Arusha, January 6, 2015 (FH) \u2013 The Congolese army and UN force in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUSCO) should step up efforts to arrest wanted Ma\u00ef Ma\u00ef militia leader Ntabo Ntaberi Sheka, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Tuesday.<\/p>\n
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Congolese judicial authorities issued an arrest warrant for Sheka in January 2011 for crimes against humanity committed in eastern DRC, including mass rape.<\/p>\n
\u201cAn arrest warrant alone won\u2019t stop a rebel leader like Sheka from committing atrocities \u2013 Congo\u2019s authorities need to bring him to justice,\u201d said HRW senior Congo researcher Ida Sawyer. \u201cThe army and UN peacekeepers should increase their efforts to arrest him before more civilians suffer.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ntabo Ntaberi Sheka is a former minerals trader from Walikale who belongs to the Nyanga, ethnic group. In 2009 he formed an armed group called the Nduma Defense of Congo (NDC), supposedly to \u201cpromote development\u201d in Walikale and \u201cliberate\u201d its mines from government control.<\/p>\n
In July 2014, the Congolese army and MONUSCO launched military operations against Sheka\u2019s militia in Walikale, North Kivu province. Officials said one of the objectives was to arrest Sheka, but the operations have been hampered by the remoteness of Walikale, a territory the size of Rwanda with few roads.<\/p>\n
HRW said that since the arrest warrant was issued four years ago, Sheka\u2019s forces have killed at least 70 civilians, many of whom were hacked to death by machete.<\/p>\n
Sheka\u2019s fighters sometimes mutilated the bodies of those they killed and paraded their body parts around town while chanting ethnic slurs, according to HRW.\u00a0 It said Sheka\u2019s forces raped women and girls and forcibly recruited scores of young men and boys into their ranks.<\/p>\n
HRW says many of the worst abuses occurred in the strategic town of Pinga between August 2012 and November 2013. \u201cWhen Sheka\u2019s forces fled Pinga in November 2013, they took dozens of women and girls with them into the forests of Walikale, many of whom are still being held hostage as sex slaves,\u201d said the rights group.<\/p>\n
ER\/JC<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Arusha, January 6, 2015 (FH) \u2013 The Congolese army and UN force in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUSCO) should step up efforts to arrest wanted Ma\u00ef Ma\u00ef militia leader Ntabo Ntaberi Sheka, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Tuesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[555],"tags":[],"ji_location":[],"class_list":["post-24955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hirondellenews"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n