Central Africa: Genocide's Children

Friday 16 November 2007 7.35pm

Reporter Sam Kiley travels to Central Africa's Great Lakes region to reveal that extremist Hutu groups behind the murder of a million people in Rwanda now hold bloody control over an area the size of Belgium.

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Reporter Sam Kiley travels to Central Africa's Great Lakes region to reveal that extremist Hutu groups behind the murder of a million people in less than 100 days in Rwanda now hold bloody control over an area the size of Belgium.

Once known as the Interahamwe, or "those who kill together", the militia who carried out the Rwandan genocide now call themselves the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR). But, as Unreported World reveals, their methods are still brutal and they are being blamed for a pandemic of rape.

The team begin their journey in Bunyakiri, in the East of the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is now controlled by the Hutu militia. Since 2005, more than 1000 women in the town have reported being abducted and raped by militia men living in the forests. They tell Kiley that after the trauma of the rape and then escaping, they have been rejected by their families.

It quickly becomes clear that these rapes form just the tip of an iceberg. The team moves on to a hospital in South Kivu province, which has recorded 4,500 rapes this year, most of them blamed on the militia.

Kiley and Watts then trek deep into the mountains in South Kivu to meet the leaders of the FDLR. The camp is bizarre: no women, no children but well-run with gardens and decent food. The FDLR leaders lay on a military drill, telling Kiley that they will return in triumph to their homeland of Rwanda, and it's clear that these militia leaders are indoctrinating young soldiers with hatred for Tutsis - the logic of mass murder.

These suspicions are confirmed by deserters from the interahamwe who admit, once safe from their senior officers, that they were drilled on what to say and think, faced execution for wanting to return home to Rwanda, and lived by looting ordinary Congolese civilians of their meagre rations.

Meanwhile another conflict is brewing in North Kivu, where local Tutsi warlord Laurent Nkunda has pulled his men out of the government army. Nkunda claims that the Hutu militia continue to pose a mortal threat to his Tutsi tribesmen.

But, as Unreported World shows, while this fear might be justified Nkunda is now fighting the government forces and the team films UN peace keepers desperately trying to keep the two sides apart.

In the regional capital Goma, the Congolese defence minister Chikez Diemu tells Kiley that the Rwandan Government is using Nkunda in a proxy war - an allegation which looks to be well-founded when Kiley discovers two teenagers who say that they were recruited in Rwanda to fight with Nkunda.

And today, in this war-torn country where four million have perished in the last decade, the population - some of whom have been refuges twice before - are set to endure another cycle of violence in the civil war Rwanda has exported to the Congo.


Channel 4 - News - Central Africa: Genocide's Children