UN delays release of controversial report on Congo massacres

Sep 2, 2010, 15:29 GMT

Geneva - The release of a United Nations report detailing the massacre of thousands of civilians by Rwandan and Congolese forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo has been delayed by a month, UN human rights chief Navi Pillay said Thursday.

The draft report, leaked to the media last week, outraged Rwanda and led to the East African nation threatening to pull its troops from UN peacekeeping missions, starting with Sudan's Darfur province.

'Following requests, we have decided to give concerned states a further month to comment on the draft,' Pillay said, 'and I have offered to publish any such comments alongside the report itself on 1 October, if they so wish.'

The report details hundreds of incidents and the killings of tens of thousand of non-combatants, including women and children, in the Democratic Republic of Congo between 1993 and 2003.

According to the report, the Rwandan army and associated Congolese rebel groups systematically targeted members of the Hutu tribe in DR Congo.

Hutu militia slaughtered 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus during Rwanda's 1994 genocide, which was ended by invading Tutsi forces led by Paul Kagame, who is now president of the Central African nation. Around 1 million Hutus fled to DR Congo as the Tutsi army bore down on Kigali.

The actions of the Rwandan army in seeking revenge on Hutus in DR Congo could be defined as genocide, the report said.

There were rumours that UN head Ban Ki-moon pressured Pillay to remove the word 'genocide' from the text. However, Pillay's spokesman said Ki-moon had not made any attempt to have the text altered.

Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo told reporters in Kigali earlier this week that Rwandan soldiers in Darfur, numbering almost 3,500, had been put on standby for withdrawal in advance of the report's publication.

The genocide is still a sensitive subject in Rwanda. Opponents of Kagame have been arrested on charges of 'genocide ideology' for suggesting invading Tutsi forces massacred Hutu civilians.

Kagame recently won a landslide re-election.

DR Congo is still recovering from a full-scale conflict that ran from 1998-2003. An estimated 5.4 million people have died as a result of the conflict and its long aftermath.