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U.N. reports 14 executions amid fighting in CongoFearing ethnic clash, up to 30,000 people go into hiding
BUNIA, Congo (CNN) -- Fourteen people, including two priests, were executed amid fighting between rival armed groups in the small northeastern town of Bunia, a United Nations spokeswoman said Saturday. Meanwhile, nearly 30,000 people are hiding in the bush -- potentially starving -- out of fear of escalating violence. The executions were carried out Friday by a Lendu militia group wanting to "destabilize the political, peaceful process," U.N. spokeswoman Patricia Tome said. Warring Congolese factions signed a political settlement last month to end several years of conflict. War broke out in August 1998 when Rwanda and Uganda sent troops to back rebels seeking to oust then-President Laurent Kabila. They accused him of backing insurgents threatening regional security. Kabila was assassinated in January 2001 and was succeeded by his son, Joseph. Violence has increased during the past week with the announcement that Uganda is removing its troops to make way for U.N. peacekeeping forces. Tome said one priest was killed in his bed and the other was killed in a garden. "They killed both of them in a very gruesome way. I don't want to tell," she said. All 14, she said, were victims of "arbitrary execution" by the armed groups. Fighting continued Saturday between the Lendu majority and the Hema minority fighters. There were heavy losses on both sides, Tome said. She said about 8,000 people are under U.N. protection, while 30,000 have sought protection outside the cities. Fierce fighting in Bunia and the surrounding Ituri province between Hema and Lendu fighters has left 4,000 people dead in the past eight months alone, according to the U.S.-based group Human Rights Watch. In the past six years in Ituri, about 50,000 people have been killed in ethnic fighting, Tome said. For years, Ugandan troops from just over the border provided a certain amount of security in the region, but as a peace accord takes shape, those troops are bowing to international pressure and are leaving the country. (Full story) Uganda withdrew most of its troops after a peace deal last year ended more than four years of war. But Uganda redeployed some of those troops in April after reports of massacres in Ituri province. Replacing the Ugandan troops are 800 Uruguayan peacekeepers, ordered only to protect U.N. personnel, and Congolese police, sent by Joseph Kabila. "At the moment, we have 600 troops in Bunia," Tome said. "We are trying to accompany, to push for the peace process which is under way with the collaboration and the cooperation of all the factions, all the armed groups." She added, "They have to keep their word, they have to respect their promise." In Ituri, Argentinean human rights workers recently exhumed a mass grave of victims who locals said were killed April 3. The workers found a woman with a machete wound and a baby in her arms, giving the United Nations team conducting that investigation its first physical evidence of the killings. (Full story) Most of the victims were Hema, and the attacks are blamed on armed Lendu combatants. Information from witnesses suggests that the killings continued throughout April. Locals fear the international community will turn a blind eye to the Hema-Lendu killings, allowing the situation to turn into a genocide like that in Rwanda. An estimated 830,000 people were killed there in 1994, mostly members of the country's Tutsi minority. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan singled out the Ituri conflict last month as one in which the perpetrators might have been trying to take advantage of the world's focus on Iraq, calling the killings in the province "the most flagrant" case. The fighting between Hema and Lendu fighters is just a part of the wider Congo conflict, which broke out in August 1998. In December, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, rebel groups and opposition political parties signed a historic treaty to end the devastating war and establish a power-sharing government.
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