DOROUMA, Congo — Massacre survivors here are so traumatized it is difficult to talk to them.
Marguerite Animbwefwo and her 7-year-old son managed to escape the onslaught by Ugandan rebels. But she is racked with guilt, despairing that she couldn’t save her 13- year-old daughter and 15-year- old son, killed in the Christmas Day rampage on her northeastern Congo village of Nawangu.
“They killed everyone else in the village. We are the only ones living,” she said Monday.
Her simple, stark words framed the situation. While the top U.N. diplomat for humanitarian affairs visited the area Monday and promised to do all he could to protect those who survived the “truly diabolical” massacre, the reality on the ground indicates those pleading for help in this remote area remain very much alone.
U.N. envoy John Holmes joined critics who blame the latest slaughter in eastern Congo on a joint military operation by troops from Congo, Uganda and Sudan to fight the rebels of Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army. The rebels — known for their brutality, their use of child soldiers and their kidnapping of girls for sex slaves — have carried their predatory violence into southern Sudan and northeastern Congo.
“The humanitarian consequences of the operations against the LRA have been catastrophic,” Holmes told reporters in Dorouma, a village in northeastern Congo near the Sudanese border.
Hundreds of people were killed in Dorouma — hacked, clubbed, bayoneted and shot — by Ugandan rebels who went on a three-day bloodletting spree beginning Dec. 24. The rebels have slaughtered 900 civilians since Christmas, the U.N. and humanitarian agencies estimate.
The onslaught came after the Ugandan air force bombed five Ugandan rebel bases in northeast Congo in December. Now the rebels have scattered across 15,000 square miles of dense forests and plains, according to Holmes — five times the area they operated in before.
One U.N. official described the bombings as throwing a rock at a hive of bees.
A spokesman for the Ugandan army, however, defended the strategy. The spokesman, Capt. Deo Akiiki, said Monday that the attacks succeeded in destroying the rebels’ base camps and their source of food.
Akiiki said rebel leader Joseph Kony’s deputy was ready to surrender and the rebels have been scattered into smaller groups that has destroyed their coordination.
Medecins Sans Frontieres has accused the U.N. peacekeeping force in Congo — the biggest in the world at 17,000 strong — of failing to protect the people slain in recent weeks.
