At the time of the incidents, the Hutu population in Rwanda and in Zaire, including refugees from Rwanda and Burundi, constituted an ethnic group within the meaning of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (OHCHR, 2010, p. 280).
Several of the massacres in Rwanda as well as in DRC such as those listed by the DRC Mapping Exercise Report of the UN OHCHR were committed regardless of the age or gender of the victims. This is particularly true of the crimes committed in Byumba stadium (1994), Kibeho IDP Camp (1995), Kibumba (October 1996), Mugunga and Osso (November 1996), Hombo and Biriko (December 1996) in the province of North Kivu, Kashusha and Shanje (November 1996) in the province of South Kivu, Tingi-Tingi and Lubutu (March 1997) in Maniema Province, and Boende (April 1997) in Equateur Province, Nyakinama caves (1998), where the vast majority of victims were women and children.
Hutu of all nationalities
Particularly in DRC, “the scale of the crimes committed by the APR against hundreds of thousands of Hutu of all nationalities [Rwandan, Congolese & Burundian] including the Hutu established in the DRC decades confirm that it was all Hutu, as such, who were targeted” (OHCHR, 2010: para 514, p 280). Many Burundian hutu refugees living in South Kivu shared the fate of their Rwandan and Congolese companions. Many were killed when their camps were attacked or while fleeing to the west with Rwandans. Others drowned, when they attempted to cross Lake Tanganyika in search of safety.
The crimes committed against Congolese Hutu civilians aka “Hutu banyarwanda”, in particular in Rutshuru (30 October 1996) and Mugogo (18 November 1996), in North Kivu, DRC, highlight the specific targeting of the Hutus, since people who were able to persuade the aggressors that they belonged to another Congolese ethnic group were released just before the massacres:
On 30 October 1996, AFDL/APR units killed at least 350 civilians, most of them Hutu Banyarwanda[1], with blows of hammers to the head in Rutshuru town centre, close to the ANP house. In the days leading up to the massacres, the soldiers had appealed to civilians […] to return home to attend a large public meeting on 30 October. When they returned to the village, the inhabitants of Kiringa were led to Rutshuru town centre and shut away in the ANP house. In the afternoon, the soldiers began to compile a register and asked people of Nande ethnic origin to return home. They then separated the men and women on the grounds that the women had to go and prepare the meal. The women were taken to the Maison de la Poste, where they were executed. The men were bound and led in pairs to a sand quarry several dozen metres from the ANP house. All of them were then executed with blows of hammers. (OHCHR, 2010: para 275, p 121)
On 18 November 1996, AFDL/APR units massacred several hundred Hutu Banyarwanda at the Mugogo market, 31 kilometres from Rutshuru. Upon their arrival, the soldiers announced that they were going to organise a meeting to introduce the new chief of the locality to the people. After asking non-Hutus and the people of Kiwanja to leave, the soldiers opened fire on the crowd. Some of the victims were killed with blows of hammers or pestles to the head. (OHCHR, 2010 : p.121-123)
The systematic use of barriers by the AFDL/APR/FAB, particularly in South Kivu, enabled them to identify people of Hutu origin by their name or village of origin and thus to eliminate them:
AFDL/APR/FAB soldiers set up a number of checkpoints on the Ruzizi Plain around the villages of Bwegera, Sange, Luberizi and Kiliba, at the entrance to Uvira town (Kalundu Port), at Makobola II (Fizi territory) and at the Rushima ravine (Uvira territory). At these checkpoints, soldiers reportedly sorted the people they intercepted according to their nationality, under the pretext of preparing for their return to their country of origin. Individuals identified as Rwandan or Burundian Hutus on the basis of their accent, their morphology or their dress were systematically separated from the other intercepted people and killed in the surrounding area (OHCHR, 2010, p. 83).
In Rwanda, Special Investigation Unit of the ICTR reported cases where RPF separated Hutus from Tutsi and executed them, such as in Runda, Gihara Commune, where in mid-June 1994, “all the companies of the 101th Batallion were gathered. At the Market of Gihara there were about 300 people who had taken refuge. They were mixed, hutu and tutsi. The IO [intelligence officer] of the 101th Battalion gave the order to separate the hutu from the tutsi and to kill the hutus. 25 tutsi who were not killed, had been put on the side. All the other hutu were killed” (Mohamed, L. A., Maiga, H. & Bastarache, J., 2003. General Report on the Special Investigations concerning the crimes committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) during 1994)
[1] Hutu Congolese who settled in North Kivu on the Congolese territory before 1885 or during the colonial era