No better place than prison

Kilo Kaba, 20, from the north-eastern district of Ituri in Orientale province, has been living in Osio penitentiary near Kisangani - the provincial capital - for the past eight months. He could easily escape, but he prefers to serve his 20-year term while waiting for his appeal to be heard. Only in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) do prisoners voluntarily stay in captivity. "I have no better place to go," Kaba said. He is married and has two children living in Bunia, the main town in Ituri, 500km to the east. The escape back there would take months of arduous trekking through dense and difficult jungle. The Belgians built Osio in 1957 as a high security prison to house 1,500 inmates. Now it is home and shelter to 84 convicts, all from the war-torn eastern province, all wishing to remain in prison. The fences are damaged or missing, there are no gates and locks, and the three prison guards show little interest in keeping anyone inside the open prison compound.

The roof in Kisangani's central prison collapsed years ago

"This is a volunteer prison system. Osio simply does not have enough staff to keep them inside forcibly," Katrina Ladwig, a criminal lawyer from Germany and human rights officer for the United Nations Mission in the DRC (MONUC) protection unit in Kisangani, told IRIN. She was referring to the inhumane prison conditions that exist in DRC. The Osio inmates were originally held in Bunia, where prisons are overcrowded and conditions appalling. Another problem in the east is the lack of an appeals court that could re-evaluate the cases of prisoners who may not have received a fair trial. Many were judged by military tribunals, which international human rights organisations claim are neither independent nor impartial. Many others are locked up for months and sometimes years without trial waiting for a civil court to pass judgment. All of this has led to several riots in Ituri’s prisons. To ease the situation, the Congolese authorities requested MONUC to transfer some of the men serving long-term sentences to Kisangani, capital of Orientale province. Horrible paradise For these inmates, Osio must look like paradise. However, in reality, it is the worst hotel you can imagine. There is nothing that resembles a toilet, no clean water, often no food and no security for those inside or outside. Bernard Bongongo, the deputy director of Osio, said the doors of the cells are open day and night. All locks were broken on 12 February 2006, when the inmates ran amok. The girls and women in the villages nearby are now afraid of being raped.

Inmate returning voluntarily to Osio Prison in Kisangani with vegetables he planted in the forest

"We live in a state of total insecurity," Bongongo said. "All doors are broken, we cannot lock them [the prisoners] in and they come and go as they please. All we can do is try to convince them that leaving Osio is not a good alternative." The prisoners went on a rampage because they had not been fed for weeks. One of the inmates was seriously ill and did not receive medical attention. At this point, about a dozen fled into the forest. "Human rights were not respected. Some were irregularly detained, others were minors," Ladwig said. "There was a lack of food and water. This is the condition in all prisons of the province and actually in all prisons in the Congo." For three months the Roman Catholic NGO Caritas supplied cereals, oil and salt to Osio. MONUC trucks shipped in 5,000 litres of water every week. Then the pipeline ran dry, forcing the prisoners to dig their own water well and grow their own food. "The situation in our prisons is really bad," Jean-Pierre Lola Kisanga, the governor of Orientale, told IRIN. But he denied that the prisoners rioted because of this. "The prison staff was corrupt and helped them to get out," he said. At the beginning of May, Lola Kisanga had four sacks of food and five bars of soap delivered to the jail. The food was finished within a week. "A sack always disappears, to feed the guards," Ladwig said. Rough justice

