Global Policy Forum

By Finbarr O'Reilly

A United Nations probe has found no proof of civilian massacres in eastern Congo during recent clashes between government troops and rebel forces, a spokeswoman said on Tuesday.

A U.N. team travelled into remote mountain villages between the towns of Bukavu and Goma on Tuesday to investigate rebel claims that government troops had slaughtered nearly 70 civilians during fighting last week. "There is no confirmation that civilians were massacred or targeted, though many people may have been killed in the clashes," U.N. spokeswoman Iliane Naba said from Bukavu.

Fighting has surged in eastern Congo during the past month, upsetting a fragile peace process aimed at ending a five-year war that killed more than three million people in the central African country, mostly from hunger and disease.

In June, rebels loyal to dissident General Laurent Nkunda seized the town of Bukavu, at the border between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, saying there had been a "genocide" against fellow ethnic Tutsis and Congolese civilians speaking Kinyarwanda, Rwanda's language.

A first probe by the U.N. last month found no proof of any mass ethnic killings of Tutsis in Bukavu and the world body said more recent rebel claims that people with close ethnic and cultural ties to Rwanda had been targeted and killed in villages around the town of Kalehe also appeared to be unfounded. "The team of investigators went to several villages around Kalehe and nobody spoke of Rwandaphones being targeted," said Naba. She said some villagers had told the U.N. team people who had been reportedly killed were still alive and had fled north towards Goma.

Nkunda, a former commander of the Rwanda-backed RCD Congolese rebel movement, withdrew from Bukavu after one week, but remains at large with some 4,000 troops despite calls for his arrest by President Joseph Kabila. Nkunda's seizure of Bukavu inflamed anti-Rwanda sentiment in the former Zaire, which has twice been invaded by its tiny neighbour during the past eight years.

Rwanda says both attacks were justified as it was hunting those responsible for the 1994 genocide, when some 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates were butchered by Hutu extremists. Regional analysts say Congo's recent fighting boils down to a turf-war in a vast, mineral-rich nation overrun by various armed militias accustomed to ruling by the gun.

Attempts to unite former foes into a unified national army have been hampered by deep political divisions and the interim government has struggled to assert its authority beyond the capital Kinshasa.

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