CONGO: Militiamen in eastern Congo have kidnapped hundreds of civilians from rival ethnic groups, decapitating some, torturing others and forcing the rest to work as porters or sex slaves, the United Nations said yesterday.
"Several witnesses reported cases of mutilation followed by death or decapitation," the UN said in a report after gathering testimonies from survivors for nearly a year near Congo's northeastern border with Uganda.
"Vital organs were said to have been cut off and used as magic charms. There were also reports that (ethnic) Hema children were thrown onto arrows stuck into the ground," the report said.
Eastern Congo is suffering the world's worst current humanitarian crisis, with a death toll outstripping that in Sudan's strife-torn Darfur region, UN emergency relief co-ordinator Jan Egeland told a news conference yesterday. "In terms of the human lives lost ... this is the greatest humanitarian crisis in the world today and it is beyond belief that the world is not paying more attention," he said.
The UN report said groups of between three and six militiamen would creep up at night on fisherman on Lake Albert, which separates Congo and Uganda. Some of their victims would be forced to swim until they were so exhausted they drowned.
The UN mission in Democratic Republic of Congo said its human rights experts had interviewed 120 people who managed to escape the attacks by the FRPI militia, one of five ethnic armed groups operating in Congo's north-eastern Ituri district.
The militia hails from the Ngiti tribe, which is close to the Lendu ethnic group - the Hema's main rivals in Ituri.
"The victims ... number in the hundreds," the report said. "Those that were kidnapped have been forced to work as fishermen, porters of goods and domestic workers. Women have been used as sex slaves. Most of the Hema and (allied) Gegere victims were mutilated and summarily executed," it said.
UN peacekeepers and investigators accompanied by a local prosecutor and police officers went to one of the slave camps where civilians were being held in December, arrested seven presumed militia members and seized weapons and ammunition. - (Reuters)