Backstory: Congolese radio show gives war victims a voice
The talk show gives allows listeners to seek justice
from the March 22, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
Are military elements authorized to carry weapons while in civilian clothes?
Various armed groups of Ituri randomly planted mines, which cause great damage among the population. Can this also constitute one of the crimes to be charged against those responsible among armed groups who will be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court?
There is a custom according to which a woman can be abducted by the friends of the one who wants to marry her. In some cases, the young woman is 13 or 14 years old. Will the law condemn this practice?
Here in Bunia, Ituri's capital city – a low-rise warren, with no paved roads – groups of residents gather on porches and one-room houses to listen to the show. They're called listening clubs, or clubs d'ecoute.
Bunia is an ethnically divided city, a fact that made the fighting here particularly brutal and personal. Hall wanted to make sure that each district was listening to the show, so she and her team helped set up clubs. They gave each club leader a battery-powered radio – few people have electricity here – and some money to buy refreshments.
Kusu Tambwe, a mother of four, runs the listening club in Bankoko, a western neighborhood of ramshackle concrete homesteads with cornstalks growing in between. On Saturday mornings, she puts the radio on a coffee table covered by faded cloth – one of the few pieces of furniture in a bare, mud-floored room – and her neighbors crowd around.
After the show, they discuss the issues, and raise their own questions. They might send those queries by cellphone text message to the local radio station. Or radio journalists might stop by and record them directly. Sometimes they meet even when the show isn't on to continue the conversation and raise more questions for the people who are supposed to be in charge.
All the members of this listening club are intimately familiar with injustice. Antoinette Kawambe's 7-year-old son was struck by a police SUV, and when she tried to get compensation, a police officer told her that laws do not apply to them. Three soldiers came into Anda Bahiti's home to rob and kill him, but he narrowly escaped their knives and managed to call for help. Four soldiers came into Love Bahati's house and took her hen without paying for it – even after she pointed out that her husband was a pastor.
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