As of Tuesday, three American nationals, who were found guilty for their involvement in the failed coup attempt in the Democratic Republic of Congo, were returned to the United States.
The three Americans – 36-year-old Benjamin Reuben Zalman-Polun from Maryland, 22-year-old Marcel Malanga, and his friend 21-year-old Tyler Thompson Jr. from Utah – were but a fraction of the 37 individuals sentenced to death by a military court for their involvement in this affair, although Malanga, Zalman-Polun, and Thompson all saw their sentences later commuted to life imprisonment.
It’s important to note that the coup attempt was led by Malanga’s late father, Christian Malanga, a politician, affluent businessman, and U.S. resident who was once a captain in the Congolese army and died in a shootout during the failed coup.
What was the coup attempt and why did it occur?
The coup started on the early hours of Sunday, May 19, 2024 with 50 men in fatigues attacking the residences of the defense minister, prime minister, and favored senior politician for the seat of speaker of the Parliament. These individuals later broke into the Palais de la Nation, the building that housed the office of President Felix Tshisekedi, breaking glass doors and issuing threats like “Felix we’re coming for you.”
These rioters were led, as mentioned earlier, by Christian Malanga, a Congolese politician based in the U.S. who viewed himself as the “President of New Zaire” (Zaire is the old name for the DRC) and an exiled head of government. Malanga had previously attempted to overthrow Tshisekedi in yet another failed coup attempt in 2017.
The older Malanga’s coup attempt was rooted in a government-in-exile founded by Malanga in Brussels in 2017, named “The New Zaire Movement”, 7 years after Malanga created his own political party, the United Congolese Party (UCP).
According to the UCP’s official Facebook page, the party is an “opposition political party-in-exile representing [the] domestic and diaspora interests” of the DRC. The UCP advocates for positive change particularly due to the “vacuum of leadership, poor sanitation, poor governance, child mortality, lack of the ‘rule of law,’ jobless youth, corruption, famine, fragmented military, insecurity, abuse of power, and erosion of trust” and “focuse[s] on building a better civil and legal society, concentrating on the human resources we have in abundance; our youth”.
Why were the Americans even involved and what is their fate?
According to his stepmother, Miranda Thompson, Tyler Thompson had boarded a plane to South Africa alongside his high school friend and Christian Malanga’s son, Marcel Malanga, under the impression that the two were going on a “once-in-a-lifetime trip to explore the world”.
According to the younger Malanga himself, his father – Christian – had threatened to kill the duo if they did not partake in his coup.
While Malanga’s mother and Thompson’s family believe the two young American men to be innocent, Malanga’s teammates believe that Malanga had an ulterior motive when “recruiting” Thompson in the first place, with teammates claiming that they had also been offered to join the trip, with it alternately being pitched as a service project to build wells or as a family vacation. Others have claimed that they were offered $100,000 to work as Christian Malanga’s bodyguards.
The third American in question, Benjamin Reuben Zalman-Polun, supposedly knew the older Malanga “through a gold mining company.”
As mentioned earlier, Thompson, the younger Malanga, and 35 others, including American citizen Benjamin Reuben Zalman-Polun, were convicted of partaking in the failed coup under charges of murder, illegal possession of weapons, terrorism, and criminal association and sentenced to the death penalty, which the DRC reinstated in March of 2024, citing the growing need to weed out traitors in the army as violence and militant attacks grow increasingly prominent in the nation.
Nearly a year later, the three Americans are being repatriated to the United States with sentences commuted from the death penalty to life in prison. The decision to commute the sentences came shortly before President Trump’s senior advisor to Africa, Massad Boulos’ visit to the nation last week, which was thought to be regarding a minerals-for-security deal.
The coup itself speaks to a growing shift worldwide towards more polarized, more extreme, and more violent ideas and actions in general. In the last year alone, we’ve seen the rise of a far-right party akin to the Nazis in Austria, Sri Lanka’s election of a Marxist president, and three years of the Taliban in Afghanistan. We’ve also seen how countries across the world are being linked in increasingly violent ways, ranging from the Houthi missile attacks to the use of North Korean and Chinese troops in the Russia-Ukraine conflict to this very incident.
In light of all these situations, we must understand the profound impact extremism and polarized political viewpoints can have on the lives of the individuals who can seem the furthest from such a conflict. In this case, three Americans were roped into a coup thousands of miles away from their homeland and now face a lifetime in prison after almost a year of fearing for their very life.
Even if these young men were truly innocent and had no idea of what they were getting themselves into, their unfortunate situation speaks to the growing potential for young people to get caught up in political machinations far larger themselves
And as a result, it’s situations like these that underscore the importance of not just being aware of political crises across the world, but critically evaluating the information one consumes regarding these crises and ensuring that one’s decisions are one’s own. It’s situations like these that speak to the importance of media literacy and being able to discern fact from fiction, being able to separate propaganda and misinformation, being able to prevent someone from twisting your beliefs and values to suit their needs, lest you risk your freedoms and life in service of some warped ideal.
