Thursday AfricaDigest(12/11): Massacre Unfurls in Congo, Despite Nearby Support

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December 11, 2008
Massacre Unfurls in Congo, Despite Nearby Support

By LYDIA POLGREEN
New York Times
KIWANJA, Congo — At last the bullets had stopped, and François Kambere
Siviri made a dash for the door. After hiding all night from
firefights between rebels and a government-allied militia over this
small but strategic town, he was desperate to get to the latrine a few
feet away.

“Pow, pow, pow,” said his widowed mother, Ludia Kavira Nzuva,
recounting how the rebels killed her 25-year-old son just outside her
front door. As they abandoned his bloodied corpse, she said, one
turned to her and declared, “Voilà, here is your gift.”

In little more than 24 hours, at least 150 people would be dead, most
of them young men, summarily executed by the rebels last month as they
tightened their grip over parts of eastern Congo, according to
witnesses and human-rights investigators.

And yet, as the killings took place, a contingent of about 100 United
Nations peacekeepers was less than a mile away, struggling to
understand what was happening outside the gates of its base. The
peacekeepers were short of equipment and men, United Nations officials
said, and they were focusing on evacuating frightened aid workers and
searching for a foreign journalist who had been kidnapped. Already
overwhelmed, officials said, they had no intelligence capabilities or
even an interpreter who could speak the necessary languages.

The peacekeepers said they had no idea that the killings were taking
place until it was all over.

The executions in Kiwanja are a study in the unfettered cruelty meted
out by the armed groups fighting for power and resources in eastern
Congo. But the events are also a textbook example of the continuing
failure of the world’s largest international peacekeeping force, which
has a mandate to protect the Congolese people from brutality.

In this instance, the failure came from a mix of poor communication
and staffing, inadequate equipment, intelligence breakdowns and
spectacularly bad luck, said Lt. Col. H. S. Brar, the commander of the
Indian peacekeepers based in Kiwanja.

But the killings and the stumbling response to the rebel advance were
symptomatic of problems that have plagued the United Nations
peacekeeping force in Congo for years, said Anneke Van Woudenberg, a
senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, who investigated the
slayings this month. The rebel onslaught was even led by a commander
who is wanted on war crimes charges by theInternational Criminal
Court.

“Kiwanja was a disaster for everyone,” Ms. Van Woudenberg said. “The
people were betrayed not just by rebels who committed terrible war
crimes against them but by the international community that failed to
protect them.”

In the past year alone, hundreds of thousands of people have been
forced to flee their homes as the rebels, led by a renegade army
general, have waged a fierce insurgency against the government and its
allied militias.

In an interview, the rebel general, Laurent Nkunda, denied that his
troops had executed civilians here, accusing militias allied with the
government of trying to make his rebel movement look bad.

“We cannot kill the population,” he said. “It is not in our behavior
to kill and to rape.”

But extensive interviews with victims, aid workers and human-rights
investigators showed that Mr. Nkunda’s men carried out a door-to-door
military operation over two days in which young men and others were
executed.

The trouble began on Oct. 28, when Congolese Army troops fled the
town, fearful of the advance of Mr. Nkunda’s troops.

The soldiers, who had already been routed by Mr. Nkunda’s men farther
south, looted and raped as they ran, taking everything of value and
even forcing some residents to help them carry the spoils, according
to witnesses and investigators. Fearful residents had to choose
between two bad options: follow the rampaging army or wait to see what
the rebels might bring.

With the soldiers long gone, Mr. Nkunda’s troops took the towns of
Kiwanja and Rutshuru without firing a shot. Immediately, they ordered
the residents who remained to torch sprawling camps that held about
30,000 people displaced by earlier fighting, proclaiming that it was
now safe for the camp dwellers to return to their villages, witnesses
said.

“They said there was security, so everyone should go home,” said
François Hazumutima, a retired teacher who had been living in a nearby
camp. “But none of us felt safe.”

A week later, on Nov. 4, a group of militia fighters known as the Mai
Mai carried out a surprise attack on Kiwanja. But the rebels soon
routed the Mai Mai — and ordered all residents to leave.

The soldiers then went house to house, saying they were searching for
militia fighters who stayed behind to fight. But many residents who
stayed were scared their houses would be looted or were too old or
infirm to flee, according to witnesses. Others had simply not gotten
the message to leave.

The rebels came to the door of a 25-year-old trader, banging and
threatening to shoot their way in.

“There were gunshots everywhere,” he said, speaking on condition of
anonymity for fear of retribution. “They asked for money. I gave them
$200.”

He then watched in impotent horror as the rebels went to his 22-year-
old brother’s house next door. The man, a student, had no money to
offer them. The soldiers ordered him to lie on the ground. They
stabbed him in the neck with their bayonets and shot him in the head,
he said.

