UN authorities said on Monday they were trying to locate 50 Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) citizens who had gathered for UN police training, amid reports that scores of policemen had been slaughtered in reprisal for an uprising in rebel-held east DRC.
”At the moment, we don’t know their whereabouts,” UN Congo mission representatives Hamadoun Toure said in Kinshasa, DRC capital.
The men, selected for training in a programme pledged by the UN Security Council, have not been accounted for since the uprising, Toure said. The United Nations was waiting for them to report in to UN officials, Toure said.
Inhabitants around the camp told a local journalist the policemen had been slaughtered. The journalist insisted on anonymity for fear of reprisal.
UN military observers have reported seeing corpses bobbing in a Congo River tributary in the area of Kisangani as Rwanda-backed rebels put down a local uprising there.
Local civilians have spoken of retaliatory killings by the Rwanda-backed rebels since the uprising. Reported death tolls since the uprising have risen steadily.
UN officials said late last week more than 20 have died. Kisangani Roman Catholic Archbishop Laurent Monsengwo on Sunday put the number of recovered bodies at 50, including some retrieved from the Tshopo River, a Congo River tributary.
Monsengwo said 50 more were missing. Congolese human rights groups have alleged summary executions of police and others since May 14’s one-day uprising.
It began when mutineers within the Rwandan-backed Congolese Rally for Democracy seized a local radio station and urged Congolese to come out armed with sticks against the rebels and their allies.
The mob burned and stoned to death two men before Rwandan-backed forces fired into the crowd, dispersing it. Locals have alleged civilians have been killed in house-to-house searches by the rebels since then.
The rebel movement, supported by neighbouring Rwanda and its military, has held Kisangani since eight nations went to war on Congo’s soil nearly four years ago.
Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi accused Congo of harbouring militias that threatened their own security.
The rebels are deeply unpopular in Kisangani. Many Congolese see them as staying on there only to secure a stake in the fortunes to be made from Congo’s diamonds and other resources.
The UN police trainees were to have taken over security after the long-promised and postponed rebel pullout from Kisangani.
UN Security Council representatives, touring Congo at the start of May, pledged then that the training would begin ”in a few days”. ? Sapa-AP