Ituri: Beautiful and Brutalized

Ituri’s subsistence farmers and herders struggle to survive a humanitarian catastrophe virtually unseen in global headlines. National armies, local militias and for-profit armed gangs burn villages, seize prisoners and blight the land in a nearly 30-year war over political power, territory and wealth. Armed groups in and near Ituri protect legal and illegal mines, smuggling gold, diamonds and coltan through Uganda or Rwanda for sale to the world. Uncontrolled logging strips forests into moonscapes. Mercury contamination from the crude mines, run by forced labor, poisons people, lands, rivers and wildlife. Fighting between ethnic Hema herders and Lendu farmers has killed thousands in eastern Ituri. Overall, Ituri’s conflicts have uprooted more than 1.7 million people, fully a quarter of the province’s estimated population. In 2021, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) declared martial law in Ituri, but violence has only increased. Government forces have killed peaceful dissenters and human rights activists ahead of national elections this month, Amnesty International has reported. 

Alongside her own six children and 11 grandchildren (and, she notes, one great-grandchild!), Pétronille has adopted 30 boys and girls, including former child soldiers. Their lives are a traumatic contrast to the peaceful Ituri of Pétronille’s childhood memory. In a village near Lake Albert, “I spent hours watching little fish playing in the waters, birds building their nests and singing in the trees, and ants marching back and forth in their work,” she said in an interview. Her father owned a fishing business and sent his children to a school run by Belgian missionaries in Bunia, Ituri’s main city.

But the colony then called the Belgian Congo was tragically primed for bloodshed. For 70-plus years, Belgium’s King Leopold, and then the Belgian state, had used extreme violence and atrocities to forge and control a commercially lucrative colony among the territory’s 250-plus ethnic and linguistic groups. At its independence in 1960, factional conflict began and a coup d’etat ousted the elected government; the authoritarian regime of Mobutu Sese Seko soon began its 32-year reign. Warfare erupted, including Cold War proxy battles between the Soviet Union and the U.S.-led western bloc. 

As a schoolgirl, “I wanted to become a nurse,” Pétronille recalled. But the fighting swept into Bunia. “The school staff, the priests and nuns, were either killed or forced to flee. Suddenly I learned what war means.” As violence cycled on and off in Ituri, she resumed her education and worked in turn as a teacher, journalist and civil servant. 

‘Mama, You Can Do It’ 

The aftermath of the 1994 genocide in neighboring Rwanda re-ignited violence in Ituri and other provinces of eastern Congo. Rwanda’s and Uganda’s armies backed rebel groups fighting to overthrow Mobutu — and soon after, to oust his successors, Laurent and Joseph Kabila. Ugandan troops and local allies seized eastern Ituri, including the capital, Bunia. That warfare caught Pétronille’s husband on the far side of its front lines and would keep the couple separated for more than six years.

Pétronille was working with the British charity Oxfam, “organizing water supply and sanitation for camps of people displaced by the fighting … and taking care of children, some of whom were dying of malnutrition,” she said. At a staff meeting, “Oxfam officials asked if there was not some way to talk with the armed groups to stop the fighting. And I was unwise enough to tell them that yes, it was possible. So they asked me to develop the idea and prepare a plan. When I gave it to them, they asked, ‘Pétronille, are you ready to perform this mission?’ And I said, ‘No, I cannot do this myself. It is too dangerous.”

“But after refusing for several months, one day I was talking to my own school-aged children, and I asked, ‘Could I do this?’ They said, ‘Yes, Mama, you can do it. God will help you.’ I went back and told my Oxfam bosses, ‘Okay, I will go and try to stop this war.’”

The mediation mission required Pétronille to leave her secure job and create a local organization, the Foundation for Durable Peace. With some money from Oxfam to open an office and rent vehicles for treks into the countryside, she began to contact and visit the warring commanders — typically without protection or support other than one or two unarmed colleagues. “It was very dangerous to travel anywhere because armed groups were all across Ituri. As we were beginning this work, armed men killed six staff of the International Committee of the Red Cross,” she recalled. The ICRC suspended operations in Ituri.