“They said, ‘If you don’t have money, you are Mai Mai,’ ” he said.
“Everyone who was young was destined to die.”

Muwavita Mukangusi said she was out in the fields farming with her
husband when the shooting started. Their three young daughters were at
home, so Ms. Mukangusi ran back. Her husband hid in the fields,
returning only at nightfall. The next morning the rebels came.

“They took my husband,” she said, her eyes rimmed in red. “Because I
had $50 in the house, I took $25 to them. But it was not enough. I
added $25. It was still not enough. They accused him of being Mai
Mai.”

The rebels beat him, she said, then forced him to the ground and shot
him in the back of the head.

According to witnesses and clips of video shot at the time, Jean Bosco
Ntaganda, Mr. Nkunda’s chief of staff, commanded the troops that
carried out the killings. Mr. Ntaganda, whose nom de guerre is the
Terminator, is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war
crimes committed while he was commanding a different armed group
earlier in the war.

Meanwhile, confusion reigned at the nearby peacekeepers’ base. The
company of soldiers sits in a spot that is decidedly not strategic,
nestled in a valley that is highly vulnerable to incoming fire and has
a poor vantage point from which to keep tabs on the surrounding area.

The company’s only translator left the base on Oct. 26 and was not
replaced until more than two weeks later. But even in normal times,
communications are limited. To make logistical arrangements, the
peacekeepers depend largely on civilian staff members who work normal
business hours and have weekends off. Unable to speak to most of the
population and with almost no intelligence capabilities, Colonel Brar
groped his way through a fog of rumor, speculation and misinformation.

“During this whole time, there was an informational vacuum,” Colonel
Brar said.

With just one company of soldiers and three armored vehicles, the
colonel’s peacekeepers were overmatched, he said. Patrols had to be
aborted because rebels and militia fighters opened fire with heavy
weapons that could pierce the vehicles’ cladding. The peacekeepers
said they could not tell the difference between the different armed
groups and were fearful of firing on civilians.

The colonel said he was juggling orders from headquarters in Goma to
rescue stranded aid workers and search for a kidnapped foreign
journalist. Sending out too many patrols would leave no one to protect
the thousands of civilians gathered around the base, trapped in the
vulnerable valley.

Making matters worse, the peacekeepers’ armored vehicles are largely
unable to handle the muddy terrain of the neighborhoods hit hardest by
the violence. It was not until the fighting was over that the full
horror of the killings was discovered in houses stuffed with dead
bodies.

“We launched patrols in areas we thought there would be clashes,” he
explained. “But we could not be everywhere at once.”

As the shooting died down, residents said they found streets littered
with bodies. Most, but not all, were young men and boys. One health
care worker, who spoke anonymously for fear of reprisals, helped the
Red Cross recover the bodies.

“Some were killed with bullets, others bayoneted,” the worker said.
Among the injured sent to the regional hospital, the worker said, were
“two women, one small girl of 9 years and one boy of 11 years.”

Witnesses said the rebels ordered that the bodies be buried quickly
and far from the cemetery, to avoid leaving evidence for war crimes
investigators.

“They did not want any mass graves,” said another man, who
participated in the burials.

The worker said that by the end of Nov. 6, they had collected 150
bodies, the same toll reached by Human Rights Watch. The count could
be higher still, he said, since the rebels have hampered efforts at a
fuller accounting of the dead and missing.

Mr. Nkunda’s men continue to hold the town, as well as neighboring
Rutshuru. Outwardly, calm has returned to the streets. But mothers
have sent their sons packing because the rebels have been forcing men
and boys to join them.

Mujawimana Nyiragasigwa said her 15-year-old son Jimia was snatched by
soldiers in broad daylight last month. He had been out looking for
work when the soldiers rounded him up, she said, and he has been
missing for two and a half weeks.

“If I ever see him again, it will be by the grace of God,” she said.

Colonel Brar was clearly troubled by what happened here but said he
and his troops did their best in an awful situation.

“We did what we could,” he said. “Imagine if we had not been here.
Many more could have died.”

Ms. Kavira Nzuva, whose son François was killed, said his death had
hollowed out her life. Gaunt and hobbled at 67, she was forced to
return to the fields to farm.

François had supported her with his photography business. He had wired
her mud-walled house for electricity and paid the monthly bill. He had
built her a new kitchen. She kept a thick album of pictures of him, a
tall man always eager to strike a pose for the camera.

“He was my youngest child,” she said. “I don’t know how I will live
without him.”

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What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the
homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of
totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?
Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948), "Non-Violence in Peace and War"
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