Congo fighters boiled girls alive, says UN

MILITIAMEN in north-eastern Congo grilled bodies on a spit and boiled two girls alive as their mother watched, UN peacekeepers claimed yesterday.

The claims add cannibalism to a list of atrocities allegedly carried out by one of the tribal groups fighting in the area.

“Those responsible for atrocities will be brought to justice,” General Patrick Cammaert, the Dutch Navy commander of UN forces in Congo, told reporters in Kinshasa as he presented a report on abuses allegedly committed by the Patriotic Resistance Front of Ituri.

Gen Cammaert said peacekeepers were working to cut off weapons supplies to the group, who apparently entered the country from neighbouring Uganda.

Militiamen were suspected of killing nine UN peacekeepers in a February 25 ambush.

Congo became a battleground for six nations during a 1998-2002 war that killed some 50,000 people directly and another three million through strife-induced hunger and disease. But sporadic fighting continues between militiamen, rebels and government troops in the lawless north-east.

The fighting kills thousands every month and has made it the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, UN humanitarian chief Jan Egeland said in Geneva.

The UN report, summarising evidence from witnesses gathered over a year, said hundreds of people have been kidnapped by militias in the region and that some have been killed by torture and decapitation. Those not killed are held in labour camps.

The charges of cannibalism were the first detailed account to emerge since the war.

The UN report was accompanied by a separate account from Zainabo Alfani in which she told UN investigators she was forced to watch rebels kill and eat two of her children in June 2003.

The report said: “In one corner, there was already cooked flesh from bodies and two bodies being grilled on a barbecue and, at the same time, they prepared her two little girls, putting them alive in two big pots filled with boiling water and oil.”

Her youngest child was saved, apparently because at six months old she didn’t have much flesh. The woman herself was gang-raped by the rebels and mutilated.

Ms Alfani died on Sunday, nearly two years after the attack, of AIDS contracted during her torture, the UN report said.

The new International Court of Justice in The Hague said this week that its first cases will deal with war crimes in eastern Congo.