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Attack on a Refugee Camp in Burundi Kills at Least 180
By The New York Times
August 15, 2004
Ujumbura, Burundi, Aug. 14 (AP) - Dozens of attackers raided a United Nations refugee camp in western Burundi, shooting and hacking to death at least 180 people, witnesses and officials said Saturday.
A Burundian Hutu rebel faction, the National Liberation Forces, claimed responsibility for the attack late Friday near the border with Congo, saying that its fighters were pursuing Burundian soldiers who fled to the camp from a nearby military position. The camp sheltered ethnic Tutsi refugees from Congo known as the Banyamulenge, who had fled the fighting in Congo's troubled border province of South Kivu.
The attackers screamed war cries as they rushed into the camp and set it on fire, said Louis Niyonzima, a local official.
"What we have seen so far are many, many, many bodies of children, women and men," said Eliana Nabaa, spokeswoman for the United Nations mission in Congo. "People were sleeping when the attack happened. People were killed as they tried to escape."
"The scene is absolutely horrific," Ms. Nabaa said by telephone from Bukavu, the capital of South Kivu. "There are many people burnt." She described the attackers as well armed and organized.
Isabelle Abric, spokeswoman for the United Nations mission in Burundi, said 159 people had been killed and 101 others had been wounded in the attack on the camp in Gatumba, 12 miles from the Congolese border. At least 30 of the wounded died later in a hospital, she said.
The bloodshed came after gunmen attacked a Burundian Army position about a half-mile away.
"These guys were armed with grenades, machetes and automatic weapons," said Fernando del Mundo, a spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva. "While the attack was going on they were beating drums."
Pasteur Habimana, spokesman for the National Liberation Forces, justified the assault on the camp by saying Burundian soldiers were hiding there after the attack on the post.
"We were also attacked by armed Banyamulenge militiamen who lived in this camp," he said. "The camp was a genuine Banyamulenge militiaman headquarters."
Earlier, Mr. Habimana had said the victims were killed by Burundian soldiers who fled into the refugee camp to escape the rebel assault. A spokesman for the Burundian Army could not be reached for comment.
The National Liberation Forces is the last main rebel movement fighting the government in Burundi's 10-year-old civil war, which has killed 300,000 people. War broke out in 1993, when Hutus took up arms after Tutsi paratroopers assassinated the country's first democratically elected president, a Hutu. Burundi's Tutsi minority has effectively run the country for all but a few months since independence in 1962.
President Domitien Ndayizeye of Burundi visited the camp on Saturday and described the massacre as "a shame" and asked the Congolese government to assist in investigations. "What I can say is that it is Burundi which has been attacked," he said. "The attackers killed innocent refugees who sought refuge in Burundi.
The rebels, he said, "declared that they attacked a military camp and that the soldiers fled in this camp, but I saw no soldier's body except those of young children, women and old persons."
The attack occurred one day after Vice President Azarias Ruberwa of Congo visited the camp to encourage the refugees to return home.
In Kinshasa, the capital of Congo, government officials were meeting on Saturday to discuss the killings. They had no immediate comment.
A renegade Congolese Army commander, whose troops briefly seized Bukavu in June over complaints that Banyamulenge kinsmen were singled out by Congolese authorities, said the attack in Burundi proved his charges. But he stopped short of threatening retaliation.
The commander, Brig. Gen. Laurent Nkunda, accused the Congolese Army of letting attackers of the Burundi operate in its zone unchallenged. "This event proves me right," he said by telephone. "This confirms that there's an extermination plan against the Banyamulenge."
President Paul Kagame of Rwanda, speaking in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, said the massacre "proves what we have been saying over time, that there have been incidents that are ignored by the international community and the U.N. where people are being killed in eastern Congo, being targeted for who they are."
United Nations officials were studying whether the attack was carried out with the help of Congolese tribal fighters known as the Mayi-Mayi or with Rwandan rebels based in eastern Congo, an official said.
The Rwandan insurgents include members of the former army and the extremist Interahamwe militia that fled to Congo after playing a major role in the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. More than 500,000 minority Tutsis and political moderates from the Hutu majority were killed in the 100-day slaughter that was organized by the Hutu government then in power.
The killings in Burundi will further complicate United Nations efforts to encourage Congolese refugees to return home, said M'Hand Ladjouzi, head of the United Nations mission in North Kivu Province in Congo.
"This is a setback in our efforts to ensure security here," Mr. Ladjouzi said. "We are trying to find out who did this. Their aim is to complicate the situation. Obviously, they did this to stop all the efforts the international community is making."
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