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French
Troops Find 22 Hacked Bodies in Congo
Reuters,
July 22, 2003
KINSHASA
(Reuters) - French peacekeepers found the hacked bodies of 22 elderly
people, women and children in a village outside the Congolese town of
Bunia after trading gunfire with militiamen, a spokesman said on Tuesday.
The bodies provided the latest evidence of massacres taking place beyond
the protection of the French troops, who began deploying in Bunia last
month to shield residents from clashes between ethnic Hema and Lendu
militia. The multinational force's spokesman said a French patrol
discovered the 22 mutilated bodies in the village of Nizi, about 19 miles
north of Bunia, during a patrol on Monday.
Troops exchanged fire with ethnic Lendu militia who were leaving the
abandoned village, wounding one fighter. There were no French casualties.
"There was an exchange of gunshots, and one of the Lendu militiamen
was wounded," Colonel Gerard Dubois told Reuters from Bunia by
telephone.
Dubois said the killings appeared to have taken place on Sunday, when
large numbers of refugees arrived in Bunia from areas north of the town.
The killings followed another massacre in Tchomia outside Bunia on July
15. Villagers said 80 people were killed, according to a revised toll
given by the United Nations (news - web sites) on Monday.
The U.N. had initially quoted villagers as saying 45 people were killed in
Tchomia, 30 miles east of Bunia, in an attack blamed by residents on Lendu
militiamen.
A U.N. statement issued on Monday said Tchomia's hospital was looted and
about 250 houses burned in the attack. It quoted a local source as saying
80 people were kidnapped.
France is providing the backbone of a multinational peacekeeping force in
Bunia, focus of clashes between rival militia backed by governments in
Congo's capital Kinshasa, Uganda and Rwanda competing over the
mineral-rich region.
The clashes mesh with a wider pattern of violence in eastern Congo, which
has overshadowed last week's launch of a power-sharing government designed
to end five years of war in which an estimated three million people have
died, mainly from hunger and disease.
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