Congo Rebels to Investigate Reports of Civilian Slayings

Congolese rebel leaders Wednesday ordered an investigation into reports that hundreds of civilians had been slaughtered by their troops in an apparent revenge attack in the eastern part of the country.

Analysts said the allegations would damage any credibility the rebels might have gained in their five-month campaign to topple President Laurent Kabila.

The reported blood bath last week came just four months after a massacre of more than 600 people allegedly committed by the rebels, which rebel leaders still are investigating.

“It will reinforce a cynical view that there is really no difference between the two sides in terms of morality and ethics, even in the midst of war,” said Salih Booker, director of the African studies program at the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations.

Kabila has faced sharp accusations of human rights abuses since he ousted dictator Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997. He renamed the country, which the late Mobutu called Zaire, the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Some of the rebels say they split with Kabila when they became convinced that he was not going to build a democracy and when he embraced an extreme ethnic Hutu movement that was largely responsible for the 1994 genocide against ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus in neighboring Rwanda. The rebels include ethnic Tutsis.

The reported tragedy will probably set back even further the frail hopes for a negotiated settlement to Congo’s civil war. And it underscores the struggle rebel leaders--academics and Congolese political opponents of Kabila--face in controlling their military forces, made up of disgruntled army soldiers, civilians who have taken up arms and soldiers from allied countries such as Rwanda and Uganda.

The Rome-based Roman Catholic Missionary News Service, or MISNA, reported Tuesday that the civilians were killed between Dec. 30 and Jan. 1 in retaliation for an earlier attack by local Mai-Mai tribal warriors, who are known to support Kabila.

MISNA said the victims, including women and children, were shot or hacked to death in the remote village of Makobola, nine miles from the town of Uvira, in the country’s South Kivu region. The news agency claimed that the killers were ethnic Tutsis from Congo, who are known as Banyamulenge.

No independent information was available from the site of the reported massacre.

At the United Nations, a spokesman said Secretary-General Kofi Annan had read with “deep concern” reports of the massacre.

“Throughout the conflict in [Congo], the secretary-general has called on all parties to respect human rights and international humanitarian law,” the spokesman said. “He reiterates that call today, as well as his strong condemnation of killing and other atrocities such as those alleged to have been committed at Makobola.”

Ernest Wamba dia Wamba, a leader of the rebel Congolese Rally for Democracy, said there were indications that his troops had clashed with Hutu insurgents based in neighboring Tanzania and Burundi and that there had been casualties, including civilians.

Wamba dia Wamba said a delegation would be dispatched to Uvira today to begin an inquiry.

“People shouldn’t charge the whole movement on the basis of this one case,” he said by satellite phone from the rebel stronghold of Goma in eastern Congo. “What they should do is see how we deal with it. . . . Those responsible will be brought to justice and punished.”

Jean-Francois Vidal, executive director of Action Against Hunger, a New York-based nongovernmental organization, said Tuesday that he had been told by the group’s field representatives that at least 350 people had been killed and that the number could increase to 800.

“There is no more precise information, but from the humanitarian point of view, it is an absolute disaster,” Vidal said. He added that, in the last few days, there also had been reports of 40,000 displaced people in the area.

Other relief groups expressed fear that their local personnel might have been among the victims.

“We are right now in Uvira talking to the authorities and double-checking the facts, after which we will see which course of action to take,” Nina Galbe, a spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, said in Nairobi.

“Rumors abound in the Kivu [area]. We have to be extremely cautious. In previous incidents, we have been misled as to the figures and the people involved in massacres,” she said.

A spokesman at the Congolese Embassy in Nairobi said Congolese Tutsis fleeing the Uvira area because of the lack of rebel support there committed the alleged slaughter.

“It was a move to quit the area. . . . They fled, and in their panic, they killed people,” the diplomat said.

Booker, the Africa specialist, said the massacre claims would probably fuel the anti-rebel propaganda by Kabila’s government.

The rebels control much of the eastern half of Congo. However, they have largely failed to win wide popular support despite an ambitious program aimed at regenerating civic and economic activity and establishing political order.

Local critics of the rebels said the renegade soldiers are trigger-happy, out of control and opposed to the openness, inclusion and respect for human rights preached by their political leaders.

In August, rebel troops were implicated in the slaughter of several hundred civilians in Kasika, also south of Uvira, in revenge for an ambush.

Missionaries in Kasika said they found 633 bodies at the local Catholic mission and a nearby village.

Wamba dia Wamba said the rebel movement was working to improve the cohesion between its political and military wings.

“We are in conditions of war, and in conditions of war small mistakes could lead to an incident” like a massacre, he said. “It may not mean that we don’t have control over the forces.”

Times staff writer John J. Goldman at the United Nations contributed to this report.