THE little girl’s head was jerked back, seeming to stare longingly up the hill toward those who had fled without her. In the town below, young thugs pranced through the streets celebrating her brutal death. One of them had skewered the child through the throat as they hunted down people who had once been their neighbours.
The fetid overflow of Rwanda’s genocide and Burundi’s civil war is fuelling a new upsurge of ethnic persecution and fighting in eastern Zaire.
Hundreds of thousands of Zaire’s native Tutsis have taken to the hills to escape their government’s threat to expel or exterminate them, which has already resulted in hundreds of deaths.
Meanwhile almost 250 000 Rwandan and Burundian Hutu refugees in Zaire abandoned their 12 camps around Uvira as Tutsis retaliated with raids. They were apparently made with the encouragement of the Rwandan government, which is keen to strike against extremist Hutu militias sheltering in the camps.
Aid agency sources reported that unidentified fighters had entered Zaire from Rwanda on Monday night and attacked government army positions close to Rwandan Hutu refugee camps in the eastern town of Goma. The United Nations said it had started to evacuate humanitarian staff from eastern Zaire.
Paul Stromberg, spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Rwanda, said 221 000 refugees were on the move towards Bukavu, but other aid sources said that with Bukavu cut off, fighting in Uvira and general insecurity in neighbouring Cibitoke, the refugees were heading for Goma.
Aid sources said heavy fighting was continuing in and around Uvira on Monday, adding that between 4 000 and 5 000 Zaireans had moved into the town from the south.
The principal victims of the latest pogroms are about 300 000 Tutsis, known as Banyamulenge, who have lived in Zaire for generations. Hostility has swelled since the end of the Rwandan war in 1994 sent more than one million Hutus fleeing into Zaire. But unlike the Tutsi victims of Rwanda’s genocide, or similar persecution further north in Zaire, the Banyamulenge are fighting back.
Among them is Moses Kinde, who helps guard his and 12 other families with a machete and an AK47 gun. About 100 people in all, they have settled on the edge of small woods in the hills north of Uvira, a squalid border town.
“We know where Zaire learned to persecute us,” he said. “We had problems before, but when the Rwandan Hutus arrived after that it was clear we were going to have a lot of problems. It got more and more dangerous until the government tried to take our land and they told us we had to leave the country and go back to Rwanda.
“But we don’t come from Rwanda and they cannot force us to go because we know how to fight and the army does not.”
Much of the violence is near Uvira. It has long had an air of menace, but the mobs of young men parading through the streets waving machetes, metal bars and wooden stakes are new. They believe they are invincible, magically shielded by the twigs and leaves sprouting from their pockets and headbands. Small children run alongside giving the war dance a sense of carnival.
In recent weeks they have beaten, stoned or carved up people who until recently were their neighbours. Other Banyamulenge disappear into Zaire’s notorious jails, emerging only for burial.
Uvira’s district commissioner, Shweka Mutabazi, drew up a list of all Banyamulenge property and land, ordered Tutsis to stop building homes, and told soldiers they could take over the houses of those forced to flee. Some people were simply thrown out. Others were beaten up, falsely accused of crimes and imprisoned, or dismissed from their jobs.
Moses Kinde was forewarned. “A friend of mine knew what was going on, what the authorities were planning. It was just like Rwanda. Men came to the house and told me we had to leave but I couldn’t take anything. Some were saying they should kill me. We went to a friend’s house but they came again and said I had to go back to Rwanda. I’ve never been to Rwanda. Then they were killing people and we came up here,” he said.
The region’s deputy governor, Lwasi Ngabo Lwabanji, sent a new wave of terror through the Banyamulenge three weeks ago when he gave them seven days to get out of Zaire or agree to be placed in camps. “For those of them who defy the order and stay in the hills they will be treated as rebels, and like rebels in other countries will be exterminated and expelled,” Lwabanji said.
Thousands of soldiers have been flown into the region. They snatch the first transport to hand – sometimes aid agency vehicles – to load up with grenade launchers, machine-guns and boxes of ammunition. But Zairean troops are often drunk and too frightened to take on the armed Banyamulenge so they lob mortars indiscriminately into the hills or hunt down women and children.
Young Banyamulenge men have struck back, on occasions sending army units fleeing and hitting refugee camps which shelter Hutu militiamen. Banyamulenge rebels were blamed for two massacres at missionary hospitals in which about 50 people were killed three weeks ago.
Although the government portrays them as outsiders, Tutsis first arrived in what is now Zaire some time after the 16th century. They established their settlement in the Mulenge hills and became known as the Banyamulenge. Later they fanned out to Uvira and outlying villages.
The Banyamulenge, often more prosperous than their neighbours, fell victim to President Mobutu’s divide-and-rule politics in 1981. A new law stripped them of citizenship, and with it rendered them stateless. By the time more than one million Hutu refugees fled Rwanda in 1994, on the heels of a similar outpouring from Burundi six months earlier, Zaire’s Tutsi population was more vulnerable than it had ever been.