RWANDAN REBELS and a Congolese militia backed by the UN have carried out “vicious and widespread” attacks against civilians in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), killing over 1,400 people, a human rights group has reported.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) yesterday released a report in which it showcased evidence of DRC soldiers fed and supplied with ammunition by the UN, and the rebel group they are engaging with, carrying out horrific atrocities against civilians.
The report is based on 23 fact-finding missions this year that accumulated 600 interviews. Witnesses described how civilians in the east of the troubled country have been massacred, girls were gang-raped, and young men accused of supporting the rebels decapitated between January and September this year.
“Some victims were tied together before their throats were, according to one witness, ‘slit like chickens’. The majority of the victims were women, children, and the elderly,” the group said.
HRW has estimated that the Congolese militia supported by troops from neighbouring Rwanda have killed 732 civilians over the first nine months of the year.
During the same period the rebel Democratic Front for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) has killed an estimated 701 civilians.
The HRW has called on the UN to “immediately cease all support to the current military operation” until it can ensure no violations of international humanitarian law are taking place.
“The UN peacekeepers are being put in an appalling situation where they are supporting an army that is attacking its own population,” it said.
The UN force in the DRC has 19,000 troops and is the biggest peacekeeping force in the world. However, it has been largely unable to quell the violence in the Kivu provinces due to their huge size and difficult jungle terrain.
To try and make the peacekeepers more effective, the UN has at times been tasked with supporting the troops of DRC president Joseph Kabila, who recently asked the body to prepare a schedule for the withdrawal of its forces before 2011.
The UN peacekeepers were first posted to the DRC in 1999, five years after violence first erupted in the eastern part of the country following the arrival of Rwandan genocide suspects hidden among up to a million fleeing refugees.
The extremist Hutus stand accused of murdering over 500,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda, and they fled their country to escape a Tutsi force led by Paul Kagama, who now leads the country. Since 1996, there has been back-to-back civil wars in the DRC and the Rwandan genocide suspects have formed themselves into the FDLR.
The rebels have been known to recruit young boys to fight as child soldiers, and women and girls are forced to act as sex slaves. Since the start of the year the UN has recorded more than 7,500 cases of sexual assault against women and girls in North and South Kivu. “Most of the women and girls were gang-raped, some so violently that they later died,” said HRW.