'Victims boiled alive'
2005-03-17 12:10
Kinshasa - Militiamen grilled bodies on a spit and boiled two girls alive as their mother watched, United Nations peacekeepers charged on Wednesday, adding cannibalism to a list of atrocities allegedly carried out by one of the tribal groups fighting in northeast Democratic Republic of Congo.
"Those responsible for atrocities will be brought to justice," General Patrick Cammaert, the Dutch Navy commander of UN forces in the DRC, told reporters in presenting a report on abuses allegedly committed by the Patriotic Resistant Front of Ituri.
Cammaert said peacekeepers also were working to cut off weapons supplies to the group, which apparently entered the country from neighbouring Uganda.
Front militiamen were suspected of killing nine UN peacekeepers in a February 25 ambush. On March 1, militiamen fired on Pakistani peacekeepers and the peacekeepers fought back, killing up to 60 fighters, UN officials said at the time.
Congo became a battleground for six nations during a 1998-2002 war that killed about 50 000 people and another three million through strife-induced hunger and disease. But sporadic fighting continues between militiamen, rebels and government troops in the lawless northeast.
Worst humanitarian crisis
The fighting is killing thousands every month and has made it the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, UN humanitarian chief Jan Egeland said in Geneva on Wednesday.
Wednesday's UN report, summarising testimony from witnesses gathered over a year, said hundreds of people have been kidnapped by militias in the region and that some have been killed by torture and decapitation. Those not killed are held in labour camps and forced to work as fishermen, porters, domestic workers and sex slaves.
"Several witnesses reported cases of mutilation followed by death or decapitation," the report said.
Wednesday's charges of cannibalism were the first detailed account to emerge since the war, when occasional charges surfaced.
The mother died
The UN report was accompanied by a separate account from Zainabo Alfani in which she described to UN investigators being forced to watch rebels kill and eat two of her children in June 2003.
The report said, "In one corner, there was already cooked flesh from bodies and two bodies being grilled on a barbecue and, at the same time, they prepared her two little girls, putting them alive in two big pots filled with boiling water and oil."
Her youngest child was saved, apparently because at six months old it didn't have much flesh.
The woman herself was gang-raped by the rebels and mutilated.
Alfani survived to tell her horror story, but she died in the hospital on Sunday, nearly two years after the attack, of Aids contracted during her torture, the UN report said.
The mother gave her account in February, but the UN waited to publish them until after her death for fear she would become a target for reprisal.
The new International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, said this week that its first cases will deal with war crimes committed in eastern Congo.
- AP