Having worked as an international aid worker on-and-off for 3 decades, i have gained the absolute highest respect for the United Nations and the work that they are trying to accomplish, going up against the world’s bully-boys. I have found most of them..experts, researchers, investigators, aid workers and armed Peacekeepers..to be true idealists.
Here are two such examples:
Two U.N. Investigators and Humanitarian Researchers..Swede Zaida Catalan, and American Michael Sharp, along with their Congolese interpreter Betu Tshintela and driver Isaac Kabuayi, and two unidentified Congolese motorcycle escort drivers all went missing two weeks ago during their investigation into recent large- scale violence and human rights violations and a large reported massacre by the Congolese army and local militias when they disappeared.
They were found, along with Betu, on Monday in shallow graves in the Congo’s Kasai- Central province. Zaida Catalan was decapitated. Isaac and the two escort drivers have yet to be found.
The two had extensive experience in tough places.
Ms. Catalan had worked in the West Bank, in Ramallah and in Kabul before taking up the post. Before that, she was a Green Party politician in Sweden. Said a friend, “She had come to see the people that she was trying to help as her equals and her friends and had very much loyalty to them. Her special passion was with forcibly-inducted child soldiers, and getting them out of the killing zone.”
Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven reacted to the news with “sadness and dismay”. Lofven said that Zaida had worked tirelessly for the world’s dispossessed, for peace and justice, and that her recent mission “gave hope to a country that has been long plagued by violence, and that she risked her own life to save others”. He talked of her passionate need to help children that had been forced into being soldiers.
Zaida had worked for two years as co-spokesperson for the Green Party’s Youth Wing.
Her social media pages; Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are still up, and you get a clear sense in who she was..and who we lost. On a bittersweet note, her previous Facebook profile picture was of Christopher Walken with the words, ‘Your Heart Chakra Needs More Cowbell’.
Zaida was 36.
Mr. Sharp had been in the Democratic Republic of Congo for five years with a large network of rebel commanders and local leaders, most of whom he met in church. Said Congo-based researcher who knew him since 2013, Rachel Sweet, “Michael told me: Rebels go to church. You build a relationship with them there.”
For years before working with the U.N., Michael was in the Congo in a Mennonite/Protestant Alliance Church group and the Mennonite Central Committee that focused on human rights.
The 34 year old Kansan who made New Mexico his home, would walk unarmed deep into rebel-held territory, sit in the shade of banana trees with rebels and exchange stories. Michael’s deep understanding of how these rebels saw their countries past- allowed him to emerge from the jungle unscathed. And it enabled him, and his Congolese colleagues, to connect with rebels in a way that few others managed to do. After every trip, the team of church workers would be followed, days later, by those rebels that wanted out and who had been persuaded to give up the fight. Michael’s team had persuaded around 1,600 rebels to abandon the jungle and go home. Conflict mediation was his specialty.
It was repeated often that Michael had ‘standard deviations above the norm when it came to integrity and compassion’. For years, “He refused to eat anything other than beans and rice” surrounded by starving people. He ate what they ate.
“He was courageous but not reckless”, says Sweet. “He just deeply cared about everyone and saw no difference between people of different nationalities”.
They traveled by motorcycle, the only way to navigate the area, and without armed PeaceKeepers.
Said a former colleague, “They were doing what we’ve all done. Getting a couple of motorcycle guys, an interpreter. And they trekked out to rebel territory, which Michael has done so many times, hundreds of times, probably”.
They uncovered inconvenient facts about people committing crimes and higher-ups helping them. In previous reports, they implicated some military officials. The part of the Province they were in were littered with mass graves, and the Congolese army was blamed for some of them.
Betu, their interpreter, was known for his constant attempts to help his people. He was also known to protect his various charges “akin to what Dith Pran did in The Killing Fields”. High praise, indeed. He was a vital part of their missions and.. his laugh was legendary to those he came in contact with.
I wish i could eulogize the three other Congolese comrades that died with them properly. All i have found out is that their driver, Isaac, was a father of 4, and was proud of his work with the U.N., and even more proud that his eldest daughter was going into University.
The U.N. has 22,000 total uniformed personnel in the Congo, it’s largest and costliest peacekeeping mission, costing $1.2 billion annually...according to MONUSCO.
Decades of conflict have left millions dead and many more displaced. It’s military, poorly trained and poorly paid, have committed countless war crimes, says Amnesty International. Thousands of foreign aid workers have come to Congo to administer the billions the international community has invested in promoted peace.
They were the first U.N. Aid Workers to die in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
I didn’t know them.
I wish i had.