The Monitor (Kampala)
September 29, 2003
Posted to the web September 29, 2003
Frank Nyakairu &agencies
Kampala
The International Criminal Tribunal (ICT) has said that massacres in DR Congo's Ituri region will continue unless the plundering is checked.
"If we do not halt the cash flows, the crimes will not stop," a prosecutor at ICT Mr Louis Moreno-Ocampo is quoted on the tribunal's official website. He held a press conference at the Hague on Thursday.
Moreno-Ocampo reaffirmed the urgency of opening a judicial inquiry into the war crimes and massacres perpetrated against the civil population in Ituri.
According to the UN, the clashes in eastern DRC have claimed at least 5,000 lives and displaced over half a million people since 1999.
Ocampo said his office had continued gathering and analysing information from Ituri to determine whether there was justification to set up an inquiry according to the Missionary News Agency-misna.
He said he would soon write to the Assembly of the signatory nations of the Rome Statute (which constituted the ICT in 1998) to inform them about his proposal for an inquiry.
"We hope to find African solutions to African problems and more generally the DR-Congo," the head prosecutor added. Uganda and Rwanda are the two main countries named in the Ituri crisis. They deny all accusations.
The groups were militarily and financially supported by Uganda and Rwanda.
Ituri is endowed with resources like Gold, Diamond, Coltan, and Hardwood among others.
Since July 2002, according to Rights Groups, at least five thousand people have been killed in Ituri. A Human Rights Watch report published mid this year insists that governments of Uganda, Rwanda and the DR. Congo are still arming the warring groups.
