MONDAY, 4.30PM
THE United Nations team sent to investigate the alleged mass slaughter of Rwandan Hutu refugees in the former Zaire has given the new regime two days to allow it to begin work, the mission said on Monday.
The team has told President Laurent Kabila’s government in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) that UN human rights investigators intend to start their enquiry on Wednesday. The chairman of the investigating panel, Togolese lawyer Atsu Koffi Amega, said the mission has decided to start work on Wednesday in the Bandaka region in the north of the DRC, where many refugees were allegedly massacred. “The mission this Monday asked Congolese Minister of Planning Etienne-Richard Mbayha and the inter-ministerial liaison committee to authorise it to begin its work on Wednesday,” the team said in a statement.
The investigation team arrived in Kinshasa — where Kabila’s rebel army ousted the late dictator Mobutu Sese Seko in May — more than three weeks ago, but has been unable to deploy across the DRC in spite of written assurances given to UN secretary-general Kofi Annan.
Kabila’s Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation (AFDL) has been accused of massacring large numbers of Rwandan Hutus who originally fled into Zaire in 1994, following the seizure of power in Rwanda by the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Armed Hutu extremist militiamen among the refugees, already blamed along with exiled former Rwandan government troops for the genocide in 1994 of between half a million and 800 000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates, were accused of taking sides against Kabila’s forces after they first took up arms in September last year in eastern Zaire.