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The Attack

In the late afternoon of August 13, local residents of Gatumba noticed a few unfamiliar men in military uniform in town. Some of them, speaking Swahili, asked local children to bring them water.³⁰ A UN staff person saw men in military uniform near the camp and asked them who they were. They answered that they were there to provide security to the camp and he did not insist further. In the early evening, boys from the camp who were playing soccer on the field behind the camp saw another small group of men loitering nearby, as did a woman who went to take a shower an hour or two later.³¹

But none of these incidents was remarkable enough to cause any real concern and the refugees retired for the night as usual. Most were asleep by ten o’clock. One young woman was still awake, nursing her month-old baby.³² Cattle herders in an enclosure immediately next to the green tents and others across the road were also settling in for the night.³³ The commander of the military camp had shared a drink with friends in town and had just returned to the military camp while other town residents were still in one of the several small bars talking and drinking. One local official was watching the Olympic Games on television with neighbors. ³⁴ 

The attackers came across the marsh from the direction of the border. At least one witness actually saw some of them cross the border; other attackers apparently joined the group on the Burundi side of the frontier.³⁵ One of the attackers fired an initial shot at a distance, perhaps as a signal to others in their group. Then they moved towards the refugee camp, playing drums, ringing bells, blowing whistles, and singing religious songs in Kirundi. At least two local residents heard them sing, “God will show us how to get to you and where to find you.”³⁶ One other heard shouts of “Ingabo Z’Imana,” “[We are] the army of God.” Many reported hearing attackers sing choruses of “Allelluia” and “Amen.”³⁷

Most of the attackers wore military uniforms, either camouflage or solid green, but a few were in civilian dress.Most carried individual firearms but they also had at least one heavy weapon.³⁸ A number of the combatants were child soldiers. According to a survivor of the massacre, some attackers were so small that the butts of the weapons they were carrying dragged on the ground.³⁹ There were women in the group, encouraging the others by their songs and shouts, and ready to assist in carrying away the loot.⁴⁰           

When the policemen heard the songs and shouts, they began to fire at the attackers who returned their fire. When the policemen exhausted their ammunition, they fled, either to hide nearby or to report to their commanding officer at the police camp.⁴¹ Stopping some fifty yards from the tents, the attackers raked the tents with fire, mostly from small-arms. They had at least one heavy arm, however, “so loud that it made its own echo,” said one witness.⁴² A Burundian who lived some distance down the road from the camp said spoke of detonations of grenades that “made the roof shake.”⁴³

Even in the midst of the noise and confusion of the attack some refugees did not immediately understand the danger. Some believed the attackers were bandits coming to steal the cows stabled nearby. Others believed those singing the religious songs had come to save them especially since some attackers were shouting “Come, come, we’re going to save you”⁴⁴ Anyone who stopped out the entry of a tent was immediately gunned down, as was one father who sought to save his two children by flight.⁴⁵ The attackers, usually only two or three at a time, ripped open the tent flaps and slit the sides of the tent. Often they stayed at the entrance to the tent and either ordered people to come out or just began shooting into the tent. They then threw or shot incendiary grenades that caused the tents to catch fire.

Most victims died by weapons fire or by being burned to death. Fifty-one of the corpses of adults and fifteen of children had been burned.⁴⁶One survivor reported seeing an attacker stab a woman to death, probably with a bayonet, and several of the dead had received blows from machetes.⁴⁷ But according to a survey of statistics collected at hospitals treating the wounded, only one person who had been struck with a machete; all other injured persons suffered wounds from gunfire, explosion, or burns.⁴⁸ These attackers were men “experienced in killing,” as one observer remarked.⁴⁹

The attackers began at either end of the group of tents housing the refugees, burning eight of them completely and burning three partially and leaving intact those in the center of the row.   About an hour after their arrival the attackers left, heading back in the direction from which they had come. They carried away loot from the camp, particularly valuable items like money, radios, and clothing, but they did not stop to take cattle from the nearby enclosures. As they made their way across the plain in the direction of the border, they again sang and made music, a sound local residents followed until it died away in the distance.⁵⁰

Of the just over 800 refugees, 152 were killed, all Banyamulenge except for fourteen Bembe people.⁵¹  One hundred and six were wounded. Most victims were women and children. Early the next morning a Human Rights Watch researcher went to the site. She found government and international officials preoccupied with determining the cause and extent of the disaster. Ignored by all of them, a child three or four years old stood alone crying in front of a still smouldering tent.   

