Catholic and Protestant leaders are facing strong political headwinds as they promote a joint plan to secure long-term peace in the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The National Episcopal Conference of Congo and the Church of Christ in the Congo, a union of 62 Protestant denominations, launched a plan known as the “Social Pact for Peace and Living Together in the DRC and the Great Lakes” in January, the month that the rebel group M23 launched a major offensive in the mineral-rich east of the country.
But Catholic bishops have faced a backlash over their insistence on direct talks between the DRC’s government and the rebels, who the government says are backed by neighboring Rwanda and Uganda.
The rebels are continuing to advance, intensifying a humanitarian crisis in the turbulent eastern region of the DRC, which has a total population of around 105 million people. Roughly half of the DRC’s population is Catholic, making it the African country with the largest number of Catholics, ahead of Nigeria.
The church leader’s social pact calls for the Congolese people to reflect critically on their past, present, and future through 2060, when the country will celebrate the centenary of its independence from Belgium. The project calls for a review of all the sensitive issues that have hindered the country’s development since 1960. Church leaders argue that to advance the initiative, they must speak to everyone, including the rebels.
The secretary general of the bishops’ conference, known as CENCO, told journalists during a trip to Brussels that: “It is a long-term project which does not concern this regime only. We have to go to the fundamentals, revisit our history, and come up with long-lasting solutions for the overall political, economic, social, and cultural recovery of our country, laying new grounds for our nation, independent of who’s in power.”
Although the social pact has gained support both nationally and internationally, the DRC’s government has sought to disrupt it. Government officials insist there is no need to talk to the rebels because they see them as puppets of Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame and Uganda’s president Yoweri Museveni.
In a Feb. 13 letter, political forces allied with the ruling party expressed outrage after CENCO-ECC representatives met with M23 leaders in Goma, the capital of the DRC’s North Kivu province, which rebels seized at the end of January.
The letter claimed CENCO-ECC’s actions were “treason.”
“The members of the clergy decided to betray their homeland in broad daylight by traveling to Goma to meet with Paul Kagame through his puppets, who bear the blood of six million lives cruelly cut down over the past 30 years, and especially that of the victims of the Goma massacre of Jan. 27-28, whose fresh memories still cry out for vengeance,” it said.
On Feb. 26, CENCO general secretary Msgr. Donatien Nshole flew into Lubumbashi, the chief city of the DRC’s mineral-laden Katanga Province, after a trip to Tanzania. Agents of the General Directorate of Migration confiscated his passport for several hours, prompting an outcry from Archbishop Fulgence Muteba, the Archbishop of Lubumbashi and president of CENCO.
In a Feb. 27 statement, Muteba described the temporary confiscation as a “serious attempt to violate the freedom of movement” of Nshole. He added that “this kind of provocation is not conducive to the tranquil search for peace and social cohesion.”
Commenting on the tensions between the government and the CENCO-ECC, Nshole told the Paris-based Jeune Afrique magazine: “Those in power believe we are working to give space to the opposition and destabilize the constitutional order.”
“The opposition believes we are providing crutches to the President of the Republic [Félix Tshisekedi, who has led the DRC since 2019], who is in difficulty. But we are used to criticism and we are not seeking to overthrow anyone.”
“Everyone will soon realize the consistency of our approach.”
Nshole was later questioned at the country’s interior ministry concerning a Feb. 22 CENCO press release highlighting alleged attacks on Swahili speakers in the DRC, previously reported by The Pillar.
The press release, signed by Nshole, urged the government to assume its responsibility to ensure the protection of all segments of the Congolese population, guaranteeing social cohesion and the harmonious coexistence of all ethnicities.
Nshole was called in to discuss the press release March 6 with Interior Minister Jacquemain Shabani.
After the meeting, the priest said: “We exchanged very valuable information and made recommendations to each other.”
According to his ministry’s communications unit, Shabani insisted that the incidents reported by CENCO were isolated cases, had already received an appropriate government response, and in no way reflected a policy of systematic stigmatization of the country’s Swahili speakers, who tend to live in the DRC’s eastern regions.
Although Swahili is one of the DRC’s four national languages, alongside Kikongo, Lingala, and Tshiluba, some Swahili speakers were reportedly targeted after being accused of being accomplices of the rebels or even Rwanda, where a small minority speaks Swahili.
Shabani, who is responsible for the DRC’s internal security, called on CENCO to address the importance of collaborating closely with the relevant government services before publishing sensitive information. He said that communications based on unverified information could serve the interests of the DRC’s enemies, especially at a time of war.
“It is essential to alert our services first to certify such facts before making them public,” he said. “This would avoid playing into the enemy’s hands and sowing division among our fellow citizens.”
Government supporters have also alleged that international travel by CENCO-ECC representatives is being funded by former DRC president Joseph Kabila and the opposition leader Moïse Katumbi.
But in a March 21 statement, ECC pastor Maurice Mondengo said: “The CENCO and ECC cannot sell themselves to politicians for plane tickets, food, and hotel accommodation.”
