At least 23 people, the majority of them women and children, were hacked or shot to death Monday in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the UN said, in the first reported massacre since UN peacekeepers began patrolling the troubled northeast last month.
“There was a massacre in Kachele,” a village about 100 kilometres northeast of Bunia, said Isabelle Abric, a spokesperson for the Monuc force charged with keeping the peace in the capital of the Ituri region in the DRC.
“Members of Monuc who went to the area saw 23 bodies, but according to other eyewitness accounts, 32 other bodies had already been buried,” she said.
Abric said the victims were “mostly children, pregnant women or older people killed with machetes or shot.”
United Nations forces began patrolling the region — wracked by an inter-ethnic battle between the minority Hema and majority Lendu militias that has killed more than 50,000 in four years — after taking over from a UN-mandated EU peacekeeping force in early September.
The spokesperson declined to say which ethnic tribe the victims belonged to or who could have been responsible for the killing.
Monuc dispatched a reconnaissance mission to the area after learning of the massacre, while a civilian and military mission was due to be sent there Tuesday, she said. “We will react very quickly,” she added.
The attack reportedly took place early on Monday morning in the hamlet of Kachele, some 25 kilometres south of Fataki, Abric said. Fataki was the site of fierce clashes between Lendu and Hema militias in July and August, sending thousands of civilians fleeing for their lives.
On October 1, a Pakistani contingency completed its deployment in Bunia, bringing the number of UN peacekeeping troops in the region to just under 3 400.
A military spokesperson, James Pruden, said then that “since the deployment of the Ituri Brigade, there haven’t been massacres in Bunia or signs of large-scale killings throughout the Ituri region.”
The reinforced peacekeeping mission, which will eventually regularly patrol beyond the confines of Bunia, is called Monuc II or the Ituri Brigade.
The region is the main remaining trouble spot in the DRC, where a peace deal was signed in April to end a five-year ruinous civil war that claimed about 2,5-million lives. – AFP