peace. Crisscrossing all zones of conflict, from village to village, Eneko was often embraced enthusiastically by large segments of the population eager for peace through direct negotiations.
People who show no respect for life, except for their own, those who live off violence, arbitrariness, the massacres of innocent for enriching themselves through theft; the people who have transformed Ituri and Congo into a hunting ground and shameless looting of its resources, the people who sell their souls to implement diabolical plans hatched by opportunists thirsting for power for power sake –indeed, all of those characterize the assassins of Joseph Eneko. They want to nip in the bud the consciousness raising work for peace which was beginning to impact the population living in Ituri Province. They are trying to intimidate people into not expressing their opposition to ethnic hatred, to war and their demands for peace. They want, through heinous crimes, gain as much power as possible in the inter-Congolese negotiations. We shall not allow them to succeed. The death of Eneko must not be crowned by such a descent into hell. The politics inspired by this activist must not disappear with him. People must rise from everywhere in Ituri and other places, in order to continue and persevere on the peace path, on the path of loving one’s neighbor, of consensual negotiations, of defending people’s right and of the uninterrupted building of human peaceful coexistence. The assassination of Eneko must be an opportunity for awakening, inspiration and commitment to pursuing, without delay, his work; it must not lead to adventures of blind vengeance. It would indeed be a very bad way of paying respect to our beloved activist and leader.
For us, personally, Eneko was a colleague, a brother, a friend and a comrade. With his passing, we feel indeed diminished, at the very moment when we are called upon to rise with greater loyalty to the politics of our movement. In spite of the searing pain caused by his death, in spite of the paralyzing suffering, we must regain our composure as Eneko himself would have wished and done. Let us forever be marked and inspired by, and called upon, the memory of the lessons drawn from Eneko’s work and be impelled to continue to work till victory for the Congo, for the cause he gave his life.
Prof Ernest Wamba dia Wamba,
President,
RCD-Kisangani, Liberation Movement,
Pretoria, November 25, 2002
