At mass burial, Congolese families weep for victims of protest killings
World
At mass burial, Congolese families weep for victims of protest killings
GOMA, Democratic Republic of Congo (Reuters) - The smell of decomposing bodies filled the air as cemetery workers in eastern Congo unloaded dozens of coffins at the final resting place for victims of one of the deadliest crackdowns on protests in recent local memory.
As rain poured down on the funerals in mid-September, distraught family members cried out and clasped each other for support. The burials continued as darkness fell.
At least 56 people were killed on Aug. 30, according to a military prosecutor, after Congolese soldiers in the city of Goma opened fire on protesters ahead of a demonstration against the presence of U.N. peacekeepers.
A military court on Monday sentenced some of those accused of orchestrating the bloodshed, and the government has paid for burials and offered compensation to the grieving and angry families.
Many are struggling to come to terms with their loss.
"It's criminal, what they've done," said 26-year-old widow Tumaini Barumana Biