The Wages of Sin and the Perfect State Crime

The tragic deaths in the Kenge air crash of Lieutenant General Joseph Mutombo Katalayi Tiende and Lieutenant General Lucien-René Likulia Bakumi, respectively the first president of the High Military Court and the FARDC’s military prosecutor general, have raised suspicions that they were politically eliminated in an operation disguised as an accident.

These two senior judges occupied a central position in the most sensitive cases of the Félix Tshisekedi era, notably by having prosecuted and handed down the death sentence against former president Joseph Kabila.

They stood at the heart of the machinery of repression and the witch-hunt conducted within the army against Swahili-speaking military officers and Rwandophone Congolese from the Kivu and Katanga regions, who are currently being held at Ndolo military prison and Makala prison.

The two deceased generals held compromising secrets and possessed an in-depth knowledge of the security apparatus, making them particularly inconvenient for the Congolese authorities in the event of a break or future revelations.

The murky circumstances surrounding their flight aboard the Let L-410 registered 9S-GUC marked by an unexplained change from the original mission order, which provided for travel by road weigh heavily against the regime.

Moreover, only recently, the Congolese defence minister presented two aircraft intended for the army’s general staff. Yet, curiously, these two senior officers were sent on a mission aboard a plane that had not undergone maintenance for several years.

The rapid dissemination of images and videos of the tragedy reinforces the need to establish the truth about the origin of the flight and the chain of decisions behind it. The Kinshasa authorities face an urgent obligation to be transparent in a case that resembles a perfect crime a planned elimination.

The dramatic end suffered by these two senior officers of Congo’s military justice system highlights a fatal paradox: the instruments used to repress others on the basis of language and appearance may ultimately have been crushed by that same state machinery.