[SIZE=7]HIDDEN HORRORS: A special report.; Uncovering the Guilty Footprints Along Zaire’s Long Trail of Death[/SIZE]
By James C. McKinley Jr. With Howard W. French
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[li]Nov. 14, 1997[/li][/ul]
The rebellion in Congo that ended in the spring was conducted largely out of the sight of the rest of the world. Most of the fighting took place in remote jungles with impassable roads and decrepit communications, and rebel commanders barred journalists and aid workers from the combat zone.
When it was over in May, the victor, Laurent Kabila, presented himself to the Congolese as a liberator who had ousted a corrupt dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko.
But more and more evidence has emerged suggesting that Mr. Kabila and the Rwandans who backed him were also fighting a war of revenge, one deeply intertwined with the ethnic conflicts between Hutu and Tutsi groups that have tormented this region. The Tutsi troops from Rwanda and Congo who made up the core of Mr. Kabila’s army had a powerful motive for vengeance, since thousands of Hutu refugees in the camps had taken part in the slaughter of more than half a million Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994.
The Origins
Frightened Refugees Flee Into the Forest
The roots of Congo’s civil war lie in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. The violence began that April, when the President of Rwanda, a Hutu, was killed in a suspicious plane crash over Kigali, the Rwandan capital, dooming a power-sharing accord between his Government and a Tutsi rebel army.
Immediately Hutu extremists began a well-orchestrated genocide against the minority Tutsi, killing more than 500,000 people before the Tutsi rebels seized control. Radical Hutu soldiers and militiamen then fled into Zaire along with more than one million Hutu refugees, settling in camps just across the border in Congo.
Over the next two years, these militiamen used the United Nations refugee camps there as bases to rearm themselves and recruit new followers. They mounted dozens of guerrilla attacks into Rwanda and killed hundreds of Tutsi living in eastern Congo, driving many into exile in Rwanda.
Last October, local government officials, allied with Hutu militants in the camps, tried to expel the ethnic Tutsi from eastern Congo, where they had lived for generations. The Congolese Tutsi rebelled, and Rwanda’s Tutsi-led Government sent in troops, ostensibly to help.
But senior Rwandan officials now say the intervention was intended above all to break up the huge Hutu refugee camps in Congo and destroy the remnants of the Hutu guerrilla army based there. Only months later, as the uprising grew into a civil war and after the rebels captured Congo’s third largest city, Kisangani, in March, did it become clear that Mr. Mobutu was so weak that he could be ousted.
From the outset the Congolese rebels targeted the Hutu refugees, many of them considered enemies by the rebels’ Rwandan backers. The rebels attacked the Hutu’s tent cities again and again, driving them deeper into the rain forest in Congo’s interior, where the refugees, relief groups and local Congolese say the Hutu were hunted down and where hundreds died of disease or drowned trying to cross rivers as they fled.
For the majority of refugees who were not Hutu guerrillas, the long flight through the jungle was a trail of tears. First the rebels attacked the refugee camps around Bukavu and Uvira in eastern Congo in October last year. Then they attacked the camps around the border city of Goma.
After Goma itself and a nearby refugee camp, Mugunga, fell to rebel forces that November, at least 600,000 refugees streamed back into Rwanda. But the rest – tens of thousands – fled westward into Congo, accompanied by hard-core Hutu militiamen and soldiers.
By February, about 120,000 of those refugees had made their way to north-central Congo, to Tingi Tingi, about 140 miles southeast of Kisangani, United Nations officials said. They were housed in meticulously assembled bamboo lean-tos, all covered with the distinctive blue plastic sheeting of the United Nations refugee agency.
‘‘We will never go back to Rwanda; the Tutsi are trying to kill us, and will certainly get rid of us there,’’ said Marie-Claire Muanyogoga, 13, at Tingi Tingi in February, when she and her sister, Sophie, 12, had become separated from their parents.
The children, emaciated from their trek, were being cared for by Denise Uwizeye, 24, a Rwandan Hutu student. ‘‘Of course our people killed a lot of Tutsi before, but what of the innocent, must we all die too?’’ she asked
On Feb. 9, Mr. Kabila’s rebels captured Amisi, a camp of 40,000 Hutu located 45 miles east of Tingi Tingi. With the outcry growing over reported massacres of Hutu civilians, the rebel leader pledged that his forces would not attack Tingi Tingi. But three weeks later, they did just that.
On March 2, according to relief officials, Western diplomats and Hutu refugees, Rwandan-backed units of Mr. Kabila’s army launched a full-scale assault on the refugee camp at Tingi Tingi, sending the population, which had swollen to well over 150,000, fleeing westward yet again.
