[…]
And so it went on all year long; one reason after another was found to block the team’s access to alleged massacres sites.
[…]
“Month after month went by, and it became clearer that most governments just did not want to know what had really happened in the jungles of eastern Zaire in the first half of 1997. UNHCR might say that 230,000 Hutu were still unaccounted for, but the U.S. had always disputed these numbers.”
But the end of 1997, the situation of the UNHCR had become so untenable in the Congo that Kofi Annan decided to call it quit while, according to a report by Howard W. French of The New York Times, “At the United States Embassy in Kinshasa (…) diplomats were bending over backward to shift the blame for the investigators' troubles to the United Nations. A senior diplomat in Kinshasa, for example, castigated the team for its rejection of the Government's insistence that their inquiry be carried out only in the east.”
Two sites of interest: Mbandaka (Equateur Province) and Tingi Tingi (near Kisangani, the capital of Oriental Province)
The new forensic teams should pick up where the 1997 team left out: near and at the provincial capital of Mbandaka, which was at the time the freshest sites of mass killings (May 13, 1997) and where there is at least an identified Westerner as eyewitnesses: the Belgian plantation owner Antoine de Klerk, who was arrested at the time by Rwandan soldiers in a lame attempt to have him not talk to the UN forensic team, and who can’t be accused of “Hutu propaganda” by Kigali. In Wendji and Mbandaka, Rwandan troops sealed off the area for four days to carry out indiscriminately killings of at least 2,000 Hutu refugees in front of the local population with one instance of a small child’s skull smashed against a tree because one Congolese villager, who had found him playing dead under his dead parents, wanted to take him home.
There are also Western identifiable eyewitnesses of the Tingi Tingi massacres. According to the same New York Times report by McKinley and French cited earlier : “On March 2, [1997], according to relief officials, Western diplomats and Hutu refugees, Rwandan-backed units of Mr. Kabila's army launched a full-scale assault on the refugee camp at Tingi Tingi, sending the population, which had swollen to well over 150,000, fleeing westward yet again.”
At those sites, eyewitnesses have reported that Rwandan troops had tried to dispose of the evidence, and in once instance, in Tingi Tingi, about 200 kilometers southeast of Kisangani, even attempted to cremate some of the bodies. But with the help of the local communities, investigators will still be able to find and access sites of mass graves, as the ones uncovered this year in eastern Congo---though there were countless victims that drowned or whose bodies were dumped into the Congo River.
One hopes that this new UNHCR investigation will not only reestablish the historical records of one of the most systematic ethnic cleansings on African continent but also result in practical follow-ups at the International Criminal Court with indictments at the rulers of the ethno-fascist dictatorship in Rwanda (incidentally, the exact mirror of the previous regime in that country) and their proxies in the DRC for these crimes against humanity---as well as lay bare to its gruesome skeleton the morally cynical travesty of the punctual indignations the Rwandan government voice whenever rights organizations would voice their rightful concerns over these still unpunished atrocities. As one Western aid worker still active in the African Great Lakes region this past week told a reporter of the London daily The Guardian in an article dealing with this renewed UN probe in the Congo: “To this day I have a hard time stomaching the Rwandan genocide propaganda and those who hold up the current regime as a model for all of central Africa”
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