Mapping Report > Executive Summary > Mapping Exercise

Mapping is based on a number of methodological premises.⁷ A mapping exercise itself should be concerned not only with the violations themselves but also with the context(s) in which they were committed, either in a given region or across an entire country, as is the case here. Such an exercise requires various activities to be carried out, including the collection, analysis and assessment of information contained in multiple reports and documents from different sources, meetings and witness interviews, as well as consultation with field experts and consultants. However, a mapping exercise is not an end in itself. It remains a preliminary exercise leading to the formulation of transitional justice mechanisms, be they judicial or not. It represents a fundamental step in enabling the identification of challenges, the assessment of needs and better targeting of interventions.

The ToR for this Mapping Exercise required the Team⁸ to “start and complete this exercise as soon as possible […] to assist the new government with the tools to manage post-conflict processes”.⁹ The six-month deployment timeframe set by the Secretary-General for the Mapping Team, with the mandate of compiling an inventory of the most serious violations committed within the territory of the DRC over a ten-year period, imposed certain constraints in terms of the methodology to be used. It did not provide for in-depth investigations or gathering of evidence admissible in court, but rather “the basis for the formulation of initial hypotheses of investigation by giving a sense of the scale of violations, detecting patterns and identifying potential leads or sources of evidence”.¹⁰ Consequently, with regard to violations of human rights and international humanitarian law, the Mapping Exercise provides a description of the violation(s) and their location in time and space, the nature of the violation(s), the victims and their approximate number and the – often armed – group(s) to which the alleged perpetrators belong(ed). The exercise was carried out “chronologically and province by province”.¹¹

Given the scale of the violations committed in the ten years of conflict in the DRC, it was necessary to select from the most serious of these crimes. A gravity threshold¹² with a set of criteria enabling the Team to identify incidents of sufficient severity to be included in the final report was used for incident selection. These criteria fell into four categories: 1) nature of the crimes and violations linked to a given incident, 2) scale (number) of crimes and violations linked to an incident, and number of victims, 3) how the crimes and violations were committed and 4) impact of crimes and violations on communities, regions or the course of events.

Since the primary objective of the Mapping Exercise was to “gather basic information on incidents uncovered”, the level of evidence required was naturally lesser than would be expected from a case brought before a criminal court. The question was therefore not one of being satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that a violation was committed, but rather of reasonably suspecting that the incident did occur. Reasonable suspicion is defined as “necessitating a reliable body of material consistent with other verified circumstances tending to show that an incident or event did happen.¹³ Assessing the reliability of the information obtained was a two-stage process involving evaluation of the reliability and credibility of the source,¹⁴ and then the validity and veracity of the information itself.¹⁵

Unlike some commissions of inquiry with a specific mandate to identify the perpetrators of violations and make them accountable for their actions, the objective of the Mapping Exercise was not to establish or to try to establish individual criminal responsibility of given actors, but rather to expose in a transparent way the seriousness of the violations committed, with the aim of encouraging an approach aimed at breaking the cycle of impunity and contributing to this. This decision is further explained by the fact that, in light of the methodology adopted and the level of evidence used in this Exercise, it would have been imprudent, and unjust, to seek to ascribe personal criminal responsibility to any given individual, which is first and foremost a matter for legal proceedings based on the appropriate level of evidence. The report does, however, identify the armed group(s) to which the alleged perpetrator(s) belong(ed), since it was essential to identify the groups allegedly involved in order to suggest proper legal characterizations for the conduct in question. Consequently, information on the identity of the alleged perpetrators of some of the crimes listed does not appear in this report but is held in the confidential project database submitted to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.¹⁶ However, the identities of alleged perpetrators under warrant of arrest and those already sentenced for crimes listed in the report have been disclosed. It should also be noted that where political officials have assumed public positions encouraging or provoking the violations listed, their names have been cited in the sections relating to the political context.

Conducting a mapping exercise of the most serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law committed in the DRC during the period under examination presented a number of challenges. In spite of the scale of extreme violence that characterises the violations in some of the country’s regions, it was also necessary to take into consideration less serious violations in seemingly less affected regions in order to provide an overview of the entire country. With this in mind, the gravity threshold was adapted to each region. Investigating violations that occurred over ten years earlier was sometimes difficult due to the displacement of witnesses and victims and the passing of time. In some cases, violations that initially appeared to be isolated crimes turned out to be an integral part of waves of violence occurring in a given geographical location or within a given timeframe. It cannot be denied that vis-à-vis the frightening number of violations committed between 1993 and 2003, the sheer size of the country and difficulties accessing a number of sites, the Mapping Exercise remains necessarily incomplete and can in no case reconstruct the complexity of each situation or obtain justice for the victims. We state this with utmost regret.

The Mapping Exercise report contains descriptions of over 600 violent incidents having occurred within the territory of the DRC between March 1993 and June 2003. Each of these incidents points to the possible commission of gross violations of human rights and/or international humanitarian law. Each of the incidents listed is backed up by at least two independent sources identified in the report. As serious as they may be, uncorroborated incidents claimed by one single source are not included in this report. Over 1,500 documents relating to human rights violations committed during this period were gathered and analysed with a view to establishing an initial chronology by region of the main violent incidents reported. Only incidents meeting the gravity threshold in accordance with the methodology set out were considered. The in-field Mapping Teams then met with over 1,280 witnesses to corroborate or invalidate the violations listed in the chronology. During these interviews, information was also collected on previously undocumented crimes.