‘Gen.’ Patrick Kagabo, alias Shemeki Shaban or Damas, a top leader of the members of the militia group called Conseil National pour la Renaissance et la Démocratie (CNRD), was killed by the Congolese army on Sunday night, news reports indicate. According to the reports, the Congolese army’s Hibou Special Force exchanged fire, for three hours, with the militia’s military wing, FLN, in the territory of Mwenga, a territory in South Kivu Province when Kagabo and 14 of his men were killed. It is noted that the latest raid on the FLN militia by the Congolese army (FARDC) came five days after the former were attacked and pushed out of their strongholds in other areas of Kalehe territory, in South Kivu. Born in 1976, in what was formerly Kibuye Prefecture, now Karongi District, Kagabo attended Ecole Supérieure Militaire (ESM) military school in 1990 in what was the 32nd intake of the school. In 1994, he, like others, was in the mass departure of the genocidal regime to neighboring Zaire, now DR Congo. At the time, he was a junior military officer in his third year studying medicine at the National University of Rwanda in Butare, now Huye. After fleeing into eastern DR Congo, the genocidal army and its militia network regrouped and formed what was then called the Army for the Liberation of Rwanda (ALiR), intent on waging a war to return to power and complete their genocidal mission. About two years after fleeing from Rwanda, Kagabo joined ALiR in Kibumba Refugee Camp, located about 25 kilometers north of the North Kivu Provincial capital, Goma. In 1988, he was posted upper north, in the Rutchuru territory, where he commanded militia units. In 2000, ALiR merged with another extremist group and formed the FDLR, with Forces Combattantes Abacunguzi (FOCA), as its armed wing. He was, at one point, at the rank of ‘Lieutenant Colonel’, a battalion commander in a Military Police Battalion is based in Kalonge. Due to internal friction, the CNRD/FLN splinter group was founded in 2016 and, at the time, Kagabo joined it as ‘Colonel’. It is reported that he was immediately promoted to a ‘Brigadier General’ and given a new position as commissioner in charge of the new group’s military wing, a position that involved instilling the group’s ideology into its fighters. Reports indicate that he had two wives and more than four children. One of the wives, the first, is reported to have repatriated to Rwanda more than 20 years ago. Mid last week, more than 400 other CNRD/FLN fighters were captured by the Congolese army which has stepped up operations against anti-Rwanda militias in the country’s east. Last week’s latest setback came just two days after, the DR Congo government handed Rwanda 291 CNRD/FDLR militia fighters. Earlier, 1,951 fighters of the same militia group and their dependants were captured during an ongoing military operations in the high plateaus of Kalehe territory, in South Kivu Province. The CNRD is part of the larger MRCD Ubumwe political platform led by, among others, Belgium-based former Rwandan Prime Minister Faustin Twagiramungu.
