DRC refugees tell of army’s civilian killings

LUSAKA: Zambia fears a looming humanitarian crisis after more than 6 000 refugees fleeing turmoil in the Democratic Republic of Congo entered its territory in one month, a senior UN official has said citing accounts of government forces killing civilians..

Pierrine Aylara, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) chief representative in Zambia, said the latest asylum seekers had said they were fleeing Congolese government forces.

“It is the government of the DRC that is said to be persecuting its own people by killing, maiming people and torching houses, as well as committing rape and looting food stored in granaries,” Aylara said.

Thousands of people have been killed and more than one million forced to flee their homes in the DRC’S eastern Kasai region since the start of an insurrection nearly a year ago by the Kamuina Nsapu militia. Kamuina Nsapu is demanding the withdrawal of military forces from Kasai.

But UN monitors noted in a report that the conflict has shifted away from an insurrection of a specific community towards a wider upheaval far beyond its initial confines.

A rebel group known as Elema was fighting the government mainly with machetes, bows and arrows in Congo’s Haut Katanga and Tanganyika provinces, Aylara said.

“The group is not targeting civilians and aims to protect them, but is rather targeting government soldiers, the police as well as government establishments,” she said.

The insurgency poses the worst threat yet to the rule of DRC President Joseph Kabila. His refusal to step down at the end of his constitutional mandate last December prompted killing and lawlessness across the vast nation.

“In turn, government soldiers have become increasingly brutal to the civilian population as they are unable to tell who does and does not belong to this (rebel) group,” Aylara said. – Reuters