Hundreds wandered silently through devastated alleyways at Gatumba refugee camp in Burundi on Sunday, trying to make sense of a massacre of almost 160 men, women and children.
Victims were shot, burned and hacked to death at the camp for Congolese Tutsis in the central African state of Burundi in an overnight attack on Friday.
”The enemies came and shone torches on the people sleeping, then they fired shots and stabbed them,” said Xavier, a survivor, one finger pointed at his temple and the other hand making the gesture of driving a knife into his chest, in a graphic pantomime.
”It’s tragic and inhuman,” said Fidele, a 22-year-old technician. Nearby a woman crouched sobbing, her head wrapped in a cloth.
”My uncle and his five children were killed,” said Xavier, who has lived in the capital Bujumbura for four years. ”I found the corpses on Saturday morning.”
Burundi’s Hutu rebel National Liberation Forces immediately claimed responsibility for the raid, but President Domitien Ndayizeye insisted it had been carried out by foreign assailants
Two United Nations helicopters circled in the foggy sky above the camp near the border with DRC on Sunday, while Burundi military personnel armed with AK-47 assault rifles patrolled the area around the camp.
Dozens of plain wooden coffins stood near a large tarpaulin covering the bodies that were wrapped in white plastic bags. Slowly the coffins filled up, amid the stench of putrefaction.
Jean-Pierre, a young Burundi volunteer worker, applied disinfectant to each bag, many of them with bloodstains or ash on them.
Claudia, an Italian woman working for a non-governmental organisation from her country and Tito, a local Burundi man, lifted the bodies into the narrow caskets.
Tito, his mouth and nose covered by a mask, had to force some of the bodies into position, so he could nail down the lids. Of the 148 caskets on the site on Sunday, 64 had simply a question mark on them indicating bodies, some of them badly burned, that could not be identified.
A woman, supported by two relatives, collapsed in front of a coffin bearing a name. Nearby dozens of crudely fashioned wooden crosses lay in a pile.
Hundreds of people sat around in the surrounding grassland listening to the words of an Evangelical pastor.
”All the violence and the deaths we see here will end one day on the Day of Judgement,” he said, speaking through a makeshift loudspeaker system.
As the day drew to a close, people gradually headed back into the capital Burundi on foot or by bus, some to return on Monday for the mass burial of the victims at a cemetery at a military base a few kilometres away. ‒ Sapa-AFP