Dec. 24, 2002. 06:48 AM

RODRIQUE NGOWI ASSOCIATED PRESS

OICHA, Congo—Thousands of people have been massacred in the northeastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, it was revealed yesterday.

Many of the murders took place after 6,000 tribal fighters overran a mission hospital in Nyankunde, killing patients as they lay in their beds.

The latest killings add to the more than 2.5 million people who have died in Congo's civil war since 1998, mainly from war-related disease and hunger, aid agencies say.

Information is only now beginning to emerge about the massacre in Nyankunde, which began Sept. 5.

After the slaughter at the mission hospital, the fighters and their allies turned on the town itself and over the next two weeks burned, shot and speared thousands to death, said some of the 1,200 survivors who made a nine-day trek to safety in Oicha.

The attackers used rifles, machetes, knives, spears and arrows, said Kakani, head nurse in the intensive care ward at the Evangelical Medical Centre.

He escaped the initial slaughter but then spent five harrowing days locked in a room with his family and 120 other people, some of whom were taken out in small groups and killed. Kakani, who uses only one name, said he and his family were freed after one of the attackers' commanders discovered that Kakani's wife was a cousin of the commander's wife.

At the end of the first day, aid workers counted at least 650 dead in one neighbourhood alone, said Western missionaries who were in Nyankunde, which had an estimated 18,000 residents. Most of those dead were from the Bira tribe, the largest in the region.

Survivors said the attackers were from the Ngiti and Lendu tribes, along with other allies. They killed people from the Bira, Hema and 16 other tribes living in Nyankunde, slaughtering men and women, young and old, witnesses said.

Congo's government, two big rebel groups and the political opposition signed a power-sharing agreement last Monday. But the lawless northeast of this vast Central African country, formerly called Zaire, has been a killing field of tribal conflicts for decades, and bringing peace to the region will be a key test for any post-war government.

Aid agencies estimate 50,000 people have been killed and more than half a million displaced by fighting in North Kivu and Ituri province in the last four years.

Survivors said the attackers kept word of the raid from getting out by seizing all the town's radios, the only means of communicating with other parts of the country.

The assailants initially barred missionary planes from landing in Nyankunde, then let them in. The foreign missionaries eventually were allowed to fly out after tense negotiations and promising not to speak to journalists about the attack.

Among the dead was the mother of little Baraka Safari. She was killed two days after giving birth to the boy, who was found crying beside his mother's body, survivors said.

He was given a Kiswahili name that means "fortunate journey" by those who carried him the 150 kilometres to Oicha.

Aid workers said the attack came several months after the Bira chief in Nyankunde barred the Ngiti from town, which denied them access to treatment at the mission hospital, one of the largest in eastern Congo.

The ban led to the death in childbirth of a number of Ngiti women because they suffer from a hereditary pelvic deformity that prevents them from giving birth safely, except by caesarean section, medical workers from Nyankunde said.

The modern, well-equipped hospital was left a burned-out shell, stripped of everything, including window frames, survivors said.

A Hema attack on an Ngiti village in late August was "probably the last straw that broke the camel's back," said Dr. Philip Wood, a Canadian who has been training physicians in eastern Congo for 30 years.

Survivors said fighters for the Union of Congolese Patriots, a rebel group led by the Hema tribe that controlled the town, fought the attackers only briefly before fleeing.

Troops of the rival rebel faction, the Congolese Rally for Democracy-Liberation Movement, which is allied to the attackers, made no attempt to stop the slaughter, the survivors said.

The bloodshed occurred in North Kivu and Ituri province, a beautiful region nearly 2,000 kilometres northeast of the capital, Kinshasa. It is rich in gold, timber and other resources that tribes have fought over for decades, but the violence worsened after the civil war broke out in August, 1998.

"Tribal clashes in Ituri are increasingly lethal due to proliferation of heavy weapons and emergence of ethnic-based militias," said Jackson Basikana, an aid worker who fled the region. "The end to the bloodbath lies in disarmament and restoration of effective government on the ground.''

Further south, the main rebel group in Congo said yesterday it had recaptured the port of Uvira after three days of fighting with government-allied militias, Reuters reports.

The renewed fighting in the strategic lakeside town, which has switched hands several times in recent months, threatens to erode the peace deal signed by rebels and the government last week in South Africa.

The secretary-general of the Rwandan-backed rebel Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD), Azarias Ruberwa, said most of the fighting took place at Baraka town, 130 kilometres southeast of Uvira, and that many people were killed.

The port of Uvira is of strategic importance for the transportation of food, ammunition and petroleum across Lake Tanganyika and into the interior provinces. Its proximity to Rwanda and Burundi also makes it key.

"The Mai Mai (militias) intended to occupy Uvira region until Christmas Day but we drove them back and Uvira is now secured," Ruberwa said from his headquarters in Goma.

"The Mai Mai lost many fighters, we even captured an Antonov on Sunday," he told Reuters in Burundi. He said the captured Antonov plane was carrying ammunition and six white men who fled towards Lake Tanganyika.

The Mai Mai are traditional warriors loosely allied to the Kinshasa government who use spears, bows and arrows as well as guns and are spread throughout the jungles of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

The United Nations refugee agency in Burundi said Congolese were fleeing the fighting.

"About 1,000 Congolese refugees have entered into Burundi since the weekend. They are fleeing new fighting in Uvira," said Ntwari Bernard, a U.N. communications official at the Burundi office.

The RCD said the Mai Mai were receiving help from a Burundian rebel group and Rwandan Interahamwe militiamen, who Rwanda says were responsible for the 1994 genocide there and have been hiding in Congo ever since.

Manace Bita, a spokesperson for the Mai Mai, said the rebels "helped by Rwandan soldiers" attacked our positions in the hills near Uvira.

"Fighting is continuing even now at Uvira. The situation is not good," he added.

Congo's war exploded in 1998 when Rwanda and Uganda invaded to support rebel movements fighting the Kinshasa government. The conflict has killed more than 2 million people, and up to 50,000 foreign troops were sucked into what was called "Africa's first world war."

Most foreign troops have now withdrawn, but violence has continued.

The agreement signed in South Africa last week was aimed at leading Congo through a peaceful transition to its first democratic elections since 1960.

Earlier this fall, the U.N. deputy emergency relief co-ordinator warned that tribal hatreds were being deliberately stirred up, and predicted that without intervention, massacres would result.

There are 5,000 U.N. observers in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but their mandate does not give them the authority to intervene to halt fighting.

-- Anonymous, December 24, 2002

Answers

just what do these 5,000 UN observers do?

and just why and how can that many people be slaughtered right under the nose of 5,000 UN workers?

sheesh....

i looked all over the net for any mention of these "Ngiti women" who can't give birth except by caesarean.....

couldn't find mention of this condition anywhere except in the article above

this sounded weird to me, and that's why i looked to see if there was any info about it

anyone ever heard of this condition before?

-- Anonymous, December 25, 2002

About 20 years ago I remember reading a bit about how certain African tribes had high rates of infant mortality and deaths from childbirth. I didn't pay much attention, living in New Orleans at the time and having far less weighty things occupying my mind. But some years later, when I read an article about how American blacks had a higher rate of infant mortality and deaths in childbirth, I wished I could remember more about that article. Very tenuous, I know, but it's all I can dredge up.

-- Anonymous, December 25, 2002