 Militiamen grilled bodies on a spit and boiled two girls alive as their mother watched, U.N. peacekeepers charged Wednesday, adding cannibalism to a list of atrocities allegedly carried out by one of the tribal groups fighting in northeast Congo. The commander of U.N. forces in Congo, Gen. Patrick Cammaert, presented a report on abuses allegedly committed by the Patriotic Resistance Front of Ituri. "Those responsible for atrocities will be brought to justice," Cammaert said.
| And you have the word of a UN official on that. |
Peacekeepers have also begun working to cut off weapons supplies to the group, which apparently entered the country from neighboring Uganda, he said. Members of the group were suspected of killing nine U.N. peacekeepers in a Feb. 25 ambush. On March 1, gunmen fired on Pakistani peacekeepers and the peacekeepers fought back, killing up to 60 fighters, U.N. officials said at the time.
The fighting there [in Congo] is killing thousands every month and has made it the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, U.N. humanitarian chief Jan Egeland said in Geneva on Wednesday. The allegations of cannibalism in the U.N. report were from a summary of testimony from witnesses gathered over a year from hundreds of people who had been kidnapped by militias in the region. The report said that some victims were killed by torture and decapitation. Those not killed were held in labor camps and forced to work as fishermen, porters, domestic workers and sex slaves. "Several witnesses reported cases of mutilation followed by death or decapitation," the report said.
The U.N. report included an account from Zainabo Alfani in which she said she was forced to watch rebels kill and eat two of her children in June 2003. The report said, "In one corner, there was already cooked flesh from bodies and two bodies being grilled on a barbecue and, at the same time, they prepared her two little girls, putting them alive in two big pots filled with boiling water and oil." Her youngest child was saved, apparently because at six months old it didn't have much flesh. Alfani said she was gang-raped by the rebels and mutilated. She survived to tell her horror story, but died in the hospital on Sunday of AIDS contracted during her torture two years earlier, the U.N. report said. The mother gave her account in February, but the U.N. waited to publish them until after her death for fear she would become a target for reprisal.
| The UN, of course, couldn't protect her. |
The new International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, said this week that its first cases will deal with war crimes committed in eastern Congo.
| "Bring in Carla del Ponte!" |
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