The Protected Burundians

The attackers harmed only Banyamulenge or others sheltered in tents with them. They did not attack any of the Burundian repatriated persons nor any Banyamulenge fortunate enough to be housed on the Burundian side of the camp. According to witnesses, the attackers even posted men at the entry to these tents to caution the persons inside not to come out.⁵² One of the Banyamulenge who nonetheless came out the back of one of these tents said he was set upon by attackers, one of whom told the others to shoot him. Another in the group stopped them, saying, “He came from the tents of our brothers.”⁵³ Another witness reported hearing an attacker say, “Leave those [people] alone, they are your brothers.”⁵⁴ The young mother who was nursing her baby when the attack began, a Bembe, was in a tent on the Banyamulenge side of the camp. She was shot in the foot while still in the tent and tried to get out at the back. As she did, she spoke some phrases in Kibembe to comfort her baby or to try to locate another woman. She said that a passing attacker heard her and asked in Kibembe if she were Bembe. When she responded yes, he helped her to get away, carrying her baby and taking her across the paved road to hide in a bush on the other side. There he asked her if there were other Bembe in the camp and remarked that “they”, that is, the attackers, believed that there were only Rwandans and Burundians in the camp. Among some Congolese, it is common to refer to Banyamulenge as “Rwandans.” She then asked him if they were going to kill everyone except the Burundians. According to her, he answered, “Our comrades told us not to kill on the side of the camp with the Burundians.”⁵⁵

Some of the repatriated Burundians present in the camp told a local official that the attackers had assured them that they would not be harmed. Others told some UN staff that they were not afraid because they knew in advance what was going to happen. They refused to explain further what they had meant: whether they simply had a general sense that there would be an attack, whether they knew that an attack would come that evening, or whether they knew that in any attack they would not be targeted. Some Burundians resident in Gatumba also suggested that they expected an attack but without giving any reason why.⁵⁶

The morning following the attack, most repatriated Burundians left the camp quickly. Over the next days local residents expressed fear of a reprisal attack by unknown perpetrators and some even took to spending the night in Bujumbura instead of in their own homes in Gatumba. Whether the repatriated Burundians from the camp shared this general fear or if they had a more specific reason to expect reprisals, many scattered to other places. The government established a new site for them, separate from that assigned to the surviving Banyamulenge, but there were few repatriated Burundians left in the camp to take up residence there.⁵⁷

Attack on the Military Camp and the Police Camp

The Burundian government has responsibility for protecting refugees on its territory, a responsibility it recognized by posting policemen as guards at the refugee camp. Yet the one hundred soldiers and several dozen policemen in the immediately adjacent camps did nothing to stop the slaughter of the refugees. Commanders of the military and police camps said they could not help the refugees because they were pinned down by heavy attacks on their own camps.⁵⁸ Soldiers and police rolled out in their trucks only after midnight, when the attackers had left the site on foot by paths overland. In contrast to the 258 refugees dead and wounded, there were no dead or injured soldiers or police nor did the Burundian armed forces inflict any casualties or capture any combatants from the attacking force.⁵⁹ 

Local residents, including some in the immediate vicinity of the military and police camps, knew immediately that the refugees had been attacked. One described how they heard the noise of weapons and even the shouts of the attackers and the cries of the victims, which carried clearly through the night air. They saw the tracer bullets against the night sky and soon after, the flames and smoke from the burning tents.⁶⁰ Administrative officials from the most local through the provincial governor knew that the refugees were being attacked and exchanged information with each other and with the commander of the police camp during the hour that the killing continued.⁶¹ The commander of the police camp said that he understood “very quickly” that the refugees were being attacked. He too heard the cries and shouts and saw the tents burning.⁶²

