The United Nations confirmed the killings of four UN police trainees at an eastern rebel-held Congo city, leaving 46 others still unaccounted for.
UN Congo mission chief Amos Namanga Ngongi, who confirmed the four deaths, also confirmed reports of summary killings in Kisangani since a May 14 uprising against Rwandan-backed rebels in control there.
”Some people in town have been executed,” Ngongi told reporters in Kinshasa, Congo’s capital.
The confirmation that police were among the dead comes amid charges of scores of reprisal killings after a quickly crushed one-day uprising in Kisangani.
Locals accuse the Rwandan-backed rebels in the killings. Rebels say any civilian deaths were in cross-fire, and that 10 of their own forces are among the dead.
UN military observers have reported seeing bodies floating in a Congo River tributary near the city since the quelled Kisangani revolt. Violence opened after mutineers within the Rwandan-backed Congolese Rally for Democracy seized a radio station at Kisangani on May 14.
Mutineers broadcast appeals for local Congolese to ”come out with sticks” against the city’s deeply unpopular military rulers, the Rwandan-backed Congolese Rally for Democracy. About 1 000 locals responded, burning and stoning two men to death before rebels fired into the mob to break it up.
Locals have spoken of the Rwandan-backed rebels going house-to-house, killing some they found, since the uprising.
The victims include at least some of 50 Congolese policemen who had been selected by the United Nations for training as a police force for Kisangani.
They were gathered at a camp, awaiting what they had been told was the May 22 start of training. Villagers around the camp told a local journalist the policemen had been slaughtered. The journalist spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.
”Among the UN-selected policemen, four have been confirmed dead,” said Ngongi, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s representative for Congo.
”Reports make us believe that the confrontation continues,” Ngongi added. ?People are still being arrested, some people are pursued, some are searched,” he said.
Reported death tolls since the uprising have risen steadily. UN officials said as of late last week they had confirmed more than 20 dead. Kisangani Roman Catholic Archbishop Laurent Monsengwo on Sunday put the number of recovered bodies at 50. He said 50 more were missing.
Ngongi said that ”the security of the population is the
responsibility” of the Rwandan-backed rebels. Ngongi also confirmed that 85 policemen who were stationed in the Congolese southern town of Pweto have deserted since May 14, apparently also in fear of reprisals since the uprising.
Kisangani, Congo’s third-largest city and a major diamond centre, has been under control of Rwandan-backed rebels since soon after Congo’s multination war broke out nearly four years ago. Rwanda, Uganda and, for a time, Burundi, deployed in Congo on the grounds that the country was harbouring militias that threatened their own safety.
Those militias included some of those responsible for Rwanda’s 1994 genocide.
The Rwandan-backed rebels and their foreign allies are deeply resented by locals in Kisangani, who see the forces as hanging on only to plunder Congo’s resources. Rebels had said they could not leave pull out of Kisangani because the city was not secure.
UN pledges of a UN-trained police force were the United Nations’ answer to that complaint. UN Security Council representatives, visiting Kisangani on May 1, promised then that UN police instructors would arrive ”in a few days.”
Diplomatic sources at UN headquarters in New York, speaking on Monday after the uprising, said that training has now been ”postponed.” – Sapa-AFP