This hamlet of straw-thatched mud huts in the heart of Congo's vast rain forest harbors a dark secret. In mid-April, urged on by military officers loyal to rebel leader Laurent Kabila, its villagers tore through a camp of mostly Rwandan Hutu refugees, hacking and spearing groups of men, women and children.
Armed men among the Hutus fought them off. But a day later, Kabila's rebel forces stepped in and, according to survivors and local residents, ravaged the refugee community of 55,000 for seven hours, firing wildly into the encampment in a grove of palm trees straddling a rutted jungle road. Again local villagers joined in the fray, wielding spears and machetes against the refugees.
The local residents and refugee survivors say hundreds died. Many of them were buried in a mass grave 500 yards up a dirt path that now is guarded by Kabila's troops.
The story of Kasese is just one of numerous tales of mass killings of refugees carried out by soldiers loyal to Kabila, now president of Congo, during his seven-month push to topple Mobutu Sese Seko, then leader of what was called Zaire. Allegations that Kabila's men killed Hutu women and children throughout Congo and urged Congolese villagers to do the same have complicated his attempts to gain international recognition of his victory over Mobutu and the new government he installed May 29.
The stories, along with mass graves and accounts of witnesses and victims in eastern, central and western Congo, paint a horrific picture of atrocities. The reported killings stretch from Goma and Bukavu, where Kabila's rebellion erupted in eastern Congo last autumn, to Mbandaka, 750 miles to the west, on the other side of the country.
Taken together, they suggest the massacres were not isolated instances of unruly troops, but rather part of Kabila's war of liberation. Their goal appears to have been twofold: vengeance and security.
Interviews with international aid workers, refugees and local villagers indicate that Kabila's army is closely controlled by Rwandan officers who dominate its upper echelons. Kabila relied heavily on the well-trained Rwandan officers, along with Rwandan, Angolan and Ugandan troops, to push Mobutu's army aside. But in so doing he made a deal with people intent on bringing the 1994 ethnic war in Rwanda to Congolese soil.
During that war, radical Hutu militiamen slaughtered an estimated 500,000 Rwandan Tutsi civilians. Rwandan Tutsi guerrillas then rose up, in part from bases in Uganda, and ousted Rwandan Hutus from power. The radical Hutus fled Rwanda into Zaire, bringing with them 1 million Hutu refugees.
Their goal was very similar to that of the Tutsis who ousted them: to use another country, in this case Congo, as a base from where they could train and one day return victorious to Rwanda. Starting last year, Rwandan Hutus began launching an increasing number of attacks into Rwanda, from bases in the refugee camps of Congo.
In October, soldiers and officers from the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan army, after training with other pro-Kabila African forces in the Rwandan jungle for about a year, entered Congo along with the other forces, including Congolese Tutsis, to crush the Rwandan Hutu security threat.
With Kabila as its head, the movement declared it was out to unseat Mobutu. But U.N. officials and Congolese officers in Kabila's army say its highest priorities -- which have remained prominent -- were to remove the Hutus from the border with Rwanda and to crush the radical Hutu movement by killing as many Hutu refugees as possible.
In interviews, Congolese soldiers fighting for Kabila indicate that the massacres were ordered by the Rwandan army officers who dominated Kabila's officer corps. In Mbandaka, for example, Congolese soldiers said the order to slaughter unarmed refugees came from two men -- identified as Col. Wilson, the head of a brigade of Kabila's troops, and Col. Richard, the brigade's operations chief. Both were identified as Rwandans. A Congolese, Gen. Gaston Muyango, has the title of military commander in the area but has no real power, they said.
In some places, such as Kasese, the population was involved in the killing. In other areas, such as Mbandaka, on the banks of the Congo River far from the battlefields of the east, the local population said it was shocked by the mayhem.
Kabila and his officials have denied that their troops carried out massacres and summary executions of the Rwandan refugees. In interviews, several members of Kabila's rebel alliance blamed the bloodshed on armed units among the Rwandan refugees, fleeing Congolese soldiers loyal to Mobutu or bandits.
