The promised national and international to massacre banyamulenge in Gatumba / BURUNDI 2004

DOMITIEN NDAYIZEYE ex Brundian President and AZARIAS RUBERWA ex Congolese vice-president.

CAROLYNE MAC ASKIE Special Representative of the Secretary General of the United Nations in Burundi I remember in 2004 the entairement of innocent Banyamulenge in Gatumba massacre / BURUNDI that the different national authorities with the promise of international prosecution of perpetrators of Gatumba massacre.

The 1996 Banyamulenge children taken to Tanzanian

Sadly, the international community is not aware of this situation. Mr. Mukiza Nelson has investigated how to return children who are being held as slaves in Tanzania to their parents. He has delivered this report to the UNHCR, Amnesty International, and the governments of Tanzania and the RDC.

What planet are we on where slavery can still exist?

I cannot understand why the world is silent on this issue. If you would like to know more about the reality of the events I described here, continue to read this blog, or contact me at jmusore@aol.com or Mr. Nelson at mukiza@hotmail.com.

Today, we mourn our brother and sister who have been taken by the aggressors of Bembé origin and manipulated by the Tanzanian government. To this day, they live in two camps near the town of Kigoma in Tanzania, where they live like slaves with poor living conditions. Bembe who crossed the border from Tanzania into Congo were also responsible for the massacre at Bibokoboko in 1996.


Many children were taken from their homes at such a young age that they cannot remember their parents.

Banyamulenge Survivors in America

We remember October 2006, when the USA announced that it would welcome more than 10,000 refugees from Burundi who had lived in camps in Tanzania since 1972. Today it was the turn for the Congolese survivors on the Gatumba massacre in Burundi. A representative from the UN High Council on Refugees made the announcement.

As individuals and humanitarians, we thank the Americans for this great act of generosity. However, there remain many other Banyamulenges in need of assistance: survivors of the 1998 massacre in Lumbubashi, in Kalmia, in Vyura, Gatanga, and the 1996 massacre in Bibokobongo in Fizi, in 2004 in Bukavu in the South Kivu, and other refugees who are displaced from their homes and continue to eke out a living in Burundi.

We call for justice on behalf of the survivors. An international tribunal should be created to try those responsible for war crimes. Not only did those (military leaders? Civilian leaders? The populace?) responsible push the “undesirables” out of their homeland, but visited violence and death upon them in the camps where they resettled across the border in another country, a place of supposed peace and security.

It is my opinion that the United States should prevail upon the United Nations to try these criminals.

The 2004 Gatumba Massacre in Burundi

This story might as well be a comic strip titled “Tin tin’s Adventures in Congo” or a bad Hollywood movie.

It is sad when men, women, and children are forced to abandon their lives, their fortunes, and their loved ones to go live in a foreign land because they are no longer wanted by their countrymen.

The conflict in Congo produced gave rise to a generation of orphans with injured bodies and minds. Many are handicapped by the trauma that they saw, heard about, and endured, during a string of massacres visited on the Banyamulenge people, starting during in 1964 during the reign of the Mulele. More children were lost in a massacre at a refugee camp in Gatumba, Burundi in 2004, when the camp was attacked and there was no one to protect them.

It is true that many men, women, and children are hated in Congo because they call themselves Banyamulenge