Massacred yards from UN post

AT LAST the bullets stopped and Francois Kambere Siviri made a dash for the door. After hiding all night from firefights between rebels and a government-allied militia over this small but strategic town, he was desperate to get to the toilet a few feet away.

"Pow, pow, pow," said his widowed mother, Ludia Kavira Nzuva, recounting how the rebels killed her 25-year-old son just outside her front door. As they abandoned his bloodied corpse, she said, one turned to her and declared, "Voila, here is your gift."

In little more than 24 hours, at least 150 people would be dead, most of them young men, summarily executed by the rebels last month as they tightened their grip over parts of eastern Congo, according to witnesses and human-rights investigators.

And yet, as the killings took place, a contingent of about 100 United Nations peacekeepers was less than a mile away, struggling to understand what was happening outside the gates of their base. The peacekeepers were short of equipment and men, UN officials said, and they were focusing on evacuating frightened aid workers and searching for a foreign journalist who had been kidnapped. Already overwhelmed, officials said, they had no intelligence capabilities or even an interpreter who could speak the necessary languages.

The peacekeepers said they had no idea that the killings were taking place until it was all over.

The executions in Kiwanja are a study in the unfettered cruelty meted out by the armed groups fighting for power and resources in eastern Congo. But the events are also a textbook example of the continuing failure of the world's largest international peacekeeping force, which has a mandate to protect the Congolese people from brutality.

The killings and the stumbling response to the rebel advance were symptomatic of problems that have plagued the UN peacekeeping force in Congo for years, said Anneke Van Woudenberg, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, who investigated the slayings.

"Kiwanja was a disaster for everyone," Van Woudenberg said. "The people were betrayed not just by rebels who committed terrible war crimes against them, but by the international community that failed to protect them."

In the past year alone, hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to flee their homes as the rebels, led by a renegade army general, have waged a fierce insurgency against the government and its allied militias.

The rebel general, Laurent Nkunda, denied that his troops had executed civilians, accusing militias allied with the government of trying to make his rebel movement look bad.

"We cannot kill the population," he said. "It is not in our behaviour to kill and to rape."

But extensive interviews with victims, aid workers and human-rights investigators showed that Nkunda's men carried out a door-to-door military operation over two days in which young men and others were executed.

The trouble began on October 28, when Congolese Army troops fled the town, fearful of the advance of Nkunda's troops.

The soldiers, who had already been routed by Nkunda's men farther south, looted and raped as they ran, according to witnesses and investigators.

With the soldiers long gone, Nkunda's troops took the towns of Kiwanja and Rutshuru without firing a shot. Immediately, they ordered the residents who remained to torch sprawling camps that held about 30,000 people displaced by earlier fighting, proclaiming that it was now safe for the camp dwellers to return to their villages, witnesses said.

"They said there was security, so everyone should go home," said Francois Hazumutima, a retired teacher who had been living in a nearby camp. "But none of us felt safe."

A week later, on November 4, a group of militia fighters known as the Mai Mai carried out a surprise attack on Kiwanja. But the rebels soon routed the Mai Mai – and ordered all residents to leave.

The soldiers then went house to house, saying they were searching for militia fighters who stayed behind to fight.

The rebels came to the door of a 25-year-old trader, banging and threatening to shoot their way in.

"There were gunshots everywhere," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. "They asked for money. I gave them $200."

He then watched in impotent horror as the rebels went to his 22-year-old brother's house next door. The man, a student, had no money to offer them. The soldiers ordered him to lie on the ground. They stabbed him in the neck with their bayonets and shot him in the head, he said.

"They said, 'If you don't have money, you are Mai Mai,'" he said. "Everyone who was young was destined to die."

According to witnesses and clips of video shot at the time, Jean Bosco Ntaganda, Nkunda's chief of staff, commanded the troops that carried out the killings. Ntaganda, whose nom de guerre is the Terminator, is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes committed while he was commanding a different armed group earlier in the war.

Meanwhile, confusion reigned at the nearby peacekeepers' base. The company of soldiers sits in a valley that is highly vulnerable to incoming fire and has a poor vantage point from which to keep tabs on the surrounding area.

To make logistical arrangements, the peacekeepers depend largely on civilian staff members who work normal business hours and have weekends off. Unable to speak to most of the population and with almost no intelligence capabilities, Lieutenant Colonel H S Brar, the commander of the Indian peacekeepers based in Kiwanja, groped his way through a fog of rumour, speculation and misinformation.

"During this whole time, there was an informational vacuum," Brar said.

With just one company of soldiers and three armoured vehicles, the colonel's peacekeepers were overwhelmed, he said. Patrols had to be aborted because rebels and militia fighters opened fire with heavy weapons that could pierce their vehicles' cladding. The peacekeepers said they could not tell the difference between the different armed groups and were fearful of firing on civilians.

The colonel said he was juggling orders from headquarters in Goma to rescue stranded aid workers and search for a kidnapped foreign journalist.

Making matters worse, the peacekeepers' armoured vehicles are largely unable to handle the muddy terrain of the neighbourhoods hit hardest by the violence. It was not until the fighting was over that the full horror of the killings was discovered in houses stuffed with dead bodies.

"We launched patrols in areas we thought there would be clashes," he explained. "But we could not be everywhere at once," said Brar.

A health care worker, who spoke anonymously for fear of reprisals, helped the Red Cross recover the bodies. She said: "Some were killed with bullets, others bayoneted." Among the injured sent to the regional hospital, the worker said, were "two women, one small girl of nine years and one boy of 11 years."

The rebels ordered that the bodies be buried quickly and far from the cemetery, to avoid leaving evidence for war crimes investigators.

"They did not want any mass graves," said another man, who helped with the burials.

Nkunda's men continue to hold the town, as well as neighbouring Rutshuru. Outwardly, calm has returned to the streets. But mothers have sent their sons packing because the rebels have been forcing men and boys to join them.

Kavira Nzuva, whose son Francois was killed, said his death had hollowed out her life. Gaunt and hobbled at 67, she was forced to return to the fields to farm.

Francois had supported her with his photography business. He had wired her mud-walled house for electricity and paid the monthly bill.

"He was my youngest child," she said. "I don't know how I will live without him."

UN condemns rivals' proxy war funded by gold and mineral riches

A UN Security Council panel has found that Rwanda and Congo are fighting a proxy war by aiding each other's enemies.

A major investigative report prepared by five outside experts concluded Rwanda is helping ethnic Tutsi rebels fight the Congolese government and Congo is collaborating with ethnic Hutu rebels and other forces against Rwanda.

The experts found evidence that the armed groups being aided by Rwanda and Congo are using child soldiers, violating laws intended to protect women and children and that the rebels on both sides make millions of dollars from illegal trade in minerals such as gold.

Rwandan authorities "have been complicit in the recruitment of soldiers, including children, have facilitated the supply of military equipment and have sent officers and units" to help Congolese rebel leader Laurent Nkunda, who uses Rwanda as "a rear base for fundraising meetings and bank accounts," the report said.

The experts said there also is evidence of "extensive collaboration" between Congolese troops and Hutu rebels of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, known by its French acronym of FDLR, and the Mai Mai tribal militia in the Congolese Resistance Patriots movement.

"The group has identified at least three Congolese army commanders who are guilty of providing support" by supplying ammunition and conducting joint operations against the Congolese army, said Jason Stearns, who led the panel's investigation.