DR CONGO KILLINGS `MAY BE GENOCIDE` - UN DRAFT REPORT
Baku, August 27 (AZERTAC). Draft UN report says crimes by the Rwandan army and allied rebels in Democratic Republic of Congo could be classified as genocide. The report, seen by the BBC, details the investigation into the conflict in DR Congo from 1993 to 2003. It says ten of thousands of ethnic Hutus, including women, children and the elderly, were killed by the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan army.
Rwanda`s justice minister has dismissed the claims as "rubbish". The report also lists human rights violations committed by security forces from all the countries involved in what has been called "Africa`s world war". The final UN High Commission for Human Rights report should be made public in the next few days. Although the conflict is officially over, eastern DR Congo, near the Rwandan border, remains volatile.
On Thursday, the UN Security Council held an emergency session to discuss allegations that Rwandan Hutu rebels were among armed men who raped at least 150 women and baby boys in the town of Luvungi and surrounding villages earlier this year. About 20 human right officers have documented, through hundreds of pages, what they call widespread and systematic attacks by the Rwandan army and the Congolese AFDL rebel movement. The AFDL rebels were led by Laurent Kabila, father of current Congolese President Joseph Kabila. Those targeted were Rwandan Hutus who had fled into what is now DR Congo, then called Zaire, after the 1994 genocide. Some 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed in Rwanda during the genocide.
Other news in this section
