UN Accuses Rwanda of Genocide in Congo

Leaked report details atrocities
By Kate Seamons,  Newser Staff
Posted Aug 27, 2010 9:51 AM CDT
UN Accuses Rwanda of Genocide in Congo
In this Sunday, July 31, 1994 file picture, a bulldozer operated by a French soldier shovels bodies into a mass grave at the Kibumba refugee camp in Rwanda near Goma, Zaire.   (AP Photo/Michel Euler, File)

It looks like the UN is ready to use the G-word. A leaked 546-page report obtained by Le Monde says that war crimes committed by the Rwandan army in the Congo in the '90s could possibly be classified as genocide. The investigation outlines years of atrocities, and accuses Rwandan forces of butchering, burning, and otherwise brutally killing Hutus who fled to refugee camps in neighboring Congo on the heels of Rwanda's own genocide in 1994, reports the Guardian.

Says the report: "The extensive use of non-firearms, particularly hammers, and the systematic massacres of survivors after camps were taken prove that the number of deaths cannot be put down to the margins of war." It comes as a major embarrassment to Rwanda's President Paul Kagame, whose government has been credited with ending his country's 1994 slaughter, during which more than half a million ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus were brutally slain. A rep for Kagame, who reportedly threatened to pull out of international peacekeeping missions if the report was published, called it "amateurish" and "outrageous."
(More Rwanda stories.)

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