Rwanda's army and its rebel group ally have killed dozens and abducted thousands, Congo says
The alleged crimes were committed between May 10 and 13 against civilians accused by the rebels of belonging to the Congolese army and its allied militias, Congo's interior ministry said in a statement Wednesday.
'The toll includes 107 murders, more than 4,000 men and boys abducted and forcibly loaded onto trucks to an unknown destination, hundreds of cases of summary executions, rape, torture, looting, restrictions on freedom of movement, as well as incursions into health facilities,' the statement read.
The Associated Press has not been able to independently verify the reports. Spokespersons for Rwanda's military and the M23 rebels did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The decades-long conflict in eastern Congo escalated in January, when the Rwanda-backed M23 rebels seized the strategic city of Goma, followed by the takeover of the city of Bukavu in February. The fighting has killed some 3,000 people and raised fears of a wider regional war.
Congo's accusation comes days after M23 presented hundreds of captured men at a stadium in Goma. The group said the captives were Congolese army or members of its allied militias whom Congo armed to foment conflict in order to blame it on M23.
M23 rebels are supported by about 4,000 troops from neighboring Rwanda, according to U.N. experts, and at times have vowed to march as far as Congo's capital, Kinshasa, about 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) to the west.
The fighting in Congo is linked to Rwanda's decadeslong ethnic conflict. M23 says it is defending ethnic Tutsis in Congo. Rwanda has claimed the Tutsis are being persecuted by Hutus and former militias responsible for the 1994 genocide of 800,000 Tutsis and others in Rwanda.
Many Hutus fled to Congo after the genocide and founded the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda militia group. Rwanda says the militia group is 'fully integrated' into the Congolese military, which denies it.
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Banchereau reported from Dakar
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Caribbean LGBTQ+ activists celebrate as court strikes down colonial-era laws
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Matthias Domaschk was only 23 years old when his body was found dangling from a heating pipe in a Stasi prison, on April 12 1981. Two days earlier, Matthias, known as 'Matz' to his friends, had boarded the fast train from his home town of Jena to East Berlin, the capital of East Germany, or the German Democratic Republic as it was officially known. All he had wanted to do was attend a birthday party there – but he never arrived. Suspicious that Matz might have plans to disrupt the 10th Congress of the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) held in Berlin that weekend, the Stasi had him and his friends arrested en route. Forty-eight hours later, Matz was dead. Attempts to revive the young man were in vain. The Stasi recorded his death as suicide, but many of his friends and relatives suspected, and still suspect, foul play. 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But the whole time we hoped that the future was on our side, that socialism was the more progressive society,' Wensierski writes, reconstructing Matz's thoughts. 'The dinosaurs in the SED currently in power in Berlin simply haven't got it right.' So Matz began asking awkward questions in school. Like so many others, his father had been coerced to join the ruling SED party in exchange for an uninterrupted career and certain privileges, such as travel to foreign countries for work. When Matz was 13, he asked his teachers why his father had been forced to join when surely all SED members should do so out of true conviction. His parents were immediately summoned to the school. Matz later became involved in the Junge Gemeinde, a Protestant youth organisation, where he met like-minded people who became both friends and lovers. When the singer and regime-critic Wolf Biermann, who had emigrated to the GDR from Hamburg as a teenager, was expatriated in 1976, Matz joined the vociferous protests coming from artists and intellectuals all over East Germany against the regime's decision. This was when the Stasi interrogated him for the first time. Determined not to cow under the pressure, Matz continued to support arrested comrades. He travelled to Czechoslovakia and Poland, where he met more like-minded young people. Here, Wensierski sketches a life full of youthful idealism. Moments of pristine happiness sit alongside moments of deep depression. The Stasi never let Matz out of their sight, narrowing his room to build a free life more and more. Just before gaining his A-level equivalents, Matz was expelled from class, barring his access to university education. Things eventually became too much for his estranged partner Renate, who was also constantly harassed by the Stasi. She eventually decided to live in West Germany with their young daughter Julia. By the time Matz embarked on his ill-fated journey to Berlin on April 10 1981, the Stasi suspected him of subversive activity, to the point of political terrorism. Matz was clearly well integrated into a network of friends and fellow dissidents – as became evident after his death, when more than 100 people attended his funeral, despite the Stasi's attempt to suppress the gathering. This was a regime run by a generation of political dinosaurs whose paranoia came from a different age. Stasi boss Erich Mielke himself had been trained in political terrorism in Moscow in the 1930s and honed his skills during the Spanish Civil War. Now he ran the Stasi, still seeing shadows of his own behaviour in a new generation that had grown up in peacetime and without Stalinist schooling. Just over a week before Matz died in one of his prisons, Mielke gave a speech to his staff in which he outlined his belief that there were six types of citizens, ranging from outright 'enemies' with a 'hostile-negative attitude' to those 'on whom can party and state depend at all times'. The latter was the only positive category out of six. It was this deep-seated mistrust of its own people that drove the regime to curtail the life opportunities of people such as Matz. As the author points out, Matz was a young man who would have challenged authority in any system. Born in 1957, he belonged to a generation of intellectuals keen to unshackle 'themselves from the authoritarian spirit of post-war society, battling their parents' conformity and apathy'. In contrast to Western democracies, the GDR left little room for alternative lifestyles. In that respect, the title of the English translation does this book no favours. This isn't a book about an entire generation but about those who chose lives that differed from the mainstream. Much to the frustration of civil rights campaigners, most people in the GDR simply tried to get on with their lives, considering people like Matz troublemakers. Most East Germans did what they felt they had to, which is why there were no uprisings between the major eruptions of unrest in 1953 and 1989. Wensierski's book, then, is about the impossibility of a different life in the GDR, about the hostility those who chose not to blend in encountered not just from the Stasi but also from their peers. In his research of this story, Wensierski found himself reminded of his earlier 'work on the 1950s and 1960s in West Germany, when almost a million young people were put into children's homes because they didn't correspond to the desired norm'. Whether in East Germany, West Germany, Britain or America, Wensierski muses, long-haired youths like Matz were told to 'Have a wash! Get yourself a job!' But there's no moral equivalence between such attitudes in West Germany and the way Matz's spirit was broken by the GDR, and Wensierski doesn't claim this either. Though it details events that occurred nearly half a century ago, Generation GDR reads like a cautionary tale for our time. Speaking to 30 former Stasi agents, the author found himself baffled by how those 'who destroyed other people's lives' found it possible to 'believe that they were part of building a more humane society'. His villains aren't shadowy figures in grey cloaks but complex humans who did what they did out of opportunism, idealism or coercion. We live in an age where many people in positions of authority feel their own outlook to be morally superior and that other views and lifestyles should not be aired or encouraged. Today, voices are also silenced, careers destroyed and life chances diminished, all in the name of building a 'kinder' future. Generation GDR delivers a powerful warning from history – against the curtailment of individual freedoms in the name of a supposed greater good. ★★★★☆
