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Tutsis accused of executing civilians

— Photo: AP

United Nations peacekeepers escort a small convoy of relief supplies for displaced people and goods for UN troops near Goma on Monday.

Rutshuru: Tutsi rebels in eastern Congo have been accused of summarily killing civilians as they seized a town that had been the stronghold of Hutu militias, and forcing tens of thousands of people from their homes. After two days of fighting, scores of bodies lay in the streets and homes of Kiwanja, a town adjacent to Rutshuru, which was seized by the Tutsi renegade general Laurent Nkunda last week.

Residents claimed his forces shot unarmed civilians after accusing them of supporting Hutu militias.

As calm returned to Kiwanja on Thursday, Mr. Nkunda’s forces seized at least two other villages in the area, Nyanzale and Kikuku.

The UN said it was moving armoured vehicles and its forces into the area in an attempt to protect civilians and prevent further advances by the Tutsi rebels.

Most of Kiwanja’s 35,000 residents were driven out of the town and into Rutshuru, where they were left to fend for themselves during the night in driving rain. Women and children, dragging goats and bundles of clothing, straggled in a line that stretched for miles. Many camped out at the town’s stadium, without food or water.

“The Tutsis came and ordered us to leave,” said Jean Bakenda.

“They shot people who refused to go or who they said were against them. They shot one man right in front of me and told me they would shoot me if I didn’t run to Rutshuru straight away. I only had time to grab my wife and children and nothing else.”

One house in Kiwanja contained the bodies of five men.

Another resident, Simo Bramporiki, said his wife and child were shot dead.

“They knocked on the doors. When the people opened, they killed them with their guns,” he said.

Mr. Nkunda denied that his National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP) forces had killed civilians, saying the dead were Hutu fighters in civilian clothes.

The UN peacekeeping mission, which did not intervene from its nearby base despite its mandate to protect civilians, said it was investigating the killings.

The fighting in Kiwanja appears to have been provoked by an assault by a regional traditional militia, the Mai Mai, and Rwandan Hutu extremists, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) who fled their own country after carrying out the 1994 genocide. The Congolese government’s army has often fought in league with the Hutu extremists. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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