As the UN report suggests Rwandan complicity in slaughter of refugees, forensic scientists hope to find the evidenc
Forensic science experts examining mass graves in the Democratic Republic of the Congo could provide further evidence of a Tutsi-led retaliatory genocide of Hutu civilians in the mid-1990s.
A diplomatic row is raging over a draft of a UN report, leaked to the press late last month, that accuses Rwandan President Paul Kagame’s troops of massacring Hutu refugees who had fled to neighbouring Zaire, now Congo, after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda of Tutsis and moderate Hutus that left 800,000 dead. The intervention of Kagame’s forces has been credited with ending the 1994 killings.
The leak of the report coincides with the completion of the training of the first team of Congolese forensic science investigators, which is being led by Peruvian forensic expert José Pablo Baraybar.
He gained international renown for his investigations in Srebrenica, where 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were murdered by Serbian forces in 1995. Baraybar’s work there was crucial to the declaration that a genocide had taken place.
Baraybar, who has previously worked at exhumations in Haiti, Rwanda, Ethiopia and Peru, has spent three months training 40 carefully selected members of the police and the Congolese army in the province of North Kivu, eastern DRC, to “investigate their own dead”.
He told us that the apparent acknowledgment by the world of the massacres in Congo meant work could now start on uncovering the stories of the millions who had since died.
The UN report suggests that both Hutu DRC civilians and Rwandan Hutu refugees were being killed up until 2003 by the Rwandan armed forces and Congolese militias.
“I hope that thanks to this new report by the UN we will be able to exhume the bodies that are spread throughout a country waiting for justice to be done for a community that has suffered crimes against humanity, which has been silen
ced for over 10 years,” said Baraybar. According to him “A light seems to have appeared at the end of a dark tunnel of death. The new Congolese forensic team is ready, at last, to exhume its own dead.”
