is a small island in Lake Kivu seeing the first vaccination migrants arrive?

It is a small paradise on this land of Kivu, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which knows so much violence. The island of Idjwi, in the middle of Lake Kivu, halfway between the Rwandan and Congolese shores, has never experienced the conflicts that regularly strike eastern DRC. It is the largest island in the country and the second lake island in Africa. Covering 285 km², it is home to nearly 250,000 inhabitants in a mountainous environment, of which the Nyamusisi is the highest point at 2 300 meters above sea level.

The economy there is essentially agricultural, Idjwi is a major producer of pineapples and its coffee is beginning to gain a solid reputation. Forgotten by Mobutu’s Zaire, coffee producers had turned to Rwanda to illegally sell their production transported in rowboats.

The history of these coffee growers is tumultuous, between thefts and dangerous crossings. In 2014, a cooperative was created and producers then turned to Goma to sell their production there. The Cooperative of Coffee Planters and Traders of Kivu (CPNCK) now has 753 members, a quarter of whom are women.

You can reach Idjwi by boat from Goma to the north of the lake, after an hour and a half crossing. Here there are only a few cars, motorcycle taxis and motorized canoes. This relative isolation may explain this tranquility and also that the island was a refuge during the genocide of the Tutsis in 1994 in Rwanda. 40,000 Rwandan Hutus settled there after fleeing the seizure of power by the men of Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front.

Today history stutters. It is the arrival of a hundred Rwandans on the island that challenges the population. “We have already registered at least one hundred of these people”, told AFP Karongo Kalaja, administrator of the territory of Idjwi. “They arrive but until then we don’t know the real reasons why they are fleeing their country”, he added. A teacher told AFP that the majority are housed in “host families”, but that “their presence worries us given that the reason for which they find themselves in Idjwi is not clear”.

There are women and children. They say they are fleeing vaccination against Covid, even though this is not compulsory in Rwanda. She is just asked to get on public transport, go to a bar or a restaurant. And this vaccination seems well accepted by the population. At the end of the year, Paul Kagame announced that 80% of Rwandans aged 12 and over had received at least a first dose of vaccination.

Could these first arrivals be the precursors of future massive immigration? ? This is the question which, although not said, seems to bother the inhabitants. This is why the chieftaincy authorities immediately carried out “steps to bring these people home”.

Because although in peace, the island is not a haven of tolerance either. The local Pygmy minority, said to be among the oldest in Africa and selling pottery to survive, is in conflict with the Buhavus, the 95% majority community. Tensions between minorities and Buhavus are not absent and the Pygmies have been moved to territories far from their traditional habitat, where they lead a survival existence and submit to the authority of local customary chiefs.

In 1994, the forest had borne the brunt of the mass influx of Hutu refugees. The new inhabitants had deforested with all their might to make shelters and obtain new land to cultivate. An action that the locals have taken over. The fear of a new “invasion” contributes to this distrust of new arrivals.

Despite everything, several academics put forward a “culture of peace”. “As soon as a conflict breaks out, instead of turning to official authorities such as the police and the army or trying to resolve the crisis through violence, residents turn to the networks”, writes Arnaud Blin, a specialist in the history of conflicts.

Finally, the 101 “vaccination refugees” returned to their country of origin on Thursday 13 January. According to the head of the Ntambuka chiefdom, in the south of the island, “they opposed their repatriation but we negotiated with them all day yesterday, we forced them to board”. Information confirmed by the Rwandan government which also specifies that their refusal of vaccination was linked in particular to religious convictions.