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UN finds half-buried corpses
22/08/2007 19:52 - (SA)
Goma - UN peacekeepers in eastern Congo have found the bodies of at least six people believed to have been executed by soldiers, deepening suspicions of an ethnic terror campaign by rogue army groups.
The half-buried bodies were found by patrolling UN soldiers over the weekend at two abandoned military installations in troubled North Kivu province occupied until recently by Tutsi-dominated army brigades fighting Hutu rebels.
"They found them on the sites of Congolese army positions
abandoned the week before," said Sylvie Van Den Wildenberg,
spokesperson in North Kivu for Congo's UN peacekeeping mission, known as Monuc.
"The state of decomposition showed that they had been there possibly a week."
Fresh ethnic fighting
The two camps, near the villages of Katweguru and Kiseguru 95km north of the provincial capital Goma, had been occupied by soldiers from Bravo Brigade.
This is one of five mixed brigades created in an effort to
bring peace to North Kivu by integrating into the army fighters
loyal to renegade General Laurent Nkunda, who led a 2004
uprising to defend the rights of his Tutsi minority group.
The move has instead sparked fresh ethnic fighting and fuelled fears of renewed conflict in Democratic Republic of Congo, which is recovering from a 1998-2003 war that killed an
estimated 4 million people.
So far this year, more than 165 000 people have fled
fighting in North Kivu between the Tutsi-dominated brigades and
the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a
predominately Hutu Rwandan rebel group based in eastern Congo.
There are no plans to exhume the six bodies, but Van Den
Wildenberg said it was possible more victims were buried in the
graves.
At the Katweguru base, investigators also discovered a shallow pit believed to have been used to hold prisoners.
15 civilians were massacred
"The visit to the site ... reinforces fears Monuc already had that (Congolese soldiers) based there illegally and arbitrarily arrested people, including civilians, and executed some of them," Van Den Wildenberg said.
Army chief Lieutenant-General Mbandakulu Kayembe told journalists in Goma on Tuesday an investigation was under way.
Monuc and human rights campaigners accuse certain mixed brigades of waging a campaign of terror against civilians from the Hutu ethnic group suspected of allegiance to the FDLR, particularly in the district of Rutshuru.
At least 15 civilians were massacred in the village of Buramba in March by suspected Bravo Brigade soldiers.
Last month (July), the bodies of five people were found bound and shot to death on a banana plantation near a Bravo Brigade base.
Nkunda said any civilian deaths were the unavoidable result of military operations against the FDLR.
"Why principally in Rutshuru? You must see the place of the FDLR in Rutshuru, their involvement and participation in the population," he said.
- Reuters
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