‘‘There were shells fired into the camp beginning around 8 P.M., and it grew very intense toward dawn,’’ said Dr. Camille Kabakira, 31, a Hutu physician who survived, speaking to a reporter in March at the Ubundu camp.
Dr. Kabakira also described a terrifying scene at the town of Lubutu, where, the next morning, rebel units launched a mortar attack on the fleeing refugees, who were trying to cross a bridge leading to the west. The sound of the machine-gun fire on the eastern bank meant certain death for Hutu stragglers, he said.
Tens of thousands of Hutu refugees pushed westward for nine days, losing people to disease as they went, until they came to Ubundu, a sawmill town on the Congo River, where they camped on the eastern bank. By March 12, many seemed to have been broken by their days of terror.
‘‘I have done nothing wrong to anyone,’’ Placidy Kubwimana, a Hutu man in his late 40’s said in March… ‘‘In three days, Kabila’s troops will be here killing people again and all I ask is that I be given a way out of this hell.’’
A week later, Mr. Kabila’s rebels captured Kisangani and attacked Ubundu, about 100 miles south, sending the refugees fleeing across the Congo River. Hundreds drowned trying to cross the broad, powerful river, infested with crocodiles.
The surviving Hutu made their way northward along the west bank of the river toward Kisangani, where they hoped to be flown back to Rwanda. Many of the soldiers and political leaders among the refugees abandoned the column, trekking off to the west.
The Turning Point
Orchestrated Attacks Scatter the Survivors
Despite the desperate condition of the refugees, Mr. Kabila said they would not be allowed into Kisangani, while for days his forces denied relief groups access to the Hutu. By mid-April, United Nations officials estimated that there were 80,000 people in the camps just south of the city, at Biaro and Kasese, though rebel officials insisted the number was far smaller.
Then, on April 20, six local villagers were killed by unidentified gunmen, who the rebels later said were Hutu militants. The next morning, cadres of local villagers along with rebels stormed the camp at Kasese, about 17 miles south of Kisangani, shooting and hacking their way through the refugees, witnesses said. Over the next four days, there were attacks up and down the road and on refugees at the Biaro camp, another eight miles farther south, witnesses said.
‘‘I saw the soldiers coming and they fired and the shot tore off four of my fingers,’’ Immacule Nyirabazanza, a 45-year-old woman with six children who was wounded in the attack on Biaro, said in late April. ‘‘My son was killed.’’
No one knows how many people died in these attacks. For four days, troops sealed off the region. Local villagers later said they were recruited for burial details. When aid workers were allowed back, they found nothing but empty camps. Over the next two months, only about 45,000 refugees came out of the forest and were airlifted home.
The refugees who did trickle out of the jungle, as well as local villagers, told of massacres and mass graves. Some said soldiers had executed people with knives at the edges of pits they had dug with a backhoe. Others said the soldiers were burning the bodies to cover up the atrocities.
But some survivors made their way still farther west, reaching the city of Mbandaka, on the country’s western border with the Congo Republic, after trekking nearly 600 miles through dense forests, crossing countless rivers and wading through swampland.
Their troubles were far from over. On May 13, as Mr. Kabila’s rebellion closed in on Kinshasa, residents of Mbandaka, church workers and Hutu survivors have told United Nations investigators and foreign journalists of a final major assault on the remaining Hutu population.
Witnesses say the rebel troops hunted down hundreds of Hutu in Mbandaka and in settlements to the south, shot them in roadside executions and threw them into the Congo River. The survivors crossed the river in dugout canoes and settled in makeshift camps in the Congo Republic.
At the largest such camp, in Loukolela, remain about 6,000 refugees who had once been at Tingi Tingi and Ubundu. Most are men, many undoubtedly former Hutu militia members suspected in the genocide in Rwanda, United Nations officials say. The majority of women and children had presumably died on the march, or returned home.
One survivor was Dr. Kabakira, who was working as camp physician. ‘‘So many of the people I have known are dead,’’ he said in October. ‘‘For myself I consider it a miracle to be alive.’’
The number of refugees still missing is another mystery, United Nations officials said. Though on paper there were 1.1 million refugees in the camps in eastern Congo before the war, refugee officials acknowledge that those numbers were inflated because refugees regularly registered under false names to get extra food and supplies.
When the camps were attacked in November last year, a flood of people crossed back into Rwanda. That number has been estimated between 600,000 and 750,000, based on what was seen from military reconnaissance aircraft, but it is not known for sure.
Since then, about 266,000 refugees have been flown or trucked back to Rwanda and about 20,000 are still in camps in other countries, according to United Nations statistics.
All told, the number of people still unaccounted for ranges from a few thousand to 233,000, depending on the figures used for the original camp population in eastern Congo and the first large-scale homecoming.