Tucked in the heart of the equatorial forest in north-east Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Kisangani is steeped in history. It was first named Stanleyville after British explorer and journalist Henry Morton Stanley, who went there in 1877 as he was crossing Africa. Nearly a century later, as part of his “authenticity” policy, former president Mobutu Sese Seko renamed it Kisangani. In Swahili, this means “on the island”, as its six districts are built on both banks of the majestic Congo River.
As well as being the country’s third-largest city after Kinshasa and Lubumbashi, Kisangani is also known as a city that suffered under foreign occupation. From 5 to 10 June 2000, it was the scene of deadly clashes between the armies of Uganda and Rwanda, which were then occupying eastern DRC. In 2022, after more than 20 years of legal battles in The Hague, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered Uganda to pay $325 million to the DRC as reparations for abuses committed in the east of the country, particularly during the so-called Six-Day War in Kisangani.
But today the city is making headlines as a hub for the misappropriation of funds from FRIVAO, the compensation fund for victims of Uganda’s illegal activities in the DRC.
“Everything was looted and destroyed”
Every year in June, Kisangani commemorates this Six-Day War. According to the locals, the most affected neighbourhood is Tshopo, on the right bank of the river. Among the few witnesses to the conflict still living there is Zacharie, aged 71.
“We suffered under the occupation of the Rwandans and Ugandans. The Rwandans had a base here behind my house, and the Ugandans in other neighbourhoods. They regularly clashed for control of the city,” says this family man, whose first name has been changed to protect his anonymity. “There was the one-day war, the three-day war and the six-day war – the largest and most horrific of all, which took our loved ones, our savings and destroyed our city.”
Before the war Zacharie was a wealthy man, but 20 years on his memories are his only wealth. There are still bullet and shell marks on the walls and doors of his house, as if the clashes had taken place only yesterday. “I never want to plaster over my house, so that the bullet marks remain visible,” he says, once settled in his living room on the second floor of a concrete building. “I used to have an oil mill that pressed at least 20 cans of oil a day. I ran a soap factory that produced between 200 and 300 sachets of soap a day. I founded a primary and secondary school. But everything was looted and destroyed.”
The war broke out on the morning of Monday 5 June 2000, at around 10.00 local time, whilst Zacharie was looking after his pupils. Realizing that the pupils’ parents would no longer be at home at that hour, he decided to take around 100 children back to his home. “The first bomb that triggered the war fell on my street, and the second on my plot of land, wounding me in the foot. We were caught in the middle of the warring factions as they launched bombs at each other,” he recalls. “I looked after 121 children in that house for six days. I had to keep an eye on them, protect them from the shells whistling and falling all around, and feed them. On the third day, as my food supplies were running out, I took advantage of a brief ceasefire by the warring parties to try and take the children back to their homes. We filed out one by one, with me leading. We had to step over corpses. That was hard to go through with the children.”
“Raped one after the other”
Like Zacharie, Rachel (name changed) also led a comfortable life before the war, which plunged her into poverty and left her with deep emotional scars. Now aged 58, this slender woman, a mother of seven and grandmother to 15 grandchildren, recalls taking displaced people into her home because people in her neighbourhood knew she had enough to feed them.
“On the fourth day of the war, we ran out of drinking water. We went out to fetch some from the neighbourhood when my daughter – who was barely 12 years old – and I came across four Rwandan soldiers who raped us one after the other. To this day, my daughter has never given birth, due to the after-effects of the rape,” she confides, covering her face with her hands to hide her tears. As if the rape weren’t enough, she adds, a stray bullet severed the fingers on one of her daughter’s hands as they were returning home, making her a victim twice over.
“My daughter now lives in Kinshasa. I recently asked her to send me her identity documents to help her register with FRIVAO, but she no longer even wants to cooperate. She tells me that this fund won’t give her back her fertility or her fingers,” says Rachel, showing us her daughter’s tattered voter registration card, which she guards jealously in the hope of one day using it to secure compensation for her.
