Forced to Flee

The region of North Kivu in eastern Zaire has been the site of recurrent interethnic violence since 1992, often carried out with the complicity of Zairian regional and national leaders and the Zairian security forces. The explosion of violence in 1993 pitted the mostly Zairian Tutsis and Hutus against other Zairian ethnic groups in the region, but the situation was exacerbated by the arrival in Goma of some 720,000 largely Hutu refugees from Rwanda after the genocide in July 1994. The influx of refugees served to reignite the ethnic violence and to break down the Hutu-Tutsi alliance, leading to attacks against the Tutsi population by both sides. The violence in North Kivu has left hundreds dead, some 250,000 displaced and approximately 16,000 Tutsis forced to flee as refugees to Rwanda. The goal of the attacks is to drive out rival ethnic groups and to create ethnically pure enclaves. This report focuses on the violence against Tutsis, which has been particularly severe since late 1995, and escalated in 1996.