In a publicized statement to the press, the
Rwandan-backed RCD fighting to overthrow the Congolese President
Laurent Kabila claimed to have killed 200 Hutu rebels, and made 100
prisoners.
"We didn't see any Hutu rebel killed. What we saw were scores of bodies of children, elderly, and women. Soldiers from the RPA, the Rwandan Army, came in the night, went from house to house killing anybody inside, and burning homes. These Rwandan soldiers were even afraid of going far from the main road, let alone killing that many Hutu rebels.
They were shouting that they want to avenge the Tutsis of the Burundian Army killed by the Burundian rebels", said this traditional chief on his way to his second exile in as many years.
The Rwandan army managed to displace several thousands of Congolese in this new operation. "This constitutes a new violation of the Lusaka accord by these Rwanda invaders", angrily confided a Congolese teacher whose salary was not paid for more than a year.
Congolese in occuppied territories agree that these massacres again demonstrates the brutality and human abuses committed by the Rwandan army in Eastern Congo.
These massacres also underline the fragility of the ceasefire agreement signed by the belligerents in the Congo's conflict.
The military regimes of Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda have been trying to remove Laurent Kabila, once their close ally, from power for more than a year.
Most analysts view the invasion of these countries as a way of plundering the Congolese vast natural resources.
The regimes, absolutely dominated by the Tutsi minority, are fighting fierce rebellions from disgruntled majority ethnic groups in their countries.
In the mean time, in a move that observers say is out of desperation, these governments have rounded up thousands of Hutus, including women, children and elders, and locked them in concentration camps, where hundreds of them are dying daily of hunger, disease, lack of sanitation, and the elements.
Moreover, in Rwanda alone, more than 150,000 Hutu elite, business people, clergy, and social leaders have been kept in jail for more than five years without trial.
These Rwandan prisons have arguably become the most crowded, most dangerous, and most inhumane prisons in the World. Hundreds of thousands of people are held in truck containers, disused factories, old bathrooms, wet or leaking dungeons, or anywhere things can be confined. Crowded cells serve as toilets, sleeping, and living rooms. Prisoners are regularly tortured. Thousands have lost limbs, developed skin diseases, or caught recurrent or terminal illnesses.