By Malcolm Beith From Bloomberg

Police in the Democratic Republic of Congo killed at least 51 young men and teenage boys in a crackdown on gangs that showed “little regard for the rule of law,” Human Rights Watch said.

Thirty three others were “forcibly disappeared” during Operation Likofi that took place in the capital, Kinshasa, from November 2013 to February 2014, the New York-based advocacy group said in a report. It urged the authorities in the central African country to investigate the deaths. Congo’s government said 34 policemen have been convicted of offenses related to the incident.

“Human Rights Watch doesn’t have the right to come into our country and demand this type of action,” government spokesman Lambert Mende said today by phone. “It’s us who decides whether someone is innocent or guilty, not a foreign NGO. This is totally unacceptable.”

Congo’s government last month expelled United Nations Joint Human Rights Office director Scott Campbell after a UN report said the police executed at least nine people in the crackdown. Interior Minister Richard Muyej said the UN report was conducted in a “partisan manner with the intention of discrediting the Congolese national police and demoralizing the republic’s institutions.”

Congo’s police force embarked on the operation following a public commitment by President Joseph Kabila to end gang crime in Kinshasa, HRW said. Uniformed police, some wearing masks, executed suspected gang members outside their homes, in open markets where they slept or worked, and in nearby fields or empty lots, it said.

‘Brutal Campaign’

“Operation Likofi was a brutal police campaign that left a trail of cold-blooded murders,” Daniel Bekele, Africa director at Human Rights Watch, said in the report published on its website today. “Fighting crime by committing crime does not build the rule of law but only reinforces a climate of fear.”

Human Rights Watch based its report on interviews conducted in Kinshasa with 107 witnesses to abuses, including family members of those killed and forcibly disappeared, police officers who participated in the operation, government officials and members of parliament.

In September, the Congolese government set up a commission to investigate Operation Likofi. In October, before the report by the UN’s Campbell was released, the commission began taking witness testimony, according to Mende. The 34 policemen who were convicted received sentences ranging from a year to death, he said, without saying when the convictions took place.

‘Lacking Impartiality’

Congolese officials said in October and November that some police officers had been investigated, arrested and convicted for crimes committed as part of Operation Likofi, Anneke Van Woudenberg, senior researcher for HRW’s Africa Division, said in an e-mail.

“However, according to six magistrates assigned to the operation, interviewed by Human Rights Watch, no police officers who took part in Operation Likofi were arrested or convicted for killings or abductions, although some were arrested and convicted for extortion and other lesser crimes.” she said.

While the commission was a step in the right direction to establish, it lacked judicial authority and “would appear to lack impartiality given that it is only made up of members of the police force,” Van Woudenberg said.

For more on this story go to: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-11-18/congolese-police-executed-people-in-gang-crackdown-group-says.html