Sitting in a small courtyard in Goma, in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo), a 55-year-old Tutsi woman joked darkly that she would be killed if she spoke under her real name.
She fled to the city last week after a militia leader known as General Janvier, an opponent of the Tutsi-led M23 rebel group, arrived in her town of Kitschanga.
“We saw children with machetes and guns saying they’d come to kill the Tutsis,” said the woman, in a poor Goma neighborhood of clapboard houses on the Rwandan border.
Photo: AFP
The M23 has advanced across North Kivu Province, winning victories over the army as well as other militias and forcing hundreds of thousands to flee in its wake.
DR Congo accuses its smaller neighbor Rwanda of backing the M23, something UN experts and US officials agree with — although Rwanda denies it.
Tensions have escalated the pressure on Congolese Tutsis, whose history is contested in the central African nation. Many assume that Tutsis support the M23, for example, or perceive them as Rwandan implants rather than native Congolese.
The government in Kinshasa has repeatedly argued against tribalism and said that the Rwandan government alone is to blame for the M23 crisis, but the reality in the east of the nation, about 1,600km from the capital, is often different.
Agence France-Presse interviewed six Congolese Tutsis who had recently arrived in Goma, mostly from Kitschanga in North Kivu’s Masisi territory. Five said they had fled death threats from militias.
“It hurts me,” said the 55-year-old Tutsi woman, who explained that all her relatives were Congolese, but her children were accused of being Rwandans at school. “Our children ask us: What’s Rwanda?”
The sense of injustice is widely shared. A 36-year-old Tutsi mother of two, who had also recently fled to Goma, said that she wanted the same rights as everyone else. She fiddled nervously with her wedding ring as she described why she left Kitschanga.
“Militiamen notice your nose and threaten to cut it off with a knife,” she said.
Tutsis are often stereotyped as having straight noses.
The woman — speaking in the Kinyarwanda language native to Rwandans as well as many Congolese Tutsis and Hutus — said militiamen also looted her home after she fled.
“They say every Tutsi is an M23,” she said. “It’s terrible.”
The M23 first came to international prominence in 2012 when it captured Goma, before being driven out and going to ground, but the rebels took up arms again late last year, claiming DR Congo had failed to honor a pledge to integrate them into the army.
The M23 has since seized swaths of territory and come within about 32km of Goma, a key hub of more than 1 million people. The M23 advance has also driven a wave of virulent anti-Tutsi hate speech on social media, with calls for them to depart for Rwanda and worse.
Emmanuel Runigi Kamanzi, the president of a North Kivu livestock farmers’ association, said his Tutsi ancestors arrived in the region in the middle ages.
“This is our home,” he said, decrying extremist attitudes fanned by Mai-Mai militias and so-called Nyatura armed groups that claim to represent Congolese Hutus.
Nyatura means “those who strike mercilessly” in Kinyarwanda.
In statements, the M23 has frequently accused other armed groups as well as government forces of targeting Tutsis, but Lieutenant-Colonel Guillaume Ndjike, the army spokesman in North Kivu, said soldiers have not attacked Tutsis and that the allegations are “excuses put forward by the Rwandan army.”
M23 fighters have themselves committed alleged atrocities. The rebels killed 131 civilians and raped 27 women and girls in two neighboring villages late last month, according to a preliminary UN probe.
Congolese Tutsi leaders have also condemned the M23.
David Karambi, the president of a North Kivu Tutsi association, told reporters that recent massacres could not even be “committed by animals.”
Many Congolese Tutsis interviewed said that they felt unfairly blamed, and in danger.
In a Goma district where many Tutsis recently fled, a 27-year-old woman said Mai-Mai and Nyatura members had threatened “to kill us as they did to Tutsis in Rwanda.”
“This war, it’s to uproot us,” she said, eyes downcast.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) removed former minister of foreign affairs Qin Gang (秦剛) from his post after an investigation concluded that he had conducted an affair and fathered a child while serving as ambassador to the US, the Wall Street Journal reported. Top officials were told in August that a CCP inquiry into Qin uncovered “lifestyle issues,” the newspaper reported yesterday, citing people familiar with the situation that it did not describe. That phrase usually means sexual misbehavior of some type in the parlance of Chinese officialdom. Two of the people said the affair led to the birth of a child in
GUNNED DOWN: The Canadian PM said there were credible allegations that India was connected to the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey on June 18 India yesterday dismissed allegations that its government was linked to the killing of a Sikh activist in Canada as “absurd,” expelling a senior Canadian diplomat and accusing Canada of interfering in India’s internal affairs. It came a day after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau described what he called credible allegations that India was connected to the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, an advocate of Sikh independence from India who was gunned down on June 18 outside a Sikh cultural center in Surrey, British Columbia, and Canada expelled a top Indian diplomat. “Any involvement of a foreign government in the killing of a
SECURITY: Wang met with the US national security adviser in Malta over the weekend, with the US side noting the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) yesterday headed to Russia for security talks after two days of meetings with US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan over the weekend in Malta. China’s top foreign policy official will be in Russia until Thursday for a round of China-Russia strategic security consultations, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a brief statement. The US and China are at odds over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. China has refrained from taking sides in the war, saying that while a country’s territory must be respected, the West needs to consider Russia’s security concerns about NATO’s
LOST BATTLE: The Varroa mite, which Canberra has called the ‘most serious pest’ to face bees, would cause serious economic damage, an ecologist said Australia yesterday abandoned its fight to eradicate the destructive Varroa mite, an invasive parasite responsible for the collapse of honeybee populations across the planet. Desperate to keep Varroa out of the country, authorities have destroyed more than 14,000 infected beehives since the tiny red-brown pest was first detected north of Sydney in June last year. The government said its US$64 million eradication plan could not stop the mite from spreading, and the country’s beekeepers should now prepare to live with the incursion. “The recent spike in new detections have made it clear that the Varroa mite infestation is more widespread and has