NEW YORK // The UN has released a report accusing Rwandan troops of raping and killing Hutu refugees in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide, detailing what it claims were widespread instances of mass- killing.
The 550-page catalogue of atrocities has been condemned by officials in Rwanda and other neighbouring countries that are implicated in the violence as a "rewriting of history" and a threat to the security and stability of central Africa. Covering a decade of violence from 1993, the UN report outlines the flight of more than one million Rwandans, mostly Hutus, into neighbouring DR Congo after the country's 1994 genocide, in which some 800,000 victims, mostly Tutsis, were killed.
Rwandan forces invaded DR Congo in 1996 in pursuit of the so-called genocidaires, who lived among hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees. The UN report describes "tens of thousands" of Hutu civilians being killed with knives, burnt alive and bludgeoned with hammers as the Rwandan army and the Allied Democratic Liberation Forces swept across DR Congo - then called Zaire - leading to the toppling of long-time ruler Mobutu Sese Seko.
DR Congo's ambassador to the UN yesterday demanded justice for the victims of the massacres. "They deserve that their voices are heard by my government and by the international community," DR Congo's ambassador to the United Nations, Ileka Atoki, said in a statement. The report said Rwandan soldiers did not discriminate between fugitives and refugees, describing systematic rapes, mutilations and murders - mostly of children, women, elderly and the sick, who were "often undernourished and posed no threat to the attacking forces".
"Thus the apparent systematic and widespread attacks described in this report reveal a number of inculpatory elements that, if proven before a competent court, could be characterised as crimes of genocide," said the document, which wad released yesterday. Called a "Mapping Exercise", the UN report saw 33 researchers spend eight months in DR Congo, interviewing 1,280 witnesses and analysing 1,500 documents before compiling evidence of 617 violations committed by several armies and rebel groups between 1993 and 2003.
The exercise was launched after UN peacekeepers discovered three mass graves in eastern DR Congo in 2005, two years after DR Congo's peace process became effective. In her foreword, the UN high commissioner for human rights Navi Pillay says that "no report can adequately describe the horrors experienced by the civilian population" in DR Congo. A draft version of the document was leaked to a French newspaper, Le Monde, at the end of August and provoked furious reactions from officials in Rwanda and other governments that are implicated in the allegations.
The Rwandan government, under the presidency of Paul Kagame, draws its legitimacy from being the force that ended the 1994 genocide, and threatened to pull peacekeeping troops out of western Sudan's Darfur region if the report's damaging allegations were published. But Mr Kagame agreed to retain peacekeepers in Sudan's war-ravaged province after closed-door talks with the UN's secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. The UN agreed to publish the document while also giving the accused governments right of reply.
"Rwanda categorically states that the document is flawed and dangerous from start to finish," the country's foreign minister, Louise Mushikiwabo, said in a statement.
