AP
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A high-ranking military court in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) convicted former president Joseph Kabila on Tuesday for treason and war crimes, sentenced him to death on charges of cooperation with anti-government rebels.
It was not immediately clear how the sentence could be carried out, as Kabila, who has been absent since July, is unknown since being seen publicly in a rebel-held city earlier this year. Kabila’s political parties called for a politically motivated verdict.
The Kinshasa court ordered his immediate arrest.
The government said Kabila worked with Rwanda and Rwanda-backed rebel group M23.
Kabila denied the allegations, but expressed support for the rebel campaign in OP-ED, published in February in the Sunday Times newspaper in South Africa.
A senior Kinshasa official ruled on Tuesday that Kabila, along with M23, had committed treason, war crimes, conspiracy and organizing rebellion. He also ordered Kabila to pay $2 billion in damages to the DRC, ordering $2 billion in damages to the country’s North Kivu province and $2 billion in South Kivu.
The court said the prosecutors presented testimony hinting at Kabila from Eric Nukuba, the imprisoned former chief of staff of rebel leader Corneil Nanga. Nkuba was convicted of rebellion charges in August 2024.
The court cited Nkuba saying that Kabila had regularly communicated with Nanga over the phone about how to overthrow the current president Felix Tsisekedi’s government.
The head of the Kabila People’s Party for Reconstruction and Democracy called the verdict a “political and unfair decision.”
“We believe that the clear intention of the dictatorship of power is to eliminate and neutralize key political actors,” Emmanuel Ramazani Shaddaly, the party’s permanent secretary, said in an interview with the Associated Press.
Richard Bond, a lawyer representing the North and South Kivu states, said he was “satisfied” with the court’s decision. “Justice rendered in the name of the Congolese people gives them satisfaction,” he added.
Kabila led the DRC from 2001 to 2019. He took office at the age of 29 – extended the mandate by delaying elections for two years after the end of 2017 after his father and former president Laurent Kabila were assassinated.
In May, the country’s Senate voted to abolish Kabila’s immunity from indictment. This is the move that Kabila at the time condemned as a dictatorship.
Kabila lived outside the voluntary exile DRC, but returned to Goma, one of the cities held by the rebel group in April. His current location is unknown.
The DRC’s decades of conflict followed the town of Bukabu that was photographed in February when M23 rebels were willing to seize the strategic city of Sesame in January. The fighting killed around 3,000 people, exacerbating what was already one of the world’s biggest humanitarian crises, displaced around 7 million people.
