Massacre video sparks Congo war crimes outcry

The New York Times

NAIROBI, Kenya — The video opens with a squad of soldiers walking down a sandy, sunlit road toward a group of people who are chanting.

Then the soldiers — who appear to be uniformed members of the national army of the Democratic Republic of Congo, accompanied by a heavy military truck — raise their weapons. They start firing. One by one, the figures in the road drop.

The soldiers then saunter up to the wounded, blasting them in the head with assault rifles from a few feet away. Many of the victims look young; several are women. None carry guns. These images are part of a battlefield video that was shared with The New York Times on Friday and that, thanks to Congolese human rights activists, has begun to make the rounds on Facebook and other social media.

Several analysts said the footage revealed a government-sponsored massacre of civilians and that the video could be used as evidence of war crimes.

Human Rights Watch, Western diplomats and U.N. officials said they were investigating the video, which was consistent with United Nations reports last week of Congolese government soldiers ruthlessly crushing a local militia in the Kasai-Central Province.

“The video shows shocking footage of killings and executions of civilians by uniformed personnel,” a statement by the U.N. peacekeeping department said.

Peacekeeping officials said they were trying to verify the source of the video and whether it was linked to the recent clashes in the Kasai area.

Congo has a sordid history of government-led atrocities, including gang rapes and the slaughtering of civilians. The country is nearly lawless, and the government forces are known to be wild, brutal, underpaid and among the most dreaded.

But it is rare to have such powerful, graphic evidence of the blase taking of human life.

The video appears to have been recorded within the past 10 days, analysts said, during the government’s military operations to quash the Kamuina Nsapu militia. The militia is an offshoot of a local movement in Kasai whose followers have challenged the government over local autonomy.

Last week, a spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Liz Throssell, said as many as 101 people, including 39 women, may have been killed in clashes in the Kasai area.

Lambert Mende, Congo’s information minister, said the video was not shot in Congo and that it was an attempt by nongovernmental organizations “to destroy the image of the DRC.”