Prisoner outside the fence of Osio prison in Kisangani, Oriental province

Before the riot, the director of Osio prison was suspended because he ordered the release of John Tinanzabo, the secretary general of the rebel movement l'Union des patriotes congolais (UPC), after he had served his sentence. Tinanzabo was a close ally of UPC leader Thomas Lubanga, who is in the custody of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, awaiting trial for crimes against humanity. Tinanzabo himself was sentenced for fraud and extortion. The appeals court in Kisangani reduced his sentence from 15 years to one. It is not uncommon for politicians and military figures to put pressure on prison directors in DRC. "But we cannot keep detainees when their punishment is over," Bongongo said. He denied the accusation of corruption, but stressed that he and the other prison staff have difficulty making ends meet. The government has not provided sufficient funds to run the country's penal system and Bongongo's salary of US$20 a month is not even enough to buy a sack of rice. The chief security guard of Osio prison, Capt Chrispain Alubu, thinks many of the prisoners serving in Osio are not judged fairly: "These are not the tough criminals people believe. We live with them and know who they are. Many were members of the rebel movement UPC." According to Ladwig, about 50 percent of the prisoners in Osio were soldiers or militias – many have been sentenced for belonging to the wrong rebel group. Members of an international human rights organisation looking after prisoners’ rights told IRIN the problem with justice in DRC is that politicians nominate prosecutors – justice has the colour of parties. To change this, the transitional parliament on 24 May passed a law that should guarantee the justice system’s independence from the executive bodies. But it has not been enacted yet. Congo's judicial system is also notorious for its inequity. Inmate Kaba is serving 20 years for the theft of $5,000 while fellow inmate Malukisa Domingo received just seven years for killing a man. But, at least in Osio the condemned get another chance. Every week, members of the appeals court spend half a day travelling from Kisangani to the prison. The appeal judges IRIN talked to did not want to comment on the cases they handled, but it emerged that there were no witnesses at the trials and that many rulings were based only on written evidence. In the meantime, inmates Kaba and Domingo, along with Osio's other prisoners, tend the fields outside the prison, growing cassava, sweet potatoes and bananas. Without growing their own crops they and their guards would starve. FAO, the UN's food and agriculture organisation, once helped with shovels and seeds for planting. When the prisoners asked for machetes to clear the fields, the prison director – for obvious reasons - decided that was asking too much. The inmates are even allowed to sell their produce. They walk for hours to the market near Kisangani accompanied by guards, who are not there to make sure they do not escape, but rather guarantee that they share their profits with guards and inmates alike. Impunity

Director of prisons in Oriental Province Raphael Koto Bate in front of his office in Kisangani

Raphael Koto Bate is the head of prisons for Orientale province. He manages 40 facilities, all built in the 1920s, none of which has been maintained. Some have fallen into disuse. "Some are totally destroyed," Koto said, "others could be rehabilitated, if there was someone to help us make our province safer." Koto Bate said he knows of three prisons still in use; however, money is so scarce he has not been able to visit them. He said he did not even have money to make phone calls. Orientale province has a population of six million; just 1,000 of them are prisoners. Bearing in mind the years of war, murder and rape that ravaged the region, the proportion of inmates seems alarmingly low. Koto Bate said hardened criminals go unpunished. "Most people who commit crimes roam free," he told IRIN. The lack of judges and police, combined with the general apathy of the public, leaves people vulnerable to crime, and women and girls exposed to rape. There is widespread concern that the excesses of war have become common crimes. In the first three months of this year alone, NGOs reported more than 800 rape victims in the province, not including war-torn Ituri. "This is a new phenomenon," said Antoinette Kingwaya, head of the UN’s population fund (UNFPA) in Kisangani. "Rape has become part of our culture. Before the war we never heard of an 11-year-old raping an eight-year-old." For prison administrator Koto Bate, one way to combat crime is to have a functioning penal system: "Our country is sick and needs help to heal. Improving the conditions in the prisons is good. But the penal system must be improved as well. If we don’t do this the criminals will not fear justice and crimes will remain high." Total collapse The almost total collapse of the prison system is nowhere more visible than in Kisangani's Central prison, built in 1925. The ceiling threatens to cave in on to the prison director and half the prison's roofs have already crashed to the ground. Central prison used to house 500 inmates in the early 1990s. During the 1996 rebellion and the ensuing battles, all the inmates escaped. The prison now houses about 180 men who have rioted twice in the past two years. Even the cell where national hero and freedom fighter Patrice Lumumba was incarcerated before he was killed is falling to ruins. "This is a national shame," Kudura Ramasan, the prison director, said. Lumumba shared the same collapsing block with another national hero, Simon Kimbangu, who founded the popular Congolese Christian sect of the "Kimbanguistes". He died a political prisoner in Lubumbashi. Ramasan, receiving no financial assistance from the government, contacted religious groups for support. He even rented out the women’s wing to make money, placing the female prisoners in with the men. The Catholic Church protested and Ramasan was forced to move the women to the minors’ wing. "You can just about imagine what happened there," said Giovanni Pross, an Italian Catholic priest, who has been helping Kisangani prisoners for the last 20 years. Three times a week his assistants bring food to the prisoners. "Of all the inmates at Central prison, at least 100 should be released," Pross said, "most of them have never been tried apart from a few who had probably had to bribe someone." What angered him most was the attitude of people outside the prison: "Even Christians are saying why don't you let them die." This comes as no surprise in a country where most people do not have enough to feed themselves and who say feeding prisoners is a waste of time and money. [Countdown in Congo] hr/js/mw