Villagers of northeast Congo told UN investigators of cannibalism and large-scale rape and looting by rebels there, the UN representative in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) said on Saturday.
A UN team on Saturday finished a one-week mission in northeast DRC investigating reports of major human-rights abuses against civilians of Ituri province.
”The team interviewed victims as well as witnesses of atrocities who spoke of cases of wholesale rape, of looting … and also cases of forced cannibalism,” representative Patricia Tome said.
The mission was prompted by reports that two rebel groups — the rebel Congolese Liberation Movement of Jean-Pierre Bemba and its allied Congolese Rally for Democracy-National — had turned viciously on civilians during fighting there.
Reports included claims that the rebels killed and ate pygmies in the region. UN authorities said earlier in the week they had found those reports to be credible.
Tome said investigators’ work included seeking out Pygmies who had gone deep in hiding in the forests there.
She did not elaborate. However, a Catholic cleric in the province, Monsignor Melchisedec Sikuli Paluku, told The Associated Press that Pygmies and others were forced by the rebels to eat human flesh. That included rebels forcing those they had taken prisoner to eat pieces of their own bodies, he said.
The report will be presented to UN officials including Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN high commissioner for human rights.
Vieira de Mello is expected in Kinshasa, the DRC capital, on Sunday.Pygmies, not all of whom are below average height, are believed to be the earliest inhabitants of Central Africa. An estimated 600 000 live in the DRC.
A series of peace deals has secured the withdrawal of most foreign troops in a four-year-old war in Congo, a mineral-rich nation the size of Western Europe. Despite a major December peace accord, fighting intensified among rebel bands in the east, however. – Sapa-AP