A coalition of 51 human rights organizations working in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo accused an army lieutenant colonel of ordering massacres, executions and rapes in a complaint sent to the region’s military commander yesterday.
The lieutenant colonel, Innocent Zimurinda, is a former rebel who joined the army last year and has been taking part in UN-backed military operations against a Rwandan Hutu rebel group in Congo’s mineral-rich east.
“We fear these attacks on civilians will continue unless there is urgent action by the authorities to suspend and investigate him,” Joseph Dunia of the Congolese group Promotion of Democracy and Protection of Human Rights said in a statement e-mailed by New York-based Human Rights Watch.
Zimurinda is accused in the complaint of deliberately killing civilians on a number of occasions dating back to 2007, when he fought with an ethnic Tutsi-led rebel group backed by Rwanda.
Last April, shortly after joining the Congolese army, he allegedly ordered the killings of at least 129 Rwandan Hutu civilian refugees, the complaint said. The groups also accuse the lieutenant colonel of continuing to order rapes and summary executions and of using child soldiers.
Human Rights Watch estimates that over 1,400 civilians died in the operations against the Rwandan rebels last year, according to a December report. Nearly one million were displaced by the fighting, according to the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and more than 8,000 rapes were reported in North and South Kivu, according to the UN Population Fund.
In late December, the UN Security Council mandated that UN peacekeepers couldn’t work with Congolese army battalions that were guilty of human-rights abuses.
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