160 People Killed In Attack On Burundi Refugee Camp

by Esdras Ndikumana
GATUMBA, Burundi, Aug 14 (AFP) - Nearly 160 people were slaughtered at a refugee camp for Congolese Tutsis in Burundi in an overnight attack which the country's president blamed on Hutu extremists from the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
There were charges that Burundian and Rwandan Hutu rebels were involved in a coordinated attack on the camp, while the Burundian army said it was braced for further attacks on Tutsi refugee camps in the area by Congolese militia and Rwanda and Burundian rebels.
Among the 159 dead at the camp, 20 kilometres (12 miles) west of the Burundian capital Bujumbura and only four kilometres from the border were many women and children.
The attackers had shot, burned and hacked to death their victims, almost all of them Banyamulenge, Congolese Tutsis originally from Rwanda who had fled the Sud-Kivu region in the east of the DRC earlier this year during an uprising in the town of Bukavu.
The Banyamulenge, who have been in DRC for generations, are herdsmen, numbering about 300,000, who live on the high plateaux in the east of the country.
The Hutu National Liberation Forces (FNL), the only rebel group still fighing in Burundi, immediately claimed responsibility for the raid.
But rebel spokesman Pasteur Habimana insisted that the victims were fighters in uniform who had taken refuge inside the camp.
"Banyamulenge were killed, they were people in military uniform, who were armed and who fired at us," he said.
Burundian President Domitien Ndayizeye insisted the attack had been carried out by foreign assailants.
"Our country has been attacked, our border has been violated by elements coming from the DRC to massacre Congolese civilians who had asked for asylum," he told reporters at the Gatumba camp.
Agreement rapidly emerged among the local authorities that the killings could have been the work of a coalition of groups: Burundian FLN, Rwanda Hutu Interahamwe and Congolese Mai Mai militias.
Officials at the camp identified the three groups as responsible for the killings and were supported by DRC Vice President Azrias Ruverwa who visited the scene.
"I am the more horrified in that those who carried out this genocide on Burundian soil were clearly Congolese, Burundian and Rwandan attackers come from DRC," he told AFP.
"What is shameful is that these Congolese belong to the Mai Mai militia which is now part of the Congolese army."
"According to early observations, there is a coalition which carried out this unspeakable massacre against the Banyamulenge people," Ndayizeye said. "Those killed are civilians, children, women and youths."
Rwandan President Paul Kagame said he was certain Rwandan Hutu militias had been involved while his representative for the Great Lakes spoke of a plan of genocide.
There have been tensions between Burundi and the DRC for six years as Kinshasa has accused Burundi of intervening on its territory while Bujumbura has charged that the DRC was harbouring fugitive Hutu rebels.
In Addis Ababa, the African Union condemned the massacre, saying it would pursue the perpetrators and rapidly deliver justice.
DRC President Joseph Kabila called for the setting up of an international committee of inquiry into the killings.
Britain on Saturday expressed shock at the massacre, saying it underscored the need to a "healing process" in Africa's Great Lakes region.
Foreign Office Minister Denis MacShane said, "This sad occurrence points up the need for a healing process in the Great Lakes region, which we hope the proposed Great Lakes conference (in Tanzania in November) will assist."
Raymond Mamazzani Baya, foreign minister of the smaller Congo state, neighboring the DR Congo, said he was profoundly angered by the "odious and debauched" crime, and called for an international inquiry into the origins of the massacre and its perpetrators.
The DRC Information Minister Henri Mova Sakanyi, while expressing his government's regret, said he was astonished the refugees protected by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and the Burundian government "should be savagely murdered with impunity."
"Yet this camp is located close to a Burundian army camp," he said, calling for the UN and the Bujumbura government to accept their share of responsibility.
Burundi is slowly emerging from a civil war that began in 1993 and has so far claimed some 300,000 lives. The FNL has consistently refused to join a peace deal which last November formed a power-sharing Hutu-Tutsi government.