UN CONDEMNS MASSACRE OF TUTSI REFUGEES

August 16, 2004 - (The Guardian) The UN security council has condemned the massacre last week of more than 160 Tutsi Congolese refugees in Burundi.

Most of the victims were women, children and babies, shot dead and burned as they slept in shelters at the Gatumba refugee transit camp on Friday.

Up to 20,000 Congolese Tutsi refugees have taken shelter in UN camps in Burundi after fleeing Congo, terrified of being attacked by government troops, local militia and civilians in eastern Congo.

The UN security council, which met yesterday in an emergency session, urged the authorities in Burundi and neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo to work together and bring those responsible to justice quickly.

Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, said he was "shocked and outraged" by the killings.

The Forces for National Liberation (FNL), a Hutu rebel group, took responsibility for the attack, saying they were aiming to hit a military camp nearby.

The nearly 3,500-strong FNL is the only rebel group refusing to join a power sharing government to end a five-year long civil war that has pitted Burundi's politically dominant Tutsi minority against rebels from the Hutu majority.

The war, which involved fighters from five countries, has left more than three million people dead, mostly through hunger and disease.

A UN peacekeeping force in Burundi, due to have 5,650 soldiers when it reaches full strength, was authorised by the security council in May to ensure the implementation of the peace process.

The former international development secretary, Clare Short, warned that the international community was not focused enough on driving forward a peace process to end the fighting in the DRC, Rwanda and Burundi.

"What we have got is failed states and marauding bands of killers and constant hatred between two peoples," she told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

"If we leave it, there will be endless killing, desperate poverty ... and we will have a failed continent with all the consequences of instability and danger for its neighbour Europe. We cannot afford to ignore it for human and moral reasons and for our own self interest."

Burundi yesterday closed its border with the DRC and increased security forces in refugee camps to prevent attacks ahead of the mass burial of the victims of the massacre later today.

From: http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1284112,00.html