9th December 1996, Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), with the help of Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (AFDL) rebels, under Paul Kagame’s orders, killed several hundred Hutu refugees at the makeshift camp in the village of Mbeshe Mbeshe in the Katoyi chiefdom.
Having surrounded the camp at around five o’clock in the morning, the AFDL and RPA soldiers indiscriminately opened fire on the camp’s occupants, killing an unknown number of refugees and internally displaced Hutu Congolese people.
Death trail from Mugunga to Mbeshe-Mbeshe
These Hutu refugee and civilians were survivors of earlier multiple massacres and under AFDL and APR pursuit :
First, Refugees had survived the October 1996 bombardments of Mugunga and Kibumba camp where they had been since June 1994.
On the run, they escaped towards the town of Walikale across the Masisi territory. AFDL and RPA were after them and had caught up with the slowest groups of refugees in Katoyi, in Ngandjo, in Miandja, in Nyaruba. Survivors of the above attacks settled at Osso Farm in Osso Village, in Masisi territory, before being attacked again in November 1996.
In November 1996, AFDL and RPA troops entered the Osso camp and killed a large number of them. Most of the Osso victims were refugees, among them many women and children.
Mbeshe Mbeshe victims were refugees who had survived the above Osso attack, and who, exhausted, sick and hungry, set up this makeshift camp in Mbeshe Mbeshe village where they were again attacked on 9 December 1996.
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OHCHR, 2010. Report of the Mapping Exercise Documenting the Most Serious Violations of Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law Committed Within the Territory of the Democratic Republic of the Congo Between March 1993 and June 2003, Geneva: Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Para 224, p 98 (web version).