A team of United Nations experts is due to begin investigations into a massacre in Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) Ituri region, where hundreds of civilians were slaughtered two weeks ago.
Last week the United Nations mission in DRC reported that a massacre had taken place in the northeastern Ituri region on April 3, when between 150 and 300 ethnic Hemas in 15 villages were killed in a three-hour spree of bloodletting allegedly by their arch-rivals, the Lendu.
The massacre took place a day after the signing of the final act of a peace deal, which set up a government of national unity in the DRC, tasked with paving the way to the first free elections there in 40 years.
The 15-strong UN team left Kinshasa for Bunia, the main town in Ituri, near the border with Uganda, shortly before 1 pm (1400 GMT) Wednesday. It was made up of members of the UN mission in DRC, MONUC, and the UN refugee agency’s Kinshasa office, a representative for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Jose Luis Diaz, said in Geneva Tuesday.
The team’s week-long probe was aimed at trying to determine exactly how many people were killed and find out the location of any mass graves, he said.
MONUC said on April 6 that 966 people had been killed in the massacre, basing its toll on witness reports. But it revised the number of dead sharply downward three days later to between 150 and 300.
”The other people included in the earlier toll were injured, some very seriously, in machete attacks,” MONUC’s second highest ranking official, Berhooz Sadry, said then. A more exact toll could only be established once bodies have been exhumed from mass graves in the villages of Drodro parish, where the massacre occurred.
”Only by exhuming bodies from the mass graves will we be able to establish an exact toll. There could be more than 1 000 victims, counting the seriously injured who did not survive,” a humanitarian doctor said in Kinshasa.
The investigating team faces a difficult task in mountainous Ituri, where recent heavy rain has made it difficult to reach isolated villages, a journalist in the region said.
The UN team will also consider ways of ”bringing the people responsible to justice”, Diaz said
On April 8 the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Sergio Vieira de Mello, issued a statement strongly condemning the killings in Ituri and vowed they would not go unpunished.
”The perpetrators of these atrocities will be placed under the spotlight and will be obliged to answer for their actions,” Vieira de Mello said.
”They may eventually be the target of prosecution before the International Criminal Court,” he said, referring to the permanent international tribunal established to try cases of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
The European Union on Monday condemned the massacre and demanded that the perpetrators be brought to justice. A week earlier Washington called on Uganda ”as the party
responsible for security in that region… ensure that no human rights violations or atrocities are committed there and that reports of any and all such activity are investigated immediately”.
Uganda has troops in Ituri at the request of the United Nations, in a bid to quash long-standing ethnic fighting. Ethnic violence stemming from land disputes has long been common in Ituri, which borders on Uganda and is rich in gold, uranium and possible oil deposits.
The ethnic feuding in Ituri is estimated to have claimed some 50 000 lives since 1999 and has helped make the humanitarian situation in the region among the worse in the world, according to a UN report. – Sapa-AFP