United Nations peacekeepers found the bodies of a dozen shot civilians yesterday in an eastern Congo village occupied by Tutsi rebels who have seized fresh territory in North Kivu province.
A stench of death hung over Kiwanja when journalists and UN troops entered the village, where fighters loyal to the rebel General Laurent Nkunda drove out pro-government Mai-Mai militia on Wednesday, sending its inhabitants fleeing in panic.
At le
ast a dozen bodies of adult males, five in one house alone, were visible among the mud-walled and tin-roofed homes, a few of them burned, apparently hit by rockets or grenades.
There was nothing, neither uniforms nor weapons, to indicate the dead had been fighters. Some wore work overalls.
A military spokesman for the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Democratic Republic of Congo (Monuc) said UN troops and human rights experts were investigating reports that Gen Nkunda's fighters killed civilians after the recent fighting.
The UN has its largest peacekeeping force – 17,000 strong – in Congo. But commanders say they cannot be everywhere in a vast, violent country the size of western Europe, which despite huge mineral wealth has only 375 miles of paved roads.
Kiwanja residents said Gen Nkunda's National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP) rebels had carried out the killings after taking control of the village in the latest flare-up of a conflict that traces its origins to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
"They knocked on the doors, when the people opened, they killed them with their guns," said Simo Bramporiki, aged around 60, who said his wife and child were killed on Wednesday night.
Gen Nkunda denied his men had killed civilians.
"It was against the Mai-Mai (militia] and many were in civilian dress," he said by telephone.
The UN military spokesman, Lieutenant-Colonel Jean-Paul Dietrich, said: "Even if they were (Mai-Mai] fighters and surrendered, and were then killed, that would be a criminal act".
He said Gen Nkunda's rebel forces had also occupied other villages about 50 miles north of the North Kivu provincial capital Goma.
Gen Nkunda advanced to the outskirts of Goma last week, before declaring a ceasefire.
As the United Nations and the African Union prepared a summit of Great Lakes leaders in Nairobi today to try to end the east Congo conflict, aid agencies were scrambling to provide food and medical care to 200,000 refugees crammed into camps around and just north of Goma.
But relief workers say that many more out of over one million displaced civilians in North Kivu are out of reach of help, either cut off by fighting, hiding in the bush or isolated in rebel-controlled zones.
In Kiwanja, one distraught woman, crying hysterically, asked journalists to "come and see the five dead bodies in my house". One was that of her husband. Two more bodies lay outside.
The latest fighting around Rutshuru has worsened a humanitarian situation already described as "catastrophic" by aid agencies in a country where more than five million people have died in a decade from conflict, hunger and disease.
"We are only reaching a certain number of people and not the greater number of displaced people," David Nthengwe, the spokesman in east Congo for the UN refugee agency UNHCR, said. "Security is our major constraint here ... it is not possible for us to access combat zones," he added.
The UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, who plans to meet the presidents of Congo and Rwanda at today's summit in Nairobi, has asked the Security Council to approve a "surge" of 3,000 extra troops for the UN Congo mission.
But with contributor governments distracted and squeezed by the global financial crisis, UN officials say mustering the reinforcements for Monuc could take weeks, maybe months.
Mr Ban has said he will urge the Congolese president, Joseph Kabila, to speak with Gen Nkunda.
Mr Kabila's government has been refusing to negotiate with the rebels, who say they will attack Goma if there are no talks.
Ethnic violence haunts lawless regionLOW-LEVEL fighting has ground on in Congo for years, but clashes intensified in August and have since driven about 250,000 people from their homes.
Dozens of militia groups operate in the remote terraced valleys and hills of eastern Congo, a lawless region that the government and the 17,000-strong United Nations peacekeeping mission have struggled to bring under control.
Among the armed groups are pro-government militias known as the Mai Mai and ethnic Hutu insurgents from Rwanda who fled to Congo after helping to carry out Rwanda's genocide.
The conflict in the east is fuelled by festering ethnic hatred left over from the 1994 slaughter of half a million Tutsis in Rwanda and Congo's civil wars from 1996-2002, which drew neighbouring countries in a rush to plunder Congo's mineral wealth.
General Laurent Nkunda, who defected from Congo's army in 2004, claims the government has not protected Tutsis from the Hutu militia.
The full article contains 839 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
