South African Press Association (Johannesburg)April 9, 2003
Posted to the web April 9, 2003
Parliament Those responsible for the recent massacre of villagers in the Ituri region of the Democratic Republic of Congo have not yet been identified, that country's President Joseph Kabila said on Wednesday evening.
Speaking at media briefing at Tuynhuys in Cape Town, where he has been taking part in a Great Lakes region heads of state meeting chaired by South African President Thabo Mbeki, Kabila said if they were caught justice would take its course.
"The United Nations team on the ground is trying to get the correct information on who is involved and why," he told journalists.
UN officials in the region on Wednesday confirmed the massacre had claimed between 150 and 300 lives, revising sharply downward earlier reports from other sources that close to a 1000 people were killed.Reports of the latest massacre in the strife-torn DRC comes one day after the signing of an accord to end over four years of war in the vast Central African country.Kabila said the violence was "due to impunity" of crimes committed and nobody being punished.
Also attending Wednesday's heads of state meeting were Rwandan President Paul Kgame, Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni and Tanzanian President Benjamin Mkapa.According to South Africa's department of foreign affairs, the meeting was aimed at finding "ways of resolving escalating intra and inter-state conflict in the region".
Speaking at the media briefing, Mbeki said agreement had been reached among the leaders that Uganda would pull its troops out of the DRC by April 24."This has been confirmed. We have spoken to the Secretary General of the United Nations to request that some of the MONUC forces in the DRC be deployed to the Ituri region."
He is attending to that as a matter of urgency."We are all agreed that this will help in resolving this conflict," Mbeki said.Asked what Ugandan troops were doing in the DRC, Museveni said they had been sent there to counter a "very vicious terrorist campaign" being waged against his country from Sudan.He said the terrorists had been moving into Uganda via the DRC."The Congo was being used as a transit artery."After assurances that MONUC would deploy troops in that area of the DRC, it would be a relief to pull his troops out."We are happy to go home," he said.
"In the time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act"
--George Orwell--
