Deaths in Congo raise questions on U.N. work in dangerous areas
Two experts killed by militias had little preparation and no protection
Zaida Catalán was on to something, and it was making her jumpy.
“Exciting development,” she scribbled in her diary in late January. “I can maybe nail this bastard. Damn!”
Weeks later, Catalán, a U.N. investigator with little training and no safety equipment or even health insurance, headed into a remote area teeming with militia fighters to find the culprits behind a massacre in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
A grainy cellphone video shows what happened next: A cluster of men with rifles and red bandannas lead Catalán, a 36-year-old Swedish-Chilean, into a grove with her American colleague, Michael J. Sharp, 34. The two investigators are barefoot.
Sharp starts arguing. He and Catalán are forced onto the ground. Suddenly, shots are fired, hitting Sharp first. Catalán screams and tries to run for cover. She is shot twice.
Their bodies were discovered weeks later in a shallow grave, laid out carefully, side by side, in opposite directions. Catalán had been decapitated. Her head had been taken.
Their deaths raise tough questions about the United Nations and its work in the most dangerous places in the world. Almost two months passed before the United Nations even assembled a panel to look into what went wrong. The U.N. Security Council could go further and order a more formal investigation, but more than two months after the murders, it has taken no steps in that direction.
Instead, it has left the investigation to Congo, a nation where violence, corruption and impunity are so widespread that the United Nations has had to spend billions of dollars over the years in a failed effort to bring peace and stability. Indeed, a big focus of Catalán and her colleagues was whether the Congolese government played a role in the massacre and broader chaos she was investigating.
“The U.N. needs to take ownership,” said Akshaya Kumar, a deputy director at Human Rights Watch. She added that the Congolese authorities, who are implicated in the region’s conflict, were in no position to carry out a credible investigation.
The killings have also stirred a sharp debate over the United Nations’ responsibility to prepare and protect the people it hires to investigate wrongdoing around the world. Catalán and Sharp belonged to a panel of six experts authorized by the Security Council to investigate rapes, massacres and the exploitation of Congo’s vast natural resources.
They traveled without U.N. escorts, often going into areas that are no-go zones for U.N. employees. In this case, the two hired three motorcycle taxis and a Congolese interpreter to ferry them into the countryside. Their Congolese companions are still missing. There is no evidence that they have been killed.
As independent contractors, the investigators had no health insurance and received little training on how to operate in hostile environments. They were bound by U.N. security rules; don’t travel on motorcycle taxis was one.
Congo has a long history of conflict and suffering. Foreign powers, successive leaders and an alphabet soup of rebel groups have all pillaged its rich natural resources. The country is the focus of the most expensive peacekeeping operation in the world. But the mission, called Monusco, has often been criticized for turning a blind eye to human rights abuses committed by government forces and rebels alike.
Catalán, a former Green Party activist in Sweden who had been working as a U.N. expert for less than a year, quickly got sucked into an extraordinarily dangerous world that she was woefully unprepared for, where the line between murderous rebels and corrupt politicians often blurs.
She worked assiduously to untangle a murky web of local politicians, rebel leaders and government ministers, trying to pin down perpetrators so that the Security Council could impose sanctions on them. Her tools often boiled down to a pen that doubled as a recorder, and a determined line of inquiry that ended up putting her life in danger.
It is still unclear who ordered the murders of the experts. The Congolese government said it had released the cellphone video to show that militia fighters, not its soldiers, were responsible. In April, the government announced the arrests of two men. One escaped. Then, on Saturday, the Congolese said they knew who had ordered the killings and where Catalán’s head was, but gave no further details.
But according to documents kept on Catalán’s computer and to others familiar with the case, she had been scrutinizing a government minister, Clément Kanku, for his possible role in inciting violence in the Congolese region of Kasai last year.
Kanku, the minister of development until he was fired this month, had close links to the militia fighters in the area; he had been brought into President Joseph Kabila’s coalition government last year to bring the rebels to heel.
Catalán kept 130 files in a folder on her computer under Kanku’s name. Among them was a recorded phone conversation in which he seems to discuss setting fire to a town in the region, Tshimbulu, with a subordinate. They talk about a successful jailbreak, targeted assassinations of a colonel and other officials, and general mayhem.
Sensing something wrong, the family frantically reached out to Catalán’s colleagues in the United Nations.
The United Nations said peacekeepers “sprang into action from the very start,” with troops and helicopters deployed the next morning, according to Díaz, the spokesman.
The few peacekeepers stationed nearby began searching by road and air. But it took four days to deploy more U.N. forces from other parts of the country and begin a robust search, according to the commander of the Monusco’s Uruguayan forces, Col. Luis Mangini.
It took a full two weeks to find the bodies.
Now, relatives, colleagues and friends are frustrated at the handling of the killings. The Swedish authorities say they are looking into the deaths, but family members are calling on the United Nations to conduct a credible, independent investigation as well.
“What we hope for now is an independent international criminal investigation,” said Sharp’s father, John. “We can’t depend on the Congolese government to do it.”