Refugees From Congo Tell of Massacre by Rebels

Ending a two-week trek from terror, refugees from neighboring Congo on Thursday told of seeing civilians being burned alive and shot as they tried to escape a New Year’s massacre by rebel soldiers in a remote eastern village.

The reports of the refugees, newly arrived at a U.N. reception center in this port town nestled on Lake Tanganyika, which separates Congo and Tanzania, countered claims by rebel leaders that their troops were not responsible for the massacre of at least 600 people in Makobola, nine miles south of the town of Uvira in Congo’s South Kivu region.

The rebels, who are fighting to oust Congolese President Laurent Kabila, have launched an investigation into allegations of their involvement in the blood bath, first reported last week by the Rome-based Roman Catholic Missionary News Service, or MISNA.

But the refugees, many of whom arrived in Kigoma on Wednesday night from Makobola and the surrounding region, said they know who the killers were.

“Their features were Tutsi, and they spoke Kinyarwanda,” Bachinda Mulanda, 22, said as he described the tall physiques and aquiline features of his alleged attackers, who reportedly spoke the native tongue of Rwanda. “They captured my whole family. They forced us all into one house. We were about 35. Then they set the house on fire. There was a window open, so I jumped through and ran away.”

Mulanda, a short, stocky man of the Bembe ethnic group, spoke through an interpreter. He said his assailants wore military uniforms and arrived early in the morning on Dec. 30. He said that the soldiers threw babies and small children into deep pit latrines, where they were left to die, and shot adults who disobeyed orders to enter a house and instead tried to escape.

The rebel coalition of ethnic Tutsis, disaffected Congolese soldiers and opposition politicians, which has military backing from Rwanda and Uganda, has claimed that the death toll came in combat after Hutu rebels from neighboring Burundi crossed into Congo and attacked rebel forces in Makobola.

But the MISNA report said that civilians, including women and children, were killed between Dec. 30 and Jan. 1 in retaliation for an earlier attack by local Mai Mai warriors--a loose coalition of ethnic groups that are known to support Kabila.

At least four regional African nations have sided with the Congolese leader.

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.

Amissi Tcheko, 22, another Makobola native, said he witnessed fighting between Tutsi rebels--who have had control of Makobola for several months--and the Mai Mai in the days before the massacre. He said that most villagers had heard that the rebels had suffered heavy losses.

“After they had been defeated, they came back for the civilians,” said Tcheko, a native Bembe farmer who also identified the assailants as Rwandans. “Those who ran into their homes were burned alive. The ones who ran into the bush were shot.”

As soon as the shooting began, Tcheko and his family scattered, he said. His mother and father were instantly mowed down.

But the young farmer’s 12-year-old sister was able to stick with him, so the two siblings survived together.

The pair spent almost two weeks trekking through dense jungle, climbing hills and uprooting cassava, a large sweet-potato-like plant, from abandoned farms for food.

After crossing an inlet on a makeshift raft, the siblings reached a dock on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. They managed to sneak their way onto a boat and to safety in Kigoma on Wednesday evening with nothing but the rags on their backs.

Mulanda, the man whose family was burned alive, also fled Makobola on Dec. 30. He spent two weeks in the bush before joining up with two other men from around Makobola. Lacking the money to pay for the boat ride across the world’s second-deepest lake, the men made a treacherous two-day journey on a homemade raft. “We had to tighten our belts,” Mulanda said as he recalled the hunger that consumed the men on their escape to Tanzania.

Although the number of refugees arriving in Kigoma from Makobola is unclear, officials with the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that at least 2,370 people had arrived from Congo since Dec. 28 and said there appeared to be a continuing steady stream.

“All the problems they tell us about [regarding the situation in Congo] is an indication that we should be expecting more,” said Anthony Mogga, a U.N. refugee agency repatriation officer in Kigoma.

Abdulkadir Jama, the agency’s senior program officer in Kigoma, said the fast-changing events in Congo have made planning difficult. The agency had repatriated 53,000 refugees between December 1997 and August 1998, when the rebellion was launched, and it was hoped that at least one camp for Congolese refugees would be closed this year.

Now, Jama confirmed, facilities for Congolese refugees might have to be expanded.

Although the rebels control much of the eastern half of Congo--a country about the size of the U.S. east of the Mississippi--they have largely failed to win widespread popular support. Many Congolese view them as a foreign occupying force.

“When they first came, they said they wanted to change the government and improve our lives,” said Mkangya Mseke, a veterinarian who fled a village near Makobola as soon as word spread of the reported killings there. “But now they are killing, and stealing from us.

“They are Rwandans, but they were telling us this is their country, this is their home. I would like these people who have invaded our country to leave so we can live in peace.”

Belafelaka Bombote, 26, a self-described Mai Mai fighter, said he had been willing to pick up arms to send the rebels “back to Rwanda.” As he sat on a bed in Kigoma’s dingy Maweni Hospital with a bullet still lodged in his left thigh and gunshot wounds to his right arm and head, Bombote told of how he and scores of other Mai Mai fighters--with no formal military training--engaged in battle with Kinyarwanda-speaking soldiers in the region surrounding Makobola.

In raids, the Mai Mai killed several rebels and stole their weapons, Bombote confirmed.

“They should go back to their country,” the fighter said. “They have no business in our country.”

A regional summit scheduled for Saturday aims to bring Kabila and the rebels face to face to sign a document paving the way for a cease-fire in the Congolese conflict. But some outside observers have doubts about the summit’s success, because last week Kabila made a surprise offer to meet his foes--but insisted that such talks take place in Congo’s capital, Kinshasa.

Riziki Matembo and her neighbor Tatu Zuberi, both Makobola residents, said they simply want the war to end so they can continue with their lives.

With five children between them, infants strapped tightly to their backs, the women told of how rebels--who had once claimed to be their friends and saviors--shot villagers and torched their homes after assuring them that if they cooperated, they would be safe.

Matembo and Zuberi fled into nearby hills. The two women walked for more than a week before reaching Tanganyika’s shoreline.

Along the way, they picked up two traumatized youths who had lost their parents.

“We were walking aimlessly; we were rained on, the children were hungry and crying,” recalled Zuberi, 29. “We dug up cassavas in people’s gardens to eat.”

The women exchanged some of the clothes on their backs for a ride across the lake to the safety of Kigoma, where they arrived Wednesday.

“We are not in a hurry to go back,” said Matembo, 22. “What we want is peace.”