The government-backed Bana Mura militia in Congo has committed horrific crimes in ethnically-motivated attacks in the past few months, including cutting off toddlers’ limbs and slicing open pregnant women, the U.N. human rights chief said on Tuesday.
“Refugees from multiple villages in the Kamonya territory indicated that the Bana Mura have in the past two months shot dead, hacked or burned to death, and mutilated, hundreds of villagers, as well as destroying entire villages,” he said.
“My team saw children as young as two whose limbs had been chopped off; many babies had machete wounds and severe burns,” Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein told the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva.
Meanwhile the Catholic Church has also claimed that Congolese security forces and a militia fighting them have killed at least 3,383 people in the central Kasai region since October.
The Catholic church made this known on Tuesday, in the most detailed report to date on the violence.
Church officials, citing their own sources in the remote territory bordering Angola, said the army had destroyed 10 villages as it sought to stamp out an insurrection.
They also accused the Kamuina Nsapu militia of killing hundreds of people, destroying four villages and attacking church property in a campaign to drive out central government troops.
No one was immediately available to comment from the militia or Democratic Republic of Congo’s army, which has dismissed accusations of excessive force in the past.
Reuters
