Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels killed at least 321 civilians in a “well-planned” four-day attack on several villages in the northeast of DR Congo (DRC) in December, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said yesterday.
In a report released in Kampala, HRW said 250 others, including at least 80 children, were abducted in the previously unreported attack by the Lord’s Resistance Army from Dec. 14 to Dec. 17 in the remote Makombo area of Haut Uele district.
A Catholic clergyman at Isiro-Niangara, Dieudonne Abakuba, speaking before the report was issued, confirmed that 30 members of the rebel LRA attacked a dozen villages of Haut Uele district, in Orientale Province.
“They killed at least 300 people. They also kidnapped between 200 and 400 others before disappearing,” he said.
“During the well-planned LRA attack,” the LRA “killed at least 321 civilians and abducted 250 others, including at least 80 children,” said the 67-page HRW report headed Trail of Death: LRA Atrocities in Northeastern Congo.
“The vast majority of those killed were adult men, whom LRA combatants first tied up and then hacked to death with machetes or crushed their skulls with axes and heavy wooden sticks,” the report said.
“The dead include at least 13 women and 23 children, the youngest a three-year-old girl who was burned to death. LRA combatants tied some of the victims to trees before crushing their skulls with axes,” said the report, written after a mission visited the region last month.
Between 25 and 40 rebels had walked for 100km during the operation which was aimed at killing, abducting and pillaging, HRW said.
“The Makombo massacre is one of the worst ever committed by the LRA in its bloody 23-year history, yet it has gone unreported for months,” said Anneke Van Woudenberg, senior Africa researcher at HRW. “The four-day rampage demonstrates that the LRA remains a serious threat to civilians and is not a spent force, as the Ugandan and Congolese governments claim.”
“They killed mainly men. They chopped some people’s heads off and kidnapped children on their way to school,” regional lawmaker Jeannette Abakuba said, confirming the more than 300 dead.
The raided villages south of the Uele river, 40km southwest of the town of Niangara, are Mabanga, Makombo, Ngbiribi, Tapili and Kiliwa.
After some people fled, some residents were slowly coming back.
“But the atmosphere is poisoned, people are scared the LRA might come back, they’re afraid of farming, so there’s a risk of famine,” Jeannette Abakuba said.
The LRA took up arms in 1988 in northern Uganda and has acquired a reputation for brutality.
Since 2005, under pressure from the Ugandan army, the fighters pulled back from their bases in Uganda to move into the remote northeast of the DRC, where they were said to number fewer than 100 late last year, according to the UN mission in the DRC.
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