A young woman and man hold the Kwibuka Flame of Remembrance during a
procession in Kigali, Rwanda, on April 3, 2014, as the torch makes its
way through the country's thirty districts before being returned to the
Kigali Genocide Memorial on April 7. April 7 is the start of a national
mourning period and marks twenty years since the 1994 genocide against
the Tutsi . AFP PHOTO / SIMON MAINA
By AFP
In Summary
- But Roberto Garreton of Chile, the first to investigate the slaughter on behalf of the United Nations in April 1997, says he concluded fairly quickly that around 150,000 people had been slain on Congolese soil.
- Hutus were allegedly hunted down elsewhere as Kabila's AFDL fighters advanced on Kinshasa, some 1,000 kilometres (600 miles) to the west.
Twenty years after the genocide of Rwanda's
Tutsi minority, the massacres of Hutu civilians who fled across the
border into the DR Congo remain a taboo subject in Kigali.
In DR Congo's restive east, however, the memories
are painfully acute, of families rounded up and murdered, bodies dumped
in mass graves, pregnant women disembowelled.
The Tutsi-led Rwandan government sees as
tantamount to negationism any suggestion that the victims of genocide
were themselves responsible for mass ethnic killings in 1996-97.
Kinshasa has never truly investigated the subject.
But Roberto Garreton of Chile, the first to
investigate the slaughter on behalf of the United Nations in April 1997,
says he concluded fairly quickly that around 150,000 people had been
slain on Congolese soil.
The killings are blamed on forces of the
post-genocide government in Kigali who backed a rebel movement led by
Laurent-Desire Kabila, the late father of current DR Congo President
Joseph Kabila.
"There were many clues showing that the goal was
to exterminate those who committed the genocide" against the Tutsis,
Garreton told AFP by telephone from Santiago.
But, he added: "It wasn't possible to say with
certainty that there was a genocide," that is, the wilful extermination
of an ethnic group.
Phoney reconciliation meetings
Here in Rutshuru in the country's east, a
Congolese Hutu told AFP: "They killed many! They set up barricades and
if you had a Hutu name they took you away (and) they killed you!"
A woman who gave her name only as Chiza said: "I
saw a pregnant woman whose stomach had been cut open, and the baby was
beside her, still attached by the umbilical cord. The woman's belly was
full of flies."
Located some 50 kilometres (30 miles) from the
regional mining hub Goma, Rutshuru and its surrounding area was a major
target of killings in 1996.
That was when Laurent-Desire Kabila kicked off his rebellion in North and South Kivu provinces in what was then Zaire.
Kabila's rebel ADFL army, which would succeed in
overthrowing the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997, was backed by
Rwandan troops who poured across the border, where hundreds of thousands
of Rwandan Hutu refugees had fled in 1994.
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