At six o'clock on New Year's Eve morning, 70 women and children were stopped by militia on a road in Burundi. The militia divided them into two groups: they took one group to a field and another to some nearby buildings.
Then they hacked them to death.
It must have taken a long time.
But maybe they were the lucky ones.
According to a report issued in the new year, Rwandan troops massacred 13 Congolese women in November - by burying them alive.
Last week, Mr John Daly, chairman of the Irish Refugee Council, wrote to this newspaper with a complaint. It concerned remarks made by a spokesman for the Department of Justice. This person had explained the backlog of 7,762 people seeking asylum in 1999 by "various factors" including economic ones.
These included "the strong economy, attractive social welfare rates and the fact that the Minister had no deportation powers for most of the year due to a legal challenge".
Mr Daly complained this left out of the equation such issues as "wars, repressive regimes and generally intolerable situations".
Since then I have been trying to find out what is happening in some of the countries from which asylum-seekers come to Ireland.
I have been able to do this through two Internet sites. One is published by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (http://www.unhcr.ch/news/media/daily.htm). The other is a marvellous news service, provided by hundreds of non-governmental organisations (http://www.oneworld.net).
As a result, I am inclined to agree with Mr Daly, or at least to go a long way down the road with him.
One of the acts of evil which I mentioned above occurred in the Democratic Republic of Congo. That country has been the scene of conflict since the early 1990s. So great has the conflict been that by last November 916,000 of its people had had to leave their homes.
And how many of them made their way to our shores last year?
Two hundred and seventy two.
In Sudan, a 16-year war has killed 1.9 million people. Another 4.5 million have had to leave their homes. Each side in the war targets civilians in order to starve the other side of resources. Of those 4.5 million displaced persons, 38 made their way here last year.
We got 19 asylum-seekers from Burundi last year. Tanzania got 30,000 in November. "They say they are running away because rebels have been burning houses, churches and schools in some villages in order to force the civilian population to flee to Tanzania," said a UN spokesman.
Nigeria provides more asylum-seekers here than any other African country. Last year we had 1,895. In Lagos, the capital, at least 50 people died in November in clashes between the Yoruba and the Hausa. Two hundred Odi people in the south of the country were killed by soldiers. Some 20,000 Odi were stranded in the bush without food and water.
Uganda is, I suppose, the epitome of awfulness in Africa. There, children are abducted, raped, made to kill and mutilate their own relatives in the long-running conflict. I don't know how many asylum-seekers we have from Uganda. Uganda is blanked out, for security reasons which I don't understand, in the figures provided by the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform.
Moving away from Africa, the Roma gypsies are probably the most visible group of European asylum-seekers here. The UN has expressed concern over attacks on the Roma in Kosovo. They are seen by Albanian Kosovars as having collaborated with the Serbs. Consequently, they have suffered murder, abduction and intimidation.
It is clear from this, I hope, that many of the foreign faces we see on our streets are here because they have fled from hellish situations.
Now, it is clear that not all asylum-seekers are fleeing this sort of oppression. It seems to me that the 600 Polish asylum-seekers and the 2,226 Romanians are economic migrants.
The UN estimates that one person in every 50 on the planet lives outside his or her country of origin. That amounts to 125 million people. Of these, only 14 million are recognised as refugees by the United Nations.
What this means, then, is that the really significant movement of people in our time is not of refugees but of so-called economic migrants.
Belgium has just re-introduced border controls because it has begun a three-week period of amnesty for asylum-seekers in the country.
These include people who have waited four years or more for a decision on their application for asylum, three years if they have children. The border controls have been reintroduced to stop people being smuggled in during this amnesty period.
This is an example of the conflict between economic migrants and the economies to which they seek to migrate.
This is not just a matter of people trying to better themselves. Consider the utter devastation which AIDS has brought to sub-Saharan Africa. Suppose you lived in a country in which entire generations and classes of people are being wiped out by AIDS, a country in which 60 and 70-year-olds are trying to raise 20 or 30 grandchildren each because the generation in between has died.
Suppose people cannot afford to pay for health services or for schooling in this country. Suppose the economy, jobs, schools, hospitals, everything, collapses in this calamity. This is happening in many African countries and is on the way for others.
If you got out and got to Ireland would "economic migrant" really express what you are going through and what you are fleeing from? Let us remember that some of our so-called economic immigrants today are fleeing from calamities as devastating as our Great Famine.
Let us also remember that some are fleeing from oppression and war of unimaginable horror. And let us draw up a policy on how to deal with all this, instead of lurching from crisis to crisis.
email: pomorain@irish-times.ie