RIGHTS: Human Rights Group Wants Congo Killers Prosecuted

By Thalif Deen and Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Jul 1 1998 (IPS) - Less than 24 hours after the United Nations blamed Congolese soldiers and their allies in the Rwandan army of killing unarmed Hutu refugees in 1996 and 1997, a leading human rights organisation pressed for the killers to be prosecuted.

“The Security Council should take immediate measures to ensure that the perpetrators of the crimes against humanity are brought to justice,” declared Iain Levine of Amnesty International. He was reacting to findings of a UN report, released Tuesday, on killings in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), formerly Zaire.

Unless there is “serious political will” on the part of the government of President Laurent Kabila to cooperate with the United Nations, the world body’s report “would go nowhere,” Levine told IPS. “This is the big worry among all human rights activists.”

The 52-page report, incomplete because of difficulties in gathering evidence, did not estimate the total number of Hutu killed but cited individual massacres of up to 500 people. It said the massacres would amount to genocide if it could be proved that “a decision was taken to eliminate this part of the Hutu ethnic group as such.”

“Our investigation was just a beginning,” team member Daniel Michael O’Donnell said. “It is very important that this investigation be continued by an impartial body.”

Kabila and the United Nations have fought a running battle over UN investigators’ access to massacre sites since the former rebel took power in May 1997. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in April was forced to withdraw the UN team from Congo. Tuesday’s report said the government in Kinshasa “has shown no interest in fulfilling its obligation, under international law, to investigate responsibility for serious violations of human rights and grave breaches of humanitarian law.”

The UN report blamed the killings on Kabila’s Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of the Congo (AFDL), which it said was aided by the Rwandese Patriotic Army (RPA), the former Zairian security forces, and other armed groups.

According to the U.N. team, hundreds of unarmed Rwandan Hutus were massacred in Mbandaka and the neighbouring village of Wendji by AFDL troops apparently under RPA command.

“Forensic evidence indicates that bodies were removed from a mass grave site in Mbandaka, corroborating testimony that an effort was made to ‘clean up’ such sites prior to the arrival of the investigative team,” the report said.

The AFDL also was accused of forcing large numbers of civilians to flee into scarcely populated areas under life-threatening conditions, and denying relief organisations access to ill and wounded non-combatants.

The United Nations team, assembled after Kabila’s troops seized power in May 1997, encountered problems immediately. The new Congolese government objected to the appointment of team leader Roberto Garreton of Chile, forcing Annan to withdraw Garreton, who previously had issued a report accusing the AFDL and its allies of massacres. Instead, the team was led by Atsu-Koffi Amega of Togo.

The Kabila government then haggled over the terms of reference for any investigation and barred any field visits outside eastern Congo. That decision prevented on-site inspections of several central areas believed to be massacre sites, notably Mbandaka and Tingi-Tingi.

Last October, U.S. Ambassador Bill Richardson secured Kabila’s consent to allow investigations at those sites. The UN team also would look into all massacre reports, including some blamed on the Hutus, dating back to 1994. However, those effort were frustrated. Investigators often were barred from field visits for “security reasons” and their work around Mbandaka repeatedly was broken up by demonstrators accusing them of desecrating traditional cemetries.

Despite those difficulties, the team said it had gathered enough damning evidence in six months to lay blame at the feet of the Congolese and Rwandan governments, to which it submitted its report in advance of Tuesday’s launch.

In response, Ambassador Gideon Kayinamura of Rwanda said “the publication of such an incomplete, biased and totally misleading report does not serve the human rights cause, and would compromise the possibility of getting to the truth as to what happened.”

Kayinamura, in a letter to Annan, said the government of Rwanda “categorically denies and resents the insinuation in the report that Rwandan soldiers committed any human rights violations against a section of its own people, or anyone else, in the then Zaire.”

Ambassador Mwamba Kapanga of DRC also wrote to Annan and described the report as “a dangerous document that, contrary to the ideals of international peace and security propagated by the United Nations, exacerbates the ethnic hatred between Hutu and Tutsi by oversimplifying the complex problems which plague the Great Lakes region.”

“The rumours collected after several investigations are based on samplings too small to be statistically viable, with the result that the document is not based on concrete facts,” Kapanga said.

Amnesty International, in a statement released Wednesday, argued that “without a determined attempt by the DRC government and the international community to address the cycle of killings, there will be no lasting social and economic development for the Congolese people.”

The human rights watchdog also called on the UN Security Council to set up a ‘Commission of Experts’ to conduct further investigations and prosecute the perpetrators.