DR Congo’s Yumbi Massacre Survivors Desperate for Justice

In late December 2018, Father Nestor Longota, a Catholic priest, returned to Bongende, his home village in northwest Democratic Republic of Congo. “What I saw was unimaginable,” he said last week. “There were putrefied bodies, some were mutilated, others had been burned in houses, and houses were destroyed.” A few days earlier, on December 16, hundreds of ethnic Batende – armed with hunting rifles, automatic weapons, knives, and machetes – stormed the nearby town of Yumbi and killed at least 170 people, mostly ethnic Banunu. The day after, they attacked the villages of Nkolo II and then Bongende.…

© Human Rights Watch - mercredi 16 décembre 2020