Rebels and villagers said killed in Congo fighting
GOMA, Congo (Reuters) - Congo's military said more than 40 Rwandan Hutu rebels had died in an air raid, as a 3-week-old joint Congolese-Rwandan offensive sparked rebel reprisals which a rights group said had killed 100 villagers.
Congo's government allowed thousands of Rwandan troops into its North Kivu province last month to take part in an operation aimed at disarming Rwandan Hutu militia groups blamed for years of strife in central Africa.
"An air raid was launched on a (rebel) position in Kashebere, where a meeting of commanders was being held ... the toll of this attack is more than 40 dead and many wounded," Congo's army said in a statement received by Reuters on Friday.
Congolese and Rwandan ground forces also inflicted "heavy" losses on a well-defended base of rebels of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) in Majembe village, it said.
Survivors there cast the rebels' bodies into a nearby river, so no accurate death toll was available, it said.
The decision by President Joseph Kabila to let around 4,000 Rwandan troops into Congo has been heavily criticised by both opposition politicians and some of Kabila's political allies.
Rwanda has twice invaded its much bigger neighbour on the ostensible grounds of pursuing the FDLR, a group composed in part of former Rwandan soldiers and Interahamwe militia responsible for carrying out Rwanda's 1994 genocide.
A 1998 Rwandan incursion helped spark a 6-year war that drew in a half dozen African neighbours and caused a humanitarian catastrophe that aid workers say has killed 5.4 million people.
"KILLINGS OF GHASTLY PROPORTIONS"
Until Thursday's attacks, Congolese and Rwandan military officials had said they had killed just a few dozen FDLR fighters. But the U.N. says hundreds of rebels and their families have surrendered and requested repatriation to Rwanda.
The bulk of the rebel force, estimated to number around 6,000, has melted into the bush, where New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said FDLR fighters had massacred more than 100 civilians they accused of betraying them.
"The FDLR have a very ugly past, but we haven't seen this level of violence in years ... we've documented many abuses by FDLR forces, but these are killings of ghastly proportions," senior HRW researcher Anneke Van Woudenberg said in a statement.
Survivors told HRW that FDLR fighters fired on villagers with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. In one instance, rebels battered a 10-year-old girl to death against a brick wall. In another, they slit open the womb of a pregnant woman.
"About 40 (Congolese and Rwandan) soldiers entered town and captured some FDLR. Others fled," Mutower Bashamwami, 38, told Reuters at a camp for displaced civilians in the town of Minova on the shores of eastern Congo's Lake Kivu.
"After the soldiers left, the FDLR came back and started shooting people because they were angry. I have five children. Two were hit by bullets and killed as we ran away. Another one is lost and two are here in the camp with me," he said.
HRW also accused Rwanda's Tutsi-dominated army of abusing Congolese civilians as it marched into former FDLR areas.
"The Tutsi soldiers accused me of being the wife of an FDLR combatant, just because I'm Hutu," said a woman who told HRW she was raped by a Rwandan army soldier in Remeka village.
"After they raped me, they burnt my house, saying it was the house of an FDLR. I was pregnant, but there's no more movement in my womb. I think I have lost my first child."
Fleeing Ugandan rebels targeted in a similar joint offensive by Congolese and Ugandan troops have slaughtered around 900 villagers in Congo's isolated northeast in recent months.
Activists and aid agencies say the 17,000-strong U.N. force has not done enough to fulfil its mandate to protect civilians.
(Writing by Joe Bavier; editing by Alistair Thomson and Andrew Roche)