U.N. Team Seeks Truth of Massacres in Silent Congo

If residents of Mbandaka have details of the alleged massacre of hundreds of Rwandan Hutu refugees here and in surrounding communities by troops of Laurent Kabila, few are willing to share them.

A veil of silence shrouds this dilapidated port city where United Nations officials will arrive later this month to investigate whether, as a rebel army made up largely of Tutsis from neighboring Rwanda, Kabila’s troops slaughtered Hutu refugees during his campaign to seize power from the late dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. Kabila is now the Congolese president.

“People are afraid to talk,” a relief worker said. “They don’t know what might happen to them if they talk.”

Though the U.N. teams have been given permission to carry out investigations in Mbandaka, along the Congo River in the country’s northwestern Equator province, and at locations in the eastern Congo, this nation’s officials insist that the teams are wasting their time. The allegations by human rights groups, they say, are nothing short of a conspiracy by the international community to discredit Kabila’s 6-month-old regime.

“They are not ready to give an unbiased report,” said Congolese Minister of Foreign Affairs Bizima Karaha, charging that the U.N. team first came to Congo earlier this year with a completed report, having not conducted any field work. “They had already made up their minds. They say that we killed people; we know that we never did.”

The U.N. team’s three leaders, from Togo, Zimbabwe and the United States, arrived Tuesday in Kinshasa, the capital, and met with Congolese officials. Reed Brody, the American delegate, said a security detail will probably check out several locations in eastern and northwestern Congo before dispatching an advance team, which will prepare the way for full deployment of about 25 investigators by month’s end.

U.N. officials are hopeful that Kabila will live up to his promise to permit the investigation, which has been stalled since May. This probe was to begin with new conditions, such as that it also cover the latter years of Mobutu’s regime and that teams deploy simultaneously in sites in the east and Mbandaka.

“We’ve been disappointed in the past,” said Jose Diaz, the U.N. investigation team’s spokesman in Kinshasa, “but we hope that this time, with their agreement--with conditions--for an independent investigation, we will be able to go ahead.”

Analysts contend that any further glitch in proceedings would strengthen the belief held by critics that Kabila’s Democratic Republic of Congo is no more democratic than the corrupt, dictatorial nation it once was; and that Kabila is no different from the power-hungry Mobutu, who was overthrown in May and died in exile in September. The Kabila administration’s banning of political party activity, crackdown on protests and arbitrary arrests of dissenters have made it easy for naysayers to accuse the new regime of covering up any involvement in the alleged slaying of refugees.

Rights activists charge that as many as 2,000 Rwandan Hutu refugees were slaughtered in communities in and around Mbandaka, which lies more than 350 miles north of Kinshasa and less than three miles from the equator. However, the total number of Rwandan refugees who might have been killed in Congo could be much higher.

According to U.N. estimates, which officials stress are difficult to confirm, about 200,000 Rwandan Hutus are still missing out of the estimated 1.1 million who fled from Rwanda into Zaire, as this country was called under Mobutu, after Hutus killed hundreds of thousands of Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994.

More than 200 possible killing sites in Congo have been identified through preliminary investigations by human rights organizations and information from aid agencies and witnesses.

However, investigators face a tremendous challenge in putting together the pieces of what might have happened.

Local human rights activists contend that, while the Congolese government was busy delaying the U.N. probe--at one stage even preventing officials from purchasing airline tickets to travel outside Kinshasa--potential witnesses were being intimidated into keeping quiet and forced to assist in hiding proof of the killings.

Some remains of corpses were dumped into the Congo River, according to witnesses who spoke to human rights groups on condition of anonymity; others were buried in remote, unmarked graves, which have since been swallowed up in the fast-growing jungle of this region, a former stronghold of Mobutu.

According to a report published by Linelit, a Kinshasa-based human rights group, hundreds of Rwandan refugees were macheted, clubbed and shot to death by soldiers of Kabila’s army as the refugees camped at Mbandaka’s port.

Many people witnessed the butchery, including 15 river transportation workers who told Linelit they were each forced to throw at least 50 corpses into the river.

Scores of other refugees reportedly were gunned down aboard a crowded barge, while many others allegedly were slaughtered in surrounding communes.

Though Linelit managed to extract testimonies from several witnesses before publishing its report in September, it is doubtful that any of Mbandaka’s 400,000 residents would now be allowed--or be brave enough--to share their views.

A Western reporter given rare permission to enter the region recently was only allowed to conduct interviews in the presence of a “minder,” assigned by provincial Gov. Gabriel Mola Motya to accompany the journalist. The reason: “So that people speak the truth,” the minder explained.

Brody, the American delegate on the U.N. team, said: “Our mandate makes it very clear that witness interviews are to be carried out in full confidence. I certainly will not conduct any interview in the presence of a government official.”

Still, local officials insist that they have nothing to hide.

“We are not afraid of the arrival of that commission, unless this committee comes with preconceived ideas and wants to impose them as the truth here” Mola Motya said. “We wish the investigation to be a sincere one. I insist nobody has been massacred in this country.”

But witnesses say hundreds of refugees were slain.

Francois Kwatshi-Mombala, an administrator at the hospital in Bolenge, about seven miles from Mbandaka, said he was in Mbandaka at the time of the alleged massacre and saw scores of bodies of refugees scattered in the streets and at the port.

But he is adamant that Kabila and Congolese soldiers were not responsible. Kabila’s “troops were made up of people from Rwanda; everybody knows that,” Kwatshi-Mombala said. “Those troops came to help Kabila. And when they came face to face with Rwandan refugees, they took revenge for the massacre that took place in Rwanda. It is not strange that, when a Tutsi faces a Hutu, he will feel angry. That’s normal. But no Congolese soldier shot any refugee. I’m really pained to hear our new regime is being falsely accused.”

Congolese officials have consistently maintained that no widespread massacres took place.

Refugees who were slain, they insist, in many cases were killed by Hutu militia trying to prevent the civilians from returning to Rwanda. This would have led to the dissolution of the U.N. refugee camps, which Congolese officials say both remnants of the Rwandan Hutu army and former soldiers of the Mobutu regime were using as a military base.

Karaha, the foreign minister, also admits that there were some slayings but blamed international relief agencies for housing innocent Hutu civilians in the same camps as Hutu militia.

“It’s like taking a lion and putting it in an area where there are sheep,” Karaha said, accusing U.N. aid groups of arming “so-called” refugees in their care.

U.N. officials call the allegations against them absurd, and they have some support from average Congolese.

In a recent survey conducted by Berci, a Kinshasa-based polling organization, 63% of the 1,013 people interviewed favored the U.N.’s probe in the eastern part of the country. Fifty-five percent of the respondents, who included people from 11 different provinces, said they believe that Hutu refugees had been massacred. And 33% said that, if the allegations of massacres proved true, Kabila should be held responsible, compared to 9% who blamed Rwandans.

Human rights groups acknowledge that completing the inquiry and deciding on the punishment for perpetrators--if the accusations of killings are confirmed--will be a major undertaking.

Congolese officials hope that the massacre issue will soon be history so they can concentrate on rebuilding their nation after decades of state pillaging and corruption.

Said one Western diplomat: “They would dearly love to get the U.N. investigation behind them. They would like to be seen as serious and independent.”