Sixty-six soldiers from a single Congolese army regiment have been condemned to death in one of the biggest mass trials eastern Congo has witnessed in years. Judges from the garrison tribunal of Goma travelled to Walikale, a small town in North Kivu province, and read out their rulings there late on Friday.
They found the men guilty on three charges: rebelling against their commanders, refusing orders and showing cowardice before enemy forces. The army’s 34th military region said in a statement that over 70 members of the 3415th regiment stood trial. Four were acquitted, including the captain in charge of the unit’s intelligence, while a sergeant got off with a decade behind bars after judges accepted that there were strong extenuating factors.
Arrests were made in the village of Ngora on October 20; the acts at the centre of the case are said to have taken place in neighbouring Ntoto. Investigators first targeted 54 men and widened the circle later. Scheduled for ten days, the hearings ran for twelve.
The army has presented the proceedings as a way to restore discipline at a time when its troops are under heavy pressure. North Kivu has been at the heart of the war with the M23 rebels, now part of a wider coalition, who hold the provincial capital Goma. Only last month another military court sentenced 27 soldiers to death for pulling back from the front line, so at least 93 servicemen have received capital sentences within weeks.
Kinshasa scrapped its halt on carrying out executions in March 2024. Since 2003 death sentences had routinely been commuted to life imprisonment. Rights campaigners have condemned the wave of death verdicts coming out of army tribunals, and there is no public record of how many prisoners have actually been put to death. Those sentenced in Walikale can still take their case to Congo’s top military appeals court.
