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Villagers 'massacred' in DRC
20/02/2008 19:16 - (SA)
Kinshasa - Forces loyal to renegade general Laurent Nkunda massacred at least 30 villagers in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo in January, the UN mission in the country (Monuc) reported on Wednesday.
Monuc had gathered evidence that members of Nkunda's National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP) "killed at least 30 civilians at Kalonge and in surrounding villages" between January 16 and 20, UN spokesperson Kemal Saiki said.
He also accused government troops of murdering civilians in the region earlier in the month.
"The CNDP elements are held to have committed these apparently premeditated acts in reprisals" against civilians who had sought refuge in an area controlled by a Mai Mai tribal militia hostile to Nkunda, Saiki told a press conference.
Local authorities at the time told AFP that members of Nkunda's CNDP killed more than 40 people near Kalonge and Nyamitaba, more than 60 kilometres northwest of the Nord-Kivu provincial capital Goma.
The civilian administrator of Nyamitaba, Emmanuel Munyamariba, then said that CNDP forces chased the villagers "right into the fields and out to isolated homes in the bush" to kill them.
He said 31 people died around Nyamitaba and 12 more in Kalonge, close to one of the highland strongholds of Nkunda, who claims to be a guardian of the Tutsi minority population in the eastern DRC's north and south Kivu provinces.
Nkunda's CNDP and Mai Mai fighters of the Congolese Patriotic Resistance (Pareco) blamed each other for the atrocities, which occurred while both were attending a peace conference for the two Kivu provinces in Goma.
The United Nations also accused the DRC army (FARDC) of murdering civilians in the same region on January 2 and Saiki pinned the blame on soldiers of the 2nd Brigade.
These troops "reportedly killed several civilians in the village of Musezero, about 50 kilometres northwest of Goma, on January 2, 2008," he said.
Monuc investigators had been able to establish the identity of "eight people killed, including three children," while another person had gone missing, he added.
The UN regretted that "no judicial enquiry" had yet been opened into these two affairs.
At the end of the Goma talks on January 23, a peace deal committing the government, Nkunda's forces and other rebel militias to an immediate ceasefire was signed aimed at bringing a halt to conflict in the region.
Since then, dozens of small-scale clashes, usually involving the local Mai Mai groups and Nkunda's forces, have been reported.
Monuc in late January reinforced its presence in Nord-Kivu, where some 4 500 of its 17&nsdp;000 troops in the vast central African country are deployed, mostly in the volatile east.
- AFP
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