The social pact, he said, was launched by Christian leaders to promote the well-being of all the Congolese people, as well as of Africa and the world, and was in no way a political machine serving a group of Congolese opponents or financed by them, as some baselessly claimed.
“Rest assured, the two Churches still take responsibility for what they do, because they are working for peace and the well-being of all, not for a group of individuals,” he said.
Earlier this month, Angola, the country that has served as a mediator in the conflict in the eastern DRC, announced that “direct peace negotiations” would take place between the government in Kinshasa and the M23.
Catholic and Protestant leaders welcomed the development, which appeared to validate their insistence on direct talks.
They encouraged “the stakeholders concerned to seize the outstretched hand” of Angola’s President João Lourenço, “to engage sincerely in this peace negotiation process, in a constructive spirit.”
But the rebels boycotted the talks, citing a wave of sanctions imposed by the U.S. and the European Union. Angola announced March 24 that it was withdrawing from its mediation role.
To salvage the talks, Qatar’s leader Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani organized a March 18 meeting in Doha attended by the DRC’s President Tshisekedi and Rwanda’s President Kagame. Qatar is a good friend of Rwanda and has mining interests in the DRC.
Tshisekedi and Kagame reaffirmed their commitment to an immediate and unconditional ceasefire, and agreed to continue the discussions initiated in Doha in pursuit of lasting peace.
CENCO president Archbishop Muteba told RFI March 20: “We welcome President Félix Tshisekedi’s decision. He has surpassed himself, even though there are those around him who disagree. But he has taken responsibility, and we encourage him to go further.”
Meanwhile, CENCO secretary general Msgr. Nshole told Jeune Afrique: “This is something we can only welcome, as it is in line with what we wanted. The Congolese need to talk to each other and to all those who can contribute to improving coexistence in the Great Lakes region. If the two presidents went to Doha, it means they recognize that Qatar can help find a solution.”
Nshole added: “We are proposing an international conference on peace in the Great Lakes region and are seeking to raise awareness among all those who can support this initiative.”
“When we consulted with national stakeholders, particularly the opposition, we were repeatedly asked for guarantees that the conclusions of a possible national dialogue would not be discarded. Support from the international community could be one of these guarantees.”
“We must consider the political situation as a whole: the Congo issue involves several interests, and it’s better to have everyone on our side.”
Fr. José Mpundu, a priest of the Archdiocese of Kinshasa, told The Pillar he believed the dialogue should take place in three stages.
He said that first, there should be an internal Congolese dialogue to foster national cohesion by addressing identity, history, and a collective vision. Second, there must be a regional dialogue with Great Lakes countries to question the benefits of proxy wars and promote African sovereignty. Third, there needs to be a global dialogue with Western powers to redefine relationships beyond colonial legacies like the 1885 Berlin Conference, where European nations divided up land and trade in Africa.
“It is imperative that we can, as Africans and Westerners, in an adult-adult dialogue, agree on the new world we want to build together, a more humane world based on the primacy of being and not that of having,” Mpundu said.
“We must redefine the relationships between us, Africans and Westerners: egalitarian relationships, not ones of domination, between masters and slaves. This is my core thinking.”
In an almost two-month period, CENCO-ECC representatives have met with Kenya’s President William Ruto, Uganda’s President Museveni, Rwanda’s President Kagame, Angola’s President Lourenço, and the Republic of the Congo’s President Denis Sassou-Nguesso.
A delegation has also visited French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris and Belgium’s Deputy Prime Minister Maxime Prévot in Brussels.
After the March 19 meeting, Macron said France fully supported dialogue and the bishops’ initiative, “to overcome the current crisis in the east of the country and enable the restoration of Congolese sovereignty.”
Nshole told Radio Okapi, a Kinshasa-based UN radio station, that Macron “listened to us attentively, shared our analyses, agreed with us regarding the perspectives presented in the social pact guide, and promised his support wherever possible.”
Belgium’s Prévot welcomed what he described as an “open and inclusive approach that is in line with the constitutional order.”
“This is a dialogue initiative that should be seized to strengthen cohesion and address the root causes of the conflict in the eastern DRC,” he said.
Before flying to Europe, CENCO-ECC representatives held talks with the U.S. Congressman Ronny Jackson (R-TX-13), who was visiting Kinshasa as President Donald Trump’s special envoy.
Jackson expressed America’s full support for the DRC’s territorial integrity and affirmed that the new U.S. administration was committed to working toward the restoration of peace, enabling American companies to seize business opportunities in various sectors.
Washington has reportedly indicated its openness to exploring a critical minerals partnership with the DRC, involving minerals such as cobalt, lithium, copper, and tantalum, in exchange for a formal security pact to help the government defeat M23.
The Congolese mining sector is currently mainly controlled by large Chinese groups and the Kazakhstan-based Eurasian Resources Group.
Critics of a potential critical minerals partnership with the U.S. include Thierry Vircoulon, a researcher at the Institut français des relations internationales, a Paris-based think tank, who questioned the practice of selling off mining rights “at every serious crisis in the DRC to save the regime and mortgaging the future of a whole people” — a concern shared widely in Congolese civil society.
