At least 1 000 people have been killed in ethnic violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the United Nations said on Sunday, one day after the signing of an accord to end over four years of war in the vast Central African country.
The massacres, which took place on Thursday in the northeastern region of Ituri, claimed ”at least one thousand victims”, the UN mission in the DRC said in a statement sent to AFP’s office in the Rwandan capital Kigali.
It said this information came from ”witness accounts” of the massacres, which took place in the parish of Drodo and 14 neighbouring areas.
According to lists compiled by local leaders, 966 people were ”summarily executed” in three hours of massacres, said the UN mission, which on Saturday sent a team to Drodo and the surrounding areas.
The UN mission said it had visited 49 seriously injured victims in a local hospital. Most had machetes wounds and some had been hit by bullets. The team had also witnessed ”20 mass graves, identifiable by traces of blood that was still fresh”.
The UN mission, Monuc, said it would continue its investigations to identify those responsible for the bloodletting. DRC’s minister for human rights, Ntumba Luaba, called on the Monuc to help catch the killers.
”Monuc, which has already gathered some information on the massacre, must quickly pursue its investigation so the perpetrators are don’t remain unpunished,” he told AFP in a telephone interview from the capital Kinshasa.
The violence came one day after the warring parties in the Democratic Republic of Congo signed a historic pact on Wednesday to end more than four years of brutal warfare.
The accord between the government, opposition parties and several rebel groups ended 19 months of tortuous peace negotiations. It enabled President Joseph Kabila to issue on Friday a new constitution which opens the way for a national unity government and the first democratic elections in the former Belgian colony for more than 40 years.
A commission, set up to try and bring peace to the troubled Ituri region, began work on Saturday. Earlier on Sunday, Ugandan officers, who have troops stationed
in Ituri, said between 350 and 400 members of the Hema ethnic community had been killed in the region in attacks by members of the Lendu ethnic group.
The head of the rebel Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC), Thomas Lubanga, confirmed the massacres and said more than 900 people had died.
Lubanga, whose rebels recently engaged in fighting against the Ugandan troops in Ituri, accused the Ugandan army of taking part in the Lendu attacks.
But General Kale Kaihura, the commander of Ugandan troops in Ituri, rejected the claims, saying he had sent his men to the site of the massacres after receiving information from local chiefs. Representatives of the Hema community in Kinshasa who had been in contact with Drodo accused the UPC of being responsible for the
massacre with support from neighbouring Rwanda, which supported rebel groups operating in eastern DRC.
”It wasn’t an interethnic massacre, but an operation controlled by Rwanda to spread terror and block the advance of peace in Ituri,” said one of the community’s leaders, on condition of anonymity.
In a sign of further instability elsewhere in the Democratic Republic of Congo, weapons fire resounded on Sunday afternoon in the town of Bukavu, the main centre in the eastern province of South-Kivu.
A representative for the rebel group which controls Bukavu, the Congolese Rally for Democracy, said it was a ”restrained” attack by local militia in protest at the arrest of their leader on Thursday.
”We are hearing shots from heavy and light arms which started some time ago and are continuing,” said an inhabitant from the village who was taking refuge inside a church.
The war in the Democratic Repulbic of Congo, the former Zaire, broke out in 1998, one year after the fall of revlied dictator Mobuto Seke Seso. It has claimed around 2,5-million lives, either directly or through disease or starvation. – Sapa-AFP