In contrast to others, the commander of the military camp—who had the larger number of troops—asserts that he did not know the refugee camp was attacked until some thirty minutes into the slaughter when he was called by one of the Banyamulenge leaders, who was himself not in the camp but had heard of the attack from others.⁶³Given that the military commander was within a few hundred yards of many others who knew that refugees were being killed, it is difficult to understand how he could not also have known what was happening.

The military camp commander began an interview with Human Rights Watch researchers by announcing that he would provide them the “official version” of events.⁶⁴   His camp was attacked, he said, at the same time as the refugee camp by a large number of combatants. He estimated the number of those attacking the military camp as one or two companies, meaning more than two hundred combatants.  At one point he suggested that the attackers had surrounded the military camp, which occupies a vast expanse of flat terrain. He later said that combatants with one or more heavy weapons were concentrated at the main gate—a single bar across the road—while others with individual arms fired from the back of the camp. Spent ammunition found on the ground at the camp entrance supports the contention that combatants fired from there, but apparently without their bullets reaching any of the camp buildings. There was no visible damage to any buildings from the gunfire.⁶⁵

In an interview with a Human Rights Watch researcher the police commander maintained that his camp had also been attacked although all the information he provided seemed to refer to the military camp rather than to his own. There was no physical sign of an attack having been carried out against the police camp. He maintained that neither he nor the military camp commander had enough men “to force their way through” the attackers.⁶⁶

The military camp commander said that he spoke on the telephone with the police camp commander about the attacks on their respective camps, but not about the attack on the refugees. The military camp commander was also in contact either by radio or by telephone with the commander of another military camp a few miles distant at the airport as well as with general staff headquarters, some fifteen miles away, where his communications with his men were being monitored by the officer on guard. He also had a telephone conversation during the attack with the chief of staff of the army, General Germain Niyoyankana. According to General Niyoyankana, he could hear the sounds of firing over the telephone. The camp commander told him that he heard firing from beyond his camp—meaning presumably from the refugee camp—but that it was impossible for him to leave his own camp and to assemble the number of troops necessary for an “élément d’intervention,” that is, a group that could carry out the necessary rescue operation.⁶⁷

In addition to the nearby military position at the airport, the camp commander had two battalions stationed in the Rukoko forest, not far from the area.⁶⁸

The camp commander said he never asked for reinforcements because he felt he was in control of the situation, that is, he was able to keep the combatants from entering the military camp. Neither he nor any of the other officers interviewed offered a satisfactory explanation of why reinforcements were not sent to provide the “élément d’intervention” that might have saved lives at the refugee camp.

When the weapons fire ended, soldiers and policemen went to the refugee camp and gathered up the wounded for transport to hospitals in Bujumbura. According to one witness on the scene, they did not pull any living persons from the tents that were still burning; anyone inside had perished by then in the flames.⁶⁹

One observer well-connected to Burundian soldiers suggested that the men at the Gatumba military and police camps—like others in the Burundian armed forces--have been so demoralized by the uncertainties of plans for demobilization and changes in the military system that they lacked the commitment to carry out their duties. The observer suggested further that officers may sometimes have trouble getting men to obey their orders and that this might have been such a case.⁷⁰ If this explanation is correct, it would have been appropriate for charges to have been brought against those failing to observe military discipline; in the three weeks since the slaughter, apparently no such charges have been brought. In addition, this explanation might have relevance for one camp, but seems less likely to apply to all those officers at whatever level of command, who were aware of the attack on the refugee camp and yet did nothing to stop it. Whether they feared for their own safety, cared little about refugees from another country, or had other personal or political reasons for not acting, these officers should be held accountable for their failure to act to provide security for the refugees.