‘Along the main road you see the graves’: UN says hundreds killed in Congo

The officials said the violence, between the Bununu and Batende groups in and around the town of Yumbi in Mai-Ndombe province, flared a few weeks before the country’s presidential election on December 30.

congo, congo violence, congo ethnic strife, Joseph Kabila, united nations, un, congo news, congo unrest — Congolese soldiers on patrol in Mukoko, December 11, 2018. Two soldiers were reported to have died of Ebola on January 29. (Source: The New York Times)

By Rick Gladstone

Fifteen communal burial sites and 43 single graves have been found in a northwest area of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where three days of ethnic strife last month may have left nearly 900 people dead, United Nations officials said Tuesday.

The officials said the violence, between the Bununu and Batende groups in and around the town of Yumbi in Mai-Ndombe province, flared a few weeks before the country’s presidential election on December 30.

There was no indication the violence had been directly related to the election, the officials said. But it came against a backdrop of high political tensions throughout the central African country because the election had been repeatedly delayed by the government of then-President Joseph Kabila, who ruled for 17 years and was reluctant to relinquish power.

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The mayhem in the Yumbi area left many homes burned, forced hundreds of residents to flee and destroyed voting machines and other election equipment, which were among the reasons that the authorities in Kinshasa, the capital, excluded the area from participating in the election.

Word of possible massacres around Yumbi first surfaced a few weeks ago, when the UN’s human rights office said it had reports from “credible sources” of horrific violence between December 16 and December 18 that had killed 890 people. Michelle Bachelet, the top human rights official at the UN, said it was “crucial that this shocking violence be promptly, thoroughly investigated and the perpetrators be brought to justice.”