Massacred by their own soldiers
Published Date: 31 October 2008
By Fred Bridgland
CONGOLESE government soldiers swept through the besieged strategic town of Goma
yesterday, looting shops and killing the citizens they were meant to protect.
Frightened people who crouched in their homes and improvised refugee camps had
been expecting the violence to come from the rebel Tutsi guerrilla army, which
shelled Goma overnight and halted its advance about ten miles to the north and
east of the town.
Instead, the bloodletting came from the retreating Congolese government army,
whose angry fighters, many of them drunk, looted homes and shops as panic
gripped the town on the northern shore of Lake Kivu. One intoxicated soldier
was seen wearing a Darth Vader mask.
>From Goma, television reporter Patrick Barth told The Scotsman: "A restaurant
>owner was shot dead by government soldiers. His bullet-ridden body was left on
>the street. At least eight other civilians, including a 17-year-old boy called
>Merci, were killed by the soldiers.
"Earlier, at the border crossing point with Rwanda, just a couple of miles
away, the road was clogged with vehicles fleeing the expected Tutsi assault.
The immigration post was swamped with many of Goma's civilians and foreign aid
workers desperate to leave as rumours circulated that the Tutsi fighters were
on the way."
One Tutsi man, fleeing into Rwanda with his family, told Barth: "I've been here
for hours, trying to get our exit documents. Look at them. Look in their eyes.
People are gripped with fear."
He added that people feared Hutus in Goma would carry out reprisals after the
rebels' advance to within a few miles.
Tutsi-Hutu enmity in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)
mirrors tension between the two ethnic groups that led to the 100-day genocide
in Rwanda in 1994 in which 800,000 were killed.
The present fighting for Goma is, in large part, a Tutsi-Hutu conflict, as well
as a complex struggle to control some of the world's richest sources of
minerals.
Hutus are the biggest tribe in eastern Congo, making up about 40 per cent of
the population. Tutsis are about 3 per cent.
Barth, from the independent production company Frontier Africa TV, said hotels
on the Rwandan side of the frontier were full with people fleeing the fighting.
Vehicles of numerous international aid organisations from DRC packed with
expatriate staff were on the road from the border towards Kigali, Rwanda's
capital. Frontier Africa TV, two of whose three directors are Scots, has been
filming the Congo conflict for the past three days.
As government troops went on the rampage in Goma, the besieging Tutsi army
honoured a temporary truce and stopped its advance in the hills on the
outskirts to allow people trapped by the fighting to flee. However, the rebel
leader, Laurent Nkunda, a renegade Congolese army general, hinted that the
final push would not be long delayed.
Some 800 United Nations peacekeeping troops and a ragtag collection of
demoralised government soldiers are now the only obstacles to a complete rebel
takeover of Goma, home to 600,000 people before tens of thousands began
fleeing.
Nkunda, in a phone call from a forward base,
warned his men would open fire on UN soldiers if they tried to halt the advance.
The Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni, Uganda is in anarchy"
Groupe de communication Mulindwas
"avec Yoweri Museveni, l'Ouganda est dans l'anarchie"<<1pixel_spacer.gif>>
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