From 3,000 to 17,000 potential victims
In 2003 one victim, Jean Kalegamire Bienda, and his fellow activists decided to set up the Solidarity Fund for Victims of the Six-Day War (FSV-G). “I was seriously injured in a bomb attack and there is still a piece of shrapnel in my eye to this day. I spent 14 months in a hospital bed,” says Bienda, now vice-president of the FSV-G, as he shows us photos of himself confined to a hospital bed.
From the moment it was founded, the association set about identifying victims, compiling a preliminary list of around 3,000 people. When he came to power in 2019, President Felix Tshisekedi decided to launch transitional justice mechanisms in the DRC. FRIVAO was created in December 2019 pending announcement of the amount of reparations set by the ICJ.
With impatient victims appealing to him, Tshisekedi, on behalf of the Congolese government, handed over a symbolic sum of around $600,000 to the Caritas association in Kisangani – a charitable organization run by the Catholic Church – to pay each of the 3,300 victims $150.
According to Bienda, it was after these symbolic reparations that many victims who had previously been sceptical decided to join the initiative, hoping to receive compensation. “That’s what caused our list to skyrocket. We went from 3,000 victims to over 17,000,” he says.
The FSG-V says it has forwarded this list of 17,000 identified victims to FRIVAO. This list, according to several witnesses in Kisangani, served as the basis for the preliminary register of victims eligible for reparations.
First disappointments
Between 2022 and 2023, as compensation payments from FRIVAO fell behind schedule, the victims – who, according to Bienda, are “used to hearing about embezzlement scandals in the Congo” – decided to send a delegation of over 80 people to Kinshasa to ensure that the first instalments sent by Uganda were safely secured (to date, Uganda has paid $260 million of the $325 million expected). Around ten travelled by plane and the rest via the Congo River, a journey of more than 15 days aboard makeshift boats.
Three victims in this delegation claim to have spent more than a year in the capital, as they could not afford to return. “In Kinshasa, we spent the night under the open sky at the Cardinal Malula Stadium, surrounded by filth and rubbish,” says missionary Godelieve Etoka Bastin, a woman in her sixties who was injured by a bullet. “In fact, one victim from the delegation – a father of ten children – died in these circumstances. Unfortunately, when the first instalment of compensation was paid out, we were the last to be paid.”
Orphans also report having struggled to access compensation for their parents who died whilst the process was ongoing, due to the cumbersome nature and cost of the administrative procedures required for certification.
Musical chairs at FRIVAO
Since 2023, FRIVAO has had three management teams. The first, appointed by the head of State and led by Bishop Mwarabu, a Catholic prelate from Kisangani, was suspended in August 2024 – just one year after taking office – by then new Justice Minister Constant Mutamba. He and his fund coordinator, Chançard Bolukola, are currently in detention on trial for embezzling funds from FRIVAO.
Mutamba then set up an interim team led by his close associates, including Bolukola. In his early twenties, Bolukola struggled to gain acceptance from certain other members of the team, including his deputy Dismas Kitenge, a well-known human rights defender in Kisangani. “During the year we were in charge, Dismas Kitenge refused to work with us,” a former colleague of Bolukola who prefers to remain anonymous told Justice Info. “Sensing the heavy-handed influence of politicians in FRIVAO’s administration, Dismas chose to step aside. Moreover, he pointed out to us that not every opportunity is worth taking,” confirmed an activist from Kisangani who has been closely following FRIVAO’s sad saga.
Following Mutamba’s departure from the team in June 2025, the original team was reinstated and Kitenge was appointed chair of FRIVAO’s board of directors.
Payments at the mercy of politics
Out of the 14,818 victims registered in the city of Kisangani alone, the first team had certified 3,163 victims as eligible for compensation. The fund was nevertheless supposed to compensate all victims in the former Orientale province (which comprises Tshopo, with Kisangani as its capital, Ituri, Haut-Uélé and Bas-Uélé). Of these 3,163 victims, the first FRIVAO team compensated only 108. They received between 250 and 1,000 dollars, depending on whether they had lost property or loved ones.