Looking Belligerents in the Eye

Repeatedly over more than two decades, Pétronille has driven, unprotected, deep into grasslands and forests ruled by men with guns and grudges. She has negotiated with militias whose commanders the International Criminal Court has convicted of war crimes. She has won the release of abducted U.N. peacekeeping troops, government officials and child soldiers.

Always, her method is the same. She looks belligerents calmly in the eye. She speaks respectfully but firmly to the parts of their psyches that remember traditional values and the voices of their mothers. Do they want always to live in war? How do they expect to build futures for themselves, peace for their own children, with violence that only isolates them further? 

“I begin by seeing these men not as enemies but as human beings. They want to show everyone their strength, but many have become violent out of despair or fears. I listen to their stories.” And in the end, “these men understand that I have taken risks to come speak to them, and they respect me,” Pétronille said. “I know that every time we drive out on a mission, we might not return. Armed groups have targeted me, even killing others in my place. But we’ve had no choice but to continue because there were lives to be saved.”

By 2003, Pétronille built credibility across Ituri that led a joint Congolese and United Nations peace initiative to elect her president of an interim regional legislature. Ugandan troops still occupying Bunia immediately seized her and threatened to kill her if she did not resign. “I refused,” she recalled, and the soldiers soon released her. 

The central government then named Pétronille Ituri’s administrator, tasked with heading a peacemaking effort that ended fighting, began to disarm militias, and was able to reopen roads, schools, courts and government offices. That peace effort significantly stabilized Ituri for more than a decade. It was “seen as a model for peacebuilding in the DRC” until large-scale fighting re-ignited in much of the country’s east, including Ituri, in recent years. 

Pétronille has recently worked as a trainer in conflict management for the efforts by the DRC and the United Nations to stabilize zones of the country ravaged by warfare. Last year, she founded Femmes Engagées pour la Paix en Afrique (Women Engaged for Peace in Africa), which aims to serve as a national-level center to train women and men in peacebuilding and to create a Congolese network of peace mediators.

USIP established its Women Building Peace Award in 2020 to amplify women’s roles in building peace worldwide. The Institute’s 15-member advisory council chose Pétronille as the award’s fourth recipient, following South Sudan’s Rita Lopidia, Kenya’s Josephine Ekiru and Colombia’s María Eugenia Mosquera Riascos. “The extraordinary accomplishments, in the face of violence, of women like Pétronille and other finalists for the award — from Haiti, Kenya and Syria — illustrates the critical and effective roles of women as leaders in building peace and justice out of wars,” said Kathleen Kuehnast, who directs USIP’s programs in support of women peacebuilders.

“I am very honored” by the award, Pétronille said. “I am grateful for everything that helps to make the world more aware of the problems that face our country and our people. … This great honor will encourage me to continue saving human lives and relieving the suffering of women and children until the end of my life.”

A Grandmother’s Gift

To anyone who asks her story, Pétronille wants to tell where she first learned how to morally disarm those who are violent and angry:

It was a gift from my mother’s mother. When I was young, she told me how one day she got up early in a morning to work in her field. She gathered her iron hoe, her axe and her knife, and she walked out a dirt path. From the morning mists still hanging over the fields, suddenly a huge leopard confronted her on the path, snarling angrily. Slowly, she bent her knees to lower the hoe and knife and axe to the ground. She told me, “I began to talk to the leopard. I looked straight into his eyes and kept my voice calm and even. I told him, ‘Leopard, you and I, we are doing the same thing this morning. You are looking for food to eat and I am going to my field to grow my crops to feed my children. So let us not disturb each other; we have nothing to fear, you and I.’” Despite her own fear, my grandmother showed only calm — and she made sure to create no fear in the leopard. After she had spoken for a while, the leopard turned from the path and leapt into the bush. My grandmother waited quietly to make sure that the leopard had gone. Then she gathered her tools and continued to her field.

Pétronille continued: “What I took from grandmother’s story is that fear is a bad influence on people. When we feel fear, we stop reasoning. When we show fear, we encourage an adversary to use force. If we show no fear — but only calm and respect — then an adversary, even someone who uses violence as a habit, is more likely to respect us. And this lesson from my grandmother is the approach I have used with armed men, with killers, with any source of evil. … I never show any fear, I look them straight in the eyes and I speak in a calm, even voice. In the end, we have to step beyond our fears to save our own lives and the lives of others.”