UN slams DRC massacre
2005-07-14 09:12
United Nations - The United Nations Security Council on Wednesday firmly condemned the massacre of dozens of villagers in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) last week and called on the UN envoy for the country to investigate and report back as soon as possible.
The more than 30 civilians were burned alive on Saturday night when an armed gang attacked Ntulumamba village about 70km northwest of Bukavu, the main town in Sud-Kivu province, according to provisional UN figures.
In a statement read by its president for the month, Greece's UN envoy Adamantios Vassilakis, the council "condemns with the utmost firmness" the massacre and called on UN chief Kofi Annan's special representative for the DRC William Swing "to establish the facts and report to the Council as quickly as possible."
It also urged DRC authorities to prosecute and bring to justice those responsible and asked the UN mission in the DRC, Monuc, to provide all necessary support.
Witnesses who fled blamed local militias and a Hutu rebel force from neighbouring Rwanda long holed up in the area, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR).
The FDLR denied involvement in the attack.
Monuc, with a mission of about 17 600 troops, civilians and police, has the task of monitoring a peace process initially intended to lead at the end of June to the first free elections since independence - now postponed - while keeping the peace and, alongside the national army, disarming rebels, renegades and militias.
The FDLR consist partly of Rwandan Hutu militias known as Interahamwe who were responsible with government troops of the day for the 1994 genocide of at least 800 000 minority Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus in their own country.
Swing said the recent attacks underscored the fact that "we have to get the foreign armed groups out of the Kivu as quickly as possible."
He noted that there had been little progress in the programme of voluntary repatriations of those groups over the past year.
"Therefore we have to look at other ways to get them to go home. We have been running a number of military operations designed to put pressure on them to go home."
Asked whether the attacks might be retaliation for more aggressive operations by UN troops, Swing replied: "I have heard that, it's a theory that cannot be excluded. It's possible that they now sense that we're going to be serious about trying to push them back. We've always known there is a risk in these operations."