Burundi points finger
2004-08-14 21:52
Gitanga, Burundi - Armed men who killed nearly 160 people in a Burundi refugee camp housing Congolese Tutsis were "obviously Congolese, Burundians and Rwandans", one of Burundi's vice presidents said on Saturday.
"What happened here is cowardly. What is baffling is that the refugees are hunted even on foreign land to be killed for ethnic reasons," Vice President Azaria Ruberwa, a Congolese Tutsi himself, said.
He added that "those who committed this genocide on Burundi soil were obviously Congolese, Burundian and Rwandan assailants from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)", in other words Rwandan rebels who had taken refuge in the DRC.
The former Rwandan Armed Forces and the Interahamwe Hutu extremists both fled into the east of the DRC after carrying out much of the killing in the Rwandan genocide of 1994.
The Congolese were members of the traditional warriors known as Mai-Mai who are now part of the Congolese army, Ruberwa said during a visit to the Gatumba refugee camp near the Burundi capital Bujumbura.
A nebulous yet pivotal collection of tribal militias and local defence forces, the Mai-Mai have fought on both sides of the two back-to-back rebellions that have swept the DRC over the past six years.
Ruberwa said that an investigation would confirm who was responsible for the massacre.
"Those who carried it out and those who masterminded it must be prosecuted," he said.