It has now been more than five years since nine communities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) filed a complaint with the International Complaint Mechanism (ICM) of the German, French and Dutch development banks. The complaint centred around land conflicts with the oil palm plantation company, Plantations et Huileries du Congo (PHC, formerly owned by Feronia Inc). Unfortunately, the mediation process resulting from this complaint is set to collapse, unless strong measures are taken to ensure adequate, safe, independent and truly inclusive participation of the local communities and their representatives.

The complaint filed by villagers from the areas of Lokutu and Boteka in 2018 dealt with three issues: land conflicts, violence against villagers, and the lack of transparency. Over the past five years, none of these issues have been resolved, but have instead only grown worse.

The villagers who filed the complaint continue to be routinely arrested, harassed and intimidated by security guards of the company and a detachment of national soldiers and police that was sent to support them. Testimonies and declarations from the villagers attest to an alarming level of brutality, with security guards and soldiers vandalising people’s homes and robbing them of their money and valuables, with impunity...

Another critical failure in the mediation process is that the company and the government have refused to provide copies of the relevant land documents. Without these documents it is not possible for the mediation to resolve the century-old land conflict at the heart of the tensions between the company and the community and at the centre of the complaint filed half a decade ago...

We also insist that evidence already provided by the communities makes it clear that funding from development banks to PHC (and its owner at the time, Feronia Inc) facilitated an illegal expansion of PHC plantations and land claims. The development banks, at a minimum, have a responsibility to ensure that the lands are immediately returned to the communities and that the affected villagers are remediated for related violations of their human right to food and compensated for the loss of their lands and the negative affects they have suffered over past decades as a result.