"Look, if we had wanted to kill all the refugees, why are we letting these people go home?" said Kalinda Kinanuka, an official of Kabila's new Interior Ministry, as he watched a group of refugees board a U.N. plane to Kigali, Rwanda, from Mbandaka on Saturday. "We are professionals. If we had wanted to kill them, we would have killed them."
On Saturday, after meeting with Bill Richardson, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Kabila agreed to cooperate with a U.N. investigation into reported massacres and other human rights abuses.
But the first team is due in the Congo in two weeks and the investigation is scheduled to begin July 6. Already, Kabila's forces appear to be destroying evidence of their attack here.
On Monday, this reporter saw more than 40 men moving through the Kasese camp, picking up spent cartridges and dropped machetes and spears. Two of the men said the team would later go to the mass grave site and begin burning cadavers. Piles of firewood had been collected at the beginning of a dirt road that leads to the grave site. This reporter went to the site but was chased away by several soldiers and a small group of men clutching panga knives. A similar cleanup operation already has been reported at the Biaro refugee camp nine miles away.
The Kasese camp is sandwiched between two villages on a road 17 miles south of Kisangani, a diamond and gold mining city in central Congo. Today the refugee camp looks like a huge, ravaged picnic ground.
Patricia Ndizeye, 20, is a Hutu who was a refugee in the camp since it was formed in March. Hutu refugees came there from another camp at Tingi Tingi, 200 miles northwest of Goma in far eastern Zaire, near the Rwandan border. Before that they had lived in several other camps after the fall of Rwanda's Hutu government in 1994, moving to flee Kabila's troops, who according to U.N. workers and survivors killed Rwandan Hutus at camps near Goma as well as Bukavu and Uvira to the south.
On April 20, Kabila's forces banned U.N. aid workers from Kasese and a nearby camp, Biaro. That night, a woman from Kasese village was killed by an unknown gunman. Kabila's officers told villagers that refugees, who had been ravaging local fields for corn and cassava, were guilty, but international aid officials said they do not believe that claim.
The next day, villagers, clutching knives and spears, attacked the camp, cutting a few refugees and pillaging the camp's infirmary. Armed Hutu militants within the camp's population fought back, firing several shots at the villagers, who fled.
At 4 the next morning, according to one account, and at 5:30, according to another, the rebel military surrounded the vast camp and began firing on the just-awakening refugees. For seven hours, according to Ndizeye and local villagers, the attack endured.
"It lasted for hours. Tat-tat-tat, tat-tat-tat, the soldiers were just killing and killing," said a local farmer who spoke on condition of anonymity because Kabila's officers have warned people not to speak to outsiders about the event.
Ndizeye, a doe-eyed student who hopes one day to become a nun, hid in a bush while the soldiers and the villagers worked their way through the camp. Thousands among the camp's population fled into the thick jungle. Hundreds could not move.
Among the camp's 55,000 people, according to Peter Kessler, a spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, 9,000 were considered "extremely vulnerable," meaning that they could not walk or they were sick.
Near nightfall of April 22, Ndizeye came out from under her bush and inched toward the jungle.
"I passed over the bodies of many people; some were still crying. There was everyone there -- women, children, men, brothers, boys, girls," she recalled, speaking in a U.N. refugee camp.
She spent the night in the woods near the camp and the next morning awoke, she said, to the sound of a bulldozer pushing a mound of corpses into a large pit.
Amid the corpses -- but still alive -- was her brother, Donatien Nkerabahizi, 32, a student. Marauding villagers had sliced his head open in five places, almost severed his right arm and cut holes in his left leg. He had been left for dead and collected with the other bodies.
"I was lying in the pile of dead people among my old friends who were now gone, bleeding, there was nothing left of them," he recounted at a nearby U.N. infirmary where he is recovering from the attack, his arm still swathed in bandages, his head still leaking pus. "The most dangerous was when I was vomiting. The smell made me so sick. But I didn't want anyone to hear."
Nkerabahizi described the pile of corpses as approximately 5 feet high, 40 feet long and 20 feet wide. He said he lay near the bottom of the pile, at the back toward the woods.
