[PDF] Bulldozed: How a mining company buried the truth about forced evictions in the DRC
On 24 and 25 November 2009 police in the Katanga province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) sent bulldozers into the village of Kawama and ordered the demolition of hundreds of homes. The people of Kawama were given no notice of the demolitions and there was no legal basis for them. People were left homeless and many lost their livelihoods as a direct consequence. The demolitions constitute forced evictions, which are illegal under international human rights law...In this report – published five years after the demolitions – Amnesty International presents new evidence exposing the scale of the 2009 demolitions at Kawama. The report demonstrates how the demolition of the temporary homes of creuseurs breached Congolese law and constituted a human rights violation. It also provides evidence that the homes of permanent residents of Kawama were demolished, in contravention of Congolese, regional and international law...This evidence includes satellite images...[that]...expose not only the number of buildings demolished but the pattern of destruction and the proportion of total buildings destroyed, information that was not previously available. They show, for example, that in the neighbourhood of Kawama closest to the mine site, 76% of all structures were destroyed.