35 killed in DRC attacks
Rebel group and militia blamed for Christmas weekend violence
ATTACKS in villages and fighting between militias killed at least 35 people over the Christmas weekend in North Kivu, a majority Christian area in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
The bloodshed began in Eringeti – a town 55km north of the regional hub Beni, which for two years has been hit by massacres killing hundreds, many of whom were hacked to death.
Rebels from The Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) – dominated by puritanical Ugandan Muslims – killed 22 people after storming Eringeti on Saturday, regional official Amisi Kalonda said.
The toll climbed to 35 on Monday with the announcement that at least 13 Hutu civilians, mostly women and an eight-year-old girl, had been killed on Sunday by a militia from the Nande ethnic group.
“The victims were all Hutu. There was an eight-year-old girl [among the dead], a father and the rest were women,” said local official Alphonse Mahano.
They were killed around the village of Nyanzale, a Hutu majority community.
The Nande and some other ethnic groups regard the Hutus as outsiders because of their attachment to the majority ethnic group in neighbouring Rwanda.
A string of attacks in the past year by both Hutu and Nande militia forces has deepened hatred between the communities.
Hutu farmers have also been forced to abandon land further south because of high property costs, and under pressure from major landowners.
Although DRC officials have blamed the attacks on the ADF, several reports by experts have suggested that other groups, including elements within the Congolese army, took part in some killings.
When the Beni massacres began in October 2014, the ADF was quickly branded the culprit by both DRC authorities and Monusco, the UN mission in the DRC.
More than two years on, DRC authorities and the UN have been unable to protect civilians and the ADF remains the only official explanation – with the government insisting on a jihadist link to the killings.
It comes as relations with the international community have soured over President Joseph Kabila’s refusal to step down despite his term ending on December 20.
Separately, the Armed Forces of the DRC (FARDC) announced on Monday that its troops had killed 10 soldiers from neighbouring Burundi after they crossed the border last week in pursuit of rebels.
“There were 10 deaths,” Major Dieudonne Kajibwami said, following a previous statement that five bodies had been taken to Uvira, a lakeside town in the eastern South Kivu province.
The FARDC initially announced the deaths of five Burundian soldiers, in the first known clash since the end of the Second Congo War in 2003.
Kajibwami said the announcement that five bodies had been taken to Uvira preceded the removal of five more bodies by FARDC troops near the scene of the clash.
“In their flight, they didn’t manage to recover the five other bodies,” said Kajibwami, the military spokesman in South Kivu, much of which lies across Lake Tanganyika from Burundi.
The Burundian army declined to comment on the incident.
Burundian medical sources said that wounded soldiers were admitted on Thursday to the military hospital in the capital Bujumbura, which lies on the north shore of the lake, across from Uvira.
The hospital also took in dead bodies, but the sources gave no number for the injured.
According to Kajibwami, FARDC soldiers opened fire on the Burundian troops when they crossed the border after midnight on Wednesday in pursuit of rebels from the ethnic Hutu National Forces of Liberation (FNL).
“Normally, there is cooperation between the two armies,” said another DRC army officer, asking not to be named.
He mentioned a tacit agreement between Bujumbura and Kinshasa to let Burundian soldiers act in pursuit of FNL rebels when they fall back after a raid into Burundi.
“The reason for this glitch” lay in the absence of the military commander of the sector and an ignorance among the soldiers of “the deal between the two sides”, the officer said.
DRC soldiers “opened fire because they have strict instructions at this moment of tension in the country”, he said. — AFP