ICRC evacuates Tutsi internees

The ICRC has transported 356 civilian detainees, mostly Congolese Tutsis, from the DRC to Kigali and another 14 to Bujumbura on Sunday and Monday, an ICRC spokesman told IRIN on Monday. He said another 120 people were scheduled to be evacuated under the operation aboard ICRC-chartered aircraft. “All accepted to go to Rwanda because they have relatives in the country. That was one of the conditions,” the spokesman said, adding that the 14 flown to Bujumbura had relatives in Burundi. Of the 190 people transported on Sunday, there were 10 children, the spokesman said, but he did not have a breakdown for the 180 people evacuated on Monday.

Many Tutsi civilians were rounded up by government authorities in Kinshasa and Lubumbashi at the outbreak of the conflict in August 1998. The government says they were placed in internment camps “for their own protection,” while the rebels said they were being held “hostage” by the Kabila regime. A recent UN mission to Lubumbashi reported that there were some 520 Tutsi detainees in the city, according to OCHA News. The UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the DRC, Roberto Garreton, estimated in February that there were between 1,000-2,000 Tutsis “deprived of their liberty” in government-controlled zones of the DRC, including several hundred still in hiding in the capital.