Text:
http://www.mg.co.za/mg/news/97june2/20june-genocide.html
Genocide continues
behind Kabila's lines
As South Africa prepares to assist the Kabilia government, evidence mounts
that the "ethnic cleansing" of Rwandan
refugees by his troops is continuing.
Mail & Guardian Correspondents
ASESE, a hamlet of straw-thatched mud huts in the heart of the Democratic
Republic of Congo's vast rain forest, harbours a dark secret. In mid-April -
urged on by Rwandan Tutsi military officers fighting with the victorious rebel
leader, President Laurent Kabila - its villagers tore through a camp of mostly
Rwandan Hutu refugees, hacking and spearing groups of men, women and children.
Armed men among the Hutus fought them off. But a day later, Kabila's forces stepped in and, according to survivors and local residents, ravaged the refugee community of 55 000 for seven hours, firing wildly into the encampment in a grove of palm trees straddling a rutted jungle road. Again local villagers joined in the fray, wielding spears and machetes against the refugees.
The local residents and refugee survivors say hundreds died. Many of them were buried in a mass grave 500m up a dirt path now guarded by Kabila's troops.
The story of Kasese is just one of numerous tales of mass killings of refugees emerging from behind the tight cordon Congo's victorious rebels have drawn around the jungles south and east of Kisangani, the principal city in the north of the former Zaire.
Evidence is mounting that these are part of another brutal ethnic extermination that is under way in central Africa, this time by marauding elements of Rwanda's overwhelmingly Tutsi army and Tutsis among Kabila's forces avenging the genocide that was visited upon their people in 1994 when extremist Hutus slaughtered more than 500 000 Rwandan Tutsi civilians before the Hutu exodus into Zaire.
Of the 1,1-million refugees who fled into eastern Zaire three years ago, perhaps 250 000 remain unaccounted for - and there are fears that more than half this number may be dead.
The United Nations accuses Kabila's forces of obstructing access to the remaining refugees to cover up continuing massacres. Aid agencies, such as Medecins sans Frontieres, trying to bring humanitarian relief to the area are concerned that they are being used to bait the refugees from their hiding places in the jungle.
"In the Shabandu area, where access was granted, humanitarian aid was used as a lure by the military in order to attract refugees out of the forest on to the road, where according to witnesses, they were killed," Medecins sans Frontieres said.
In a message to mark Africa Refugee Day this Friday, the UN high commissioner for refugees, Sadako Ogata, said refugees have been turned back at borders and then killed.
"The ordeal of exhausted Rwandans and Burundians in forests in the heart of Africa is one of the worst dramas of our times," she said.
The numbers of missing refugees has been in dispute since Rwanda invaded the
former Zaire in
November to back Kabila's rebels and to clear the sprawling camps which provided
shelter for Hutu mass murderers threatening to repeat the 1994 genocide. At the
time the US and the United Kingdom backed Rwanda's claim that all the refugees
had returned to their homeland en masse and those left behind were Hutu
militiamen. The UN disagreed.
eter Kessler, the UN High Commission for Refugees representative in Nairobi,
said large numbers of people simply went missing.
"They were very carefully counted. If you allowed for 10% error rate, that's
still more than 100 000 people. We hope there is no policy of genocide. The
situation is very distressing."
Even as the bulk of refugees were tramping home it was clear that considerably fewer were walking back into Rwanda than had left more than two years earlier. And it was equally clear the Tutsi-dominated government regarded those who remained behind as most likely to be responsible for the genocide and therefore a fair target for attack.
As Kabila's rebels swept west, the refugees were driven before them. Some were the families of Hutu militiamen, others were effectively hostage. Most were terrified to return to Rwanda, fearing retribution for the genocide. All were ill-prepared to march hundreds of kilometres through jungle, and the weak swiftly succumbed to starvation and disease. And then the rebels caught up.
While a significant number of Hutu extremist militiamen responsible for the 1994 genocide were among the refugees, they also included large numbers of innocent women and children who are among the latest victims.
Reporters have been returning from eastern Congo in recent weeks with gruesome tales of large-scale ethnic massacres. The stories, along with mass graves and accounts of witnesses and victims in eastern, central and western Congo, paint an horrific picture of atrocities. The reported killings stretch from Goma and Bukavu, where Kabila's rebellion erupted in eastern Congo, to Mbandaka, more than 1 000km to the west. Taken together, they suggest the massacres were not isolated instances involving unruly troops.
Interviews with international aid workers, refugees and local villagers indicate Kabila's army is closely controlled by Rwandan officers who dominate its upper echelons. Kabila relied heavily on the well-trained Rwandan officers, along with Rwandan, Angolan and Ugandan troops, to push Mobutu's army aside. But in so doing he made a deal with people intent on bringing the 1994 ethnic war in Rwanda to Congolese soil.
In interviews, Congolese soldiers fighting for Kabila indicate the massacres were ordered by the Rwandan army officers who dominated Kabila's officer corps.
In Mbandaka, for example, Congolese soldiers said the order to slaughter unarmed
refugees came from two men - identified as Colonel Wilson, the head of a brigade
of Kabila's troops, and Colonel Richard, the brigade's operations chief. Both
were identified as Rwandans. A Congolese, General Gaston
Muyango, has the title of military commander in the area but has no real power,
they said.
In some places, such as Kasese, the population was involved in the killing. In other areas, such as Mbandaka, on the banks of the Congo River far from the battlefields of the east, the local population said it was shocked by the mayhem.
Kabila and his officials have denied their troops have carried out massacres and summary executions of the Rwandan refugees. In interviews, several members of Kabila's rebel alliance blamed the bloodshed on armed units among the Rwandan refugees, fleeing Congolese soldiers loyal to Mobutu or bandits.
Despite earlier promises made to the UN, Kabila has instructed local officials not to assist the UN investigation into reported massacres and other human rights abuses. The first team is due in the Congo in two weeks and the investigation is scheduled to begin on July 6. Already, Kabila's forces appear to be destroying evidence of their attacks.
The Washington Post reporter John Pomfret last week saw more than 40 men moving through the Kasese camp, picking up spent cartridges and dropped machetes and spears. Two of the men said the team would later go to the mass grave site and begin burning cadavers.
A similar clean-up operation already has been reported at the Biaro refugee camp 12km away. Kabila's forces have banned UN aid workers from the camps since April 20.
- The Washington Post and M&G Reporters
Fears for the future: One of the 1,1-million refugees who
fled to Zaire
.
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