These payments were made using some 103 million dollars that FRIVAO received as part of a first 130 million instalment paid by Uganda. The Congolese government withheld 18% at source – amounting to nearly $27 million – which then-Justice Minister Rose Mutombo said was to cover damage to natural resources. She later on asked FRIVAO to give back another 5% for costs of managing legal disputes.
Mutombo was then replaced by Mutamba, who suspended FRIVAO’s management team due to the slowness of operations, but also because of irregularities found in the identification of victims – irregularities that had also been slammed by beneficiaries on the day the compensation was launched. “The proceedings were happening at the Raw Bank. When a victim’s name was called, people would boo and complain to minister Constant Mutamba that these were fake victims,” recounts missionary Bastin. Faced with this, and criticism of the meagre compensation despite millions paid by Uganda, Mutamba decided to bring the parties involved and MPs from Kisangani together to revise the amounts upwards.
“The minister had heard that around 14,000 victims had been registered and he said there was enough money to compensate the victims more generously,” says Bienda. “The minister proposed $3,500 for each victim. They reached an agreement with the [Kisangani] MPs on a lump sum of $2,000. A simple calculation shows that by granting each victim $2,000, only 28 million out of the 325 million would have been spent.”
Blaise Monduka, lawyer and coordinator of the Ukumbusho collective (“Memory” in Swahili) set up by Tshopo activists to demand justice and reparations, slams this political interference in FRIVAO’s remit. “The minister plucked the figure of 2,000 out of thin air, without any prior assessment or categorisation of the harm done. Someone who has lost a loved one should never get the same amount as someone who has lost only material possessions,” says Monduka. “It was a politically motivated payment to soften the victims up, coming after the announcement of President [Tshisekedi]’s imminent visit to the city.”
FRIVAO then abandoned its compensation payments of 250 to 1,000 dollars to comply with the new rate set by the minister. When Bishop Mwarabu’s team was suspended, it had just compensated five victims to the tune of $2,000 each, according to a former member of Bolukola’s interim team who had taken over the cases.
Ministers give orders, FRIVAO obeys
Christian Kambi, chairman of the “Nouvelle dynamique de la société civile” (engaged civil society) association in Kisangani, maintains that every Justice Minister – from Mutombo and Mutamba to current minister Guillaume Ngefa – bears part of the responsibility for the FRIVAO scandal by interfering in the allocation of funds. “Over the phone, ministers order ‘give this to the Catholic Church, that amount to the Provincial Assembly’, and the FRIVAO managers comply,” he laments. This reality is acknowledged by the various teams at the helm of FRIVAO.
In early June 2026, during a programme on the FRIVAO affair, journalist Stanislas Bujakera asked on what basis the fund’s managers accepted the deductions made by Kinshasa. Bishop Mwarabu replied with a Latin adage: “Qui dat, jube” – he who gives, commands. Bolukola’s former colleague also confided: “We were acting on the recommendation of the supervisory authority [the Ministry of Justice]. We were at fault in our administration. We are in the Congo and in politics you cannot tell the minister not to do this or that. We blame ourselves for failing to follow administrative procedures,” he admits, whilst lamenting that his former boss is languishing in prison.
But Kambi thinks these FRIVAO officials must take responsibility for their mistake in having “carried out orders that were wrongly given”.
The battle over victim lists and figures
During their year at the helm of the Fund, Bolukola’s team compensated more than 14,000 victims with $2,000 each, according to his former colleague. “On our arrival, the 3,000 victims certified by Bishop Mwarabu’s team were paid immediately. On the minister’s instructions, we set up a monitoring committee to verify the eligibility of the other 14,000 victims remaining in the database.” He refutes the accusation that his team artificially inflated the list of victims, increasing it from 3,000 to 14,000.
“Chançard (Bolukola) is the victim of a politicised narrative,” he says. Bienda concurs. “Our committee was made up of investigating officers from the public prosecutor’s office, representatives of the victims, an adviser to the Minister of Justice, representatives of civil society, the National Intelligence Agency, human rights organisations, the Red Cross and doctors,” he recalls. In his capacity as head of a victims’ association, he took part in the verification operations carried out by the ad hoc commission that Mutamba set up. “We had four interview desks. I was the one who called up the people listed on the FRIVAO register. The victims had to move from one desk to another for verification. We carried out this verification of the register from September 2024 to March 2025. The 14,000 are genuine victims. They have evidence of the harm they suffered,” asserts Bienda.
