Open Letter

Budget Sum for Raped Women and for the Education of Children

To His Excellence, Mr Joseph Kabila, President of the Democratic Republic of Congo

Dear Mr President

We are taking the liberty of sending you this open letter from Switzerland, where we are undergoing medical treatment. We would have liked to send you this letter through official channels via parliament. Yet, given the importance and urgency of our matter, as well as the fact that the transitional parliament will also be dealing with the issue, we have decided to use the channel of the press.

Our country was attacked again and again by regular troops from Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi during the period August 1998 to 2004.

These attacks were supported by Congolese traitors and collaborators of the so-called rebel movements which had been formed in Kampala and Kigali in order to carry out the meticulously planned criminal assault against the hospitable and peaceful inhabitants of the eastern provinces of our country. Today we know those responsible for the deaths of over 4 million innocent Congolese civilians. The same criminals are still carrying on their evil work and are exploiting the rich mineral resources of our country. Instead of using the substantial income from selling those mineral resources to nurse our sick people, to pay regular salaries to our civil servants and police, to educate our youth and to launch the reconstruction of our country, only our enemies are profiting from this wealth.

Dear Mr President

Since 1998 the inhabitants of the eastern provinces of our country have been humiliated, massacred - and those massacres remain unpunished. The people have been robbed and turned out of house and home. They are forced to wander around like homeless nomads. Furthermore, our grandmothers, mothers, wives, sisters and daughters are kidnapped by armed Rwandese who remain in the country illegally. Often these women have been kept as sex slaves for years; most of them are HIV-positive today. Those are the circumstances in which they have to live today, left to their own devices. We are writing to you today because of the situation of all these victims, innocent women and young girls, and because of the education of our children, the decision-makers of tomorrow. We would like to recommend strongly that a substantial sum is included in the 2006 budget for the medical, social and psychological care of these raped women. This is the last budget to be adopted by the transitional parliament. A further substantial sum should be reserved for the education of our children, something almost unheard of under the Mobutu dictatorship.

Yours faithfully

Joseph M. Kyalangilwa, President of the Civil Society of the Province of South Kivu/Congo and President of the International Great Lakes Forum, Switzerland.