A special report.; Uncovering the Guilty Footprints Along Zaire’s Long Trail of Death
By JAMES C. MCKINLEY JR. WITH HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: November 14, 1997
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 Evidence U.N. Wants to Begin With Freshest Site
The clearest atrocities documented so far occurred at Mbandaka. Dozens of townspeople there told journalists and aid workers in early June that the rebels massacred between 200 and 2,000 Hutu.
It doesn’t depent on you whether or not I exist. If you don’t like me, don’t accept my invitation and don’t invite me to come and see you. Whether you like it or not, history is on my side, I will bury you.
Jean-Christophe, Utrecht,April 3rd, 2004.
Nothing but Human rights. We Will Win !
The Truth can be buried and stomped into the ground where none can see, yet eventually it will, like a seed, break through the surface once again far more potent than ever, and nothing can stop it. Truth can be suppressed for a “time”, yet it cannot be destroyed. ==> Wolverine
