HIDDEN HORRORS: A special report.; Uncovering the Guilty Footprints Along Zaire's Long Trail of Death
The European Union has already held up nearly $500 million in loans because of the allegations of atrocities, and Congress is considering bills that would cut United States support for Mr. Kabila's Government, unless it cooperates with the inquiry, diplomats said.
The Origins
Frightened Refugees Flee Into the Forest
The roots of Congo's civil war lie in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. The violence began that April, when the President of Rwanda, a Hutu, was killed in a suspicious plane crash over Kigali, the Rwandan capital, dooming a power-sharing accord between his Government and a Tutsi rebel army.
Immediately Hutu extremists began a well-orchestrated genocide against the minority Tutsi, killing more than 500,000 people before the Tutsi rebels seized control. Radical Hutu soldiers and militiamen then fled into Zaire along with more than one million Hutu refugees, settling in camps just across the border in Congo.
Over the next two years, these militiamen used the United Nations refugee camps there as bases to rearm themselves and recruit new followers. They mounted dozens of guerrilla attacks into Rwanda and killed hundreds of Tutsi living in eastern Congo, driving many into exile in Rwanda.
Last October, local government officials, allied with Hutu militants in the camps, tried to expel the ethnic Tutsi from eastern Congo, where they had lived for generations. The Congolese Tutsi rebelled, and Rwanda's Tutsi-led Government sent in troops, ostensibly to help.
But senior Rwandan officials now say the intervention was intended above all to break up the huge Hutu refugee camps in Congo and destroy the remnants of the Hutu guerrilla army based there. Only months later, as the uprising grew into a civil war and after the rebels captured Congo's third largest city, Kisangani, in March, did it become clear that Mr. Mobutu was so weak that he could be ousted.
From the outset the Congolese rebels targeted the Hutu refugees, many of them considered enemies by the rebels' Rwandan backers. The rebels attacked the Hutu's tent cities again and again, driving them deeper into the rain forest in Congo's interior, where the refugees, relief groups and local Congolese say the Hutu were hunted down and where hundreds died of disease or drowned trying to cross rivers as they fled.
For the majority of refugees who were not Hutu guerrillas, the long flight through the jungle was a trail of tears. First the rebels attacked the refugee camps around Bukavu and Uvira in eastern Congo in October last year. Then they attacked the camps around the border city of Goma.
After Goma itself and a nearby refugee camp, Mugunga, fell to rebel forces that November, at least 600,000 refugees streamed back into Rwanda. But the rest -- tens of thousands -- fled westward into Congo, accompanied by hard-core Hutu militiamen and soldiers.
By February, about 120,000 of those refugees had made their way to north-central Congo, to Tingi Tingi, about 140 miles southeast of Kisangani, United Nations officials said. They were housed in meticulously assembled bamboo lean-tos, all covered with the distinctive blue plastic sheeting of the United Nations refugee agency.
''We will never go back to Rwanda; the Tutsi are trying to kill us, and will certainly get rid of us there,'' said Marie-Claire Muanyogoga, 13, at Tingi Tingi in February, when she and her sister, Sophie, 12, had become separated from their parents.
The children, emaciated from their trek, were being cared for by Denise Uwizeye, 24, a Rwandan Hutu student. ''Of course our people killed a lot of Tutsi before, but what of the innocent, must we all die too?'' she asked
On Feb. 9, Mr. Kabila's rebels captured Amisi, a camp of 40,000 Hutu located 45 miles east of Tingi Tingi. With the outcry growing over reported massacres of Hutu civilians, the rebel leader pledged that his forces would not attack Tingi Tingi. But three weeks later, they did just that.
On March 2, 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.