“The certification did indeed take place, and it worked. It took place every week and, at the end, we displayed the list of certified individuals at FRIVAO’s headquarters,” confirms Kambi, whose organisation had a representative on the commission.
Lutula Philémon, secretary of FSG-V, also confirms that Bolukola’s team paid $2,000 to 14,000 victims as a first instalment. “Even those who had already received the $250 during Bishop Mwarabu’s time had their payments topped up to $2,000 each,” he explains. “Chançard used only $39 million, of which approximately $28 million went towards individual compensation for the 14,000 victims and $11 million towards collective compensation.”
Compensation without support
And yet, serious doubts persist regarding the integrity of those managing the funds. Within the civil society sector in Kisangani, as well as within FRIVAO, several sources have told Justice Info of fraudulent schemes involving certain alleged “false victims” and members of the FSG-V or the oversight committee. The latter are said to have approved victims in exchange for commissions taken from the $2,000 received by each certified victim. These are allegations that Justice Info has been unable to confirm.
Unlike the reparations mechanisms implemented by the International Criminal Court (ICC) Trust Fund in Ituri, which trains and supports victims in choosing income-generating activities, FRIVAO has done nothing to support the victims. Some have bought plots of land but sometimes had to resell them to survive. Others do not know what to do with their money and keep it without spending it, due to a lack of training and support to make it grow.
“Without support, did they think that by giving them $2,000 each it would turn them into business people?” says Zacharie, who refuses to register with FRIVAO. “I’ve met victims who told me that this money was an opportunity for them to buy Nido [milk] and meat, something they hadn’t been able to do in all these years of hardship. $2,000 is nothing.
“I cannot humiliate myself and sell my family’s dignity for a sum of money that can’t bring back my oil mill, my soap factory and my school, all destroyed by the war,” continues the former entrepreneur, who is hoping for more in the way of collective compensation. “It is not cash that changes a man’s life. Instead, we need to support the victims, so that this money can be put to good use by creating structures that can provide ongoing assistance to them. If I had 300 million, I would improve the town’s electricity supply to encourage the development of factories, I would develop agriculture, and I would strengthen healthcare facilities so that victims can access medical care more easily.”
Some, however, have managed to stand out: Rachel and four members of her family each received $2,000. With the $10,000 they pooled together they bought a 200-square-metre plot on the outskirts of Kisangani, built a solid house and started a pig and poultry farm. Rachel says she is relieved to have received the first instalment, which has enabled her family to rebuild their lives, and she hopes to receive the final instalment.
Other victims have managed to put the compensation received from FRIVAO to good use: young motorbike taxi drivers have managed to buy new motorbikes for their business. Kisangani is renowned as the city of bike taxis, the “toleka” (“let’s go” in Lingala), and many drivers now have new vehicles.
The forgotten aspects of reparation
Compensation does not erase physical or psychological trauma. Bastin and Bienda highlight the urgent need for medical care for many victims who still have bullet or shell fragments lodged in their bodies. And many victims require psychosocial support, an aspect that has so far been overlooked by FRIVAO. “The first victim identification team rejected those who reported trauma and violence as their harm, even though it is precisely these kinds of cases that affect my family the most,” says Rachel.
“Many families now have children they no longer know how to look after. They roam the city’s streets and pose a constant danger in Kisangani. If we don’t take them in, they will become kuluna [children who have broken away from their families]. The state must ensure they are looked after: take them in, support them and reintegrate them,” warns psychologist Lisisa Wanamali Wali, himself a victim of the Six-Day War. In his view, the Congolese state must not limit reparations to the provision of money, but must also prioritise the psychosocial care of victims. “Money is merely a token. If I have lost my daughter, is money a fair compensation?” he asks. “What matters in a person’s life is self-respect, and many victims have lost that. We must help them to find psychological relief. They have deep wounds.”