"When the bulldozer driver took a break, I moved like a snake into the forest," he said. "I lived there for a week. Then when I heard U.N. people calling to us with megaphones, I decided to find them. When I was in the forest my skin was peeling off like plastic. My arm was infected, and I knew I was going to die."
Under intense international pressure, Kabila agreed on April 28 to allow U.N. aid officials access to the area. U.N. officials and two soldiers from Kabila's army who said they were disgusted with the Rwandan leadership said large-scale killing of refugees occurred also in the Biaro camp.
A few weeks later another massacre, of a different sort, is alleged to have occurred in Mbandaka, a steamy town that straddles the equator in Congo's far west.
On May 13, shortly before 8 a.m., Kabila's troops entered the region. They arrived first in the hamlet of Wenji.
Shouting, "Zairians, don't be afraid, we've come for the refugees," according to three local witnesses, the soldiers made for a refugee camp of 20,000 that had sprung up along the banks of the Congo River. The Rwandan Hutu refugees had arrived in Wenji, about 15 miles south of Mbandaka, on April 18. They had walked more than 1,000 miles from their Bukavu camps. They, too, were fleeing Kabila's forces.
Unlike the refugees in Kasese, the Rwandan Hutus in Mbandaka had been disarmed. The local military governor, a Mobutu man known as Gen. Mokubo who commanded a brigade of marines, had also disarmed fleeing soldiers from Mobutu's defeated army who had been pillaging villages along the way.
"The refugees were without arms," agreed Gabriel Mola-Motia, the new governor of the region. "My predecessor really did a good job."
Anselm Eale, 35, is proprietor of a health center in Iyonda, a village near Wenji. He remembered May 13 as a "horrible day."
"For us it was the first time to live such a story. Around 7:30, just as we were opening the doors of the dispensary, we heard sounds of gunfire. At first we just thought it was the marines doing their job, but then we heard explosions that we had never heard before. We knew it was Kabila. We closed the door. The sick went home and we fled to our houses," he said.
"Outside there was a river of people, of refugees, fleeing Wenji. Some went into the forest, others stole canoes and went to the river. Many were wounded. There was blood and dying people everywhere," he said. "They killed many refugees that day."
In the afternoon, when the shooting stopped, Eale was directed to a pile of wounded women. He said he found a woman and her daughter, about 10 years old, dead. Two others were wounded but alive.
In Wenji that day, Red Cross workers buried 116 people and pushed dozens more bodies into the river, they said.
Killing continued in Mbandaka on May 13 as the soldiers moved in. They chased refugees through the small riverside town, gunning down about 15 people who had hidden behind a large fresco of Mobutu, witnesses said.
Several residents said women fleeing the bloodshed handed them their babies for protection from the marauding troops. Of the 7,000 Rwandan refugees repatriated from the area by the United Nations, more than 1,250 have been unaccompanied children.
About 280 refugees had assembled on a barge at the port and were waiting for a tugboat to move them down the Congo River so they could cross to safety. The ship's captain however had gone into town.
A wizened longshoreman described the scene he saw, looking out of a warehouse.
"The army came onto the docks and started spraying the port with bullets. All of the soldiers just loaded their guns and shot at the boat, killing everybody. Bodies fell into the river. Bodies fell onto the quay. Bodies fell into the barge," he said recently as he stood by the water and angled for catfish.
"I was in the warehouse and saw it all. We have never seen anything like that. The smell, all the blood, the crying. And the soldiers were so cold. Then they called the Red Cross to clean up the mess. They came and they pushed the rest of the bodies into the river," he said.
U.N. officials worry that thousands more refugees are alive in the Congo's dense jungles and risk extermination by Kabila's troops.
A U.N. team found a group of 300 over the weekend in swamps two days by boat from Mbandaka.
But Congolese authorities denied the team permission to remove the refugees, U.N. officials said. The Congolese then told the U.N. team that the area would be closed because of military operations.
"We are worried that we are being used by the military to identify where the refugees are. The military will then go in and kill them," a U.N. official said.