|
Genocide as militias battle to
seize power
James Astill in Kalonge Sunday June 15, 2003 The Observer Feli thought war was fun at first, after he was press-ganged into Rwanda's invading army. Formerly a student at Bukavu university, in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, he learnt the Rwandans' language quickly, and enjoyed their company and their copious supply of booze. But then they began asking him to kill babies. 'Women, children, everyone we could get our hands on, we killed them all,' said Feli, 26, now the leader of one of eastern Congo's innumerable militias. 'We'd surround a village, then slowly move in, leaving nothing alive, not even babies - their heads were so soft that our rifles would pulp clean through the skin.' Rwanda invaded eastern Congo in 1996 to destroy the Hutu militiamen who had fled there after perpetrating the 1994 Rwandan genocide. America secretly authorised the invasion; then watched as it spiralled out of control. Besides scattering the militias, the Rwandans slaughtered an estimated 300,000 Hutu civilian refugees and Congolese villagers, then marched 2,000 miles across Congo - or Zaire, as it was then called - to seize Kinshasa, the capital. Rwanda set up a puppet government in Kinshasa headed by an obese, retired Congolese revolutionary named Laurent Kabila. But Kabila soon ignored its orders. So, in 1998, Rwanda invaded again. That invasion drew the armies of seven other neighbouring countries into Congo, sparking a conflagration of killing that is still ablaze. Between 3.1 million and 4.7 million people are estimated to have died in Congo's war: already, the highest death toll in any conflict since the Second World War. Feli can't begin to calculate how many he has killed. But he remembers his initiation. Two Hutu officers had been captured and - as the only non-Rwandan in his regiment - he was called on to prove his loyalty. 'I said, "OK, that's my job, give me a gun",' Feli recalled, swigging warm beer in a cold, dark mud hut, in eastern Congo's wooded hills. 'But they said, "Waste bullets on Hutus, are you joking? Use a knife".' But that was too much for the young student. 'I said, "Please, let me kill them with a gun" - I'd shot people already, it's easy. But this was something different.' Feli was given 120 lashes for refusing orders, on his back, hands and the soles of his feet. 'Then they said to me, "Now, watch, idiot, how idiots die".' The two Hutus were garroted, as the Rwandan soldiers laughed. 'One kept saying, "God forgive me," as the cord was tightened,' said Feli. 'Then it cut through his skin, it cut halfway through his neck, there was blood everywhere. And the Rwandans said, "Remember this, or next time it will be you. We didn't come here to be priests. We came here as soldiers".' Shortly afterwards six Hutu refugees, 'two men, and two women carrying babies on their backs', were brought into camp. 'A Rwandan guy killed the men. Then he gave me the knife,' said Feli. 'I stabbed them in the throat, first the women, then the babies. God help me.' Congo's state was collapsing, even before Rwanda's invasion, after the 33-year misrule of Mobutu Sese Seko, an American-sponsored kleptocrat. But the invasion was the death blow. Across eastern Congo today, a dozen small wars are raging, fuelled by the guns and territorial ambitions of Rwanda, Uganda and Congo's criminal government. The tribal war in north-eastern Ituri province, to which the European Union sent a small, French-led force of peacekeepers last week, is one example. Yet the force will be confined to one town in Ituri, Bunia, and will quit Congo in less than three months. It will not try to stop the genocidal madness sweeping Ituri, as rival Ugandan and Rwandan-backed militias battle for control. Nor has any Western country mooted intervening in any of eastern Congo's other small wars. 'There is no military solution to the war in Congo,' said France's ambassador to the UN, Jean-Marc de la Sablière. The suggestion is that Congo's war is too complicated to quench: another age-old and inevitable African war. Yet it is fought by young men like Feli: smart students-turned-killers who, given half a chance, would much rather be back in university. The
Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni, Uganda is in anarchy" Groupe de communication Mulindwas "avec Yoweri Museveni, l'Ouganda est dans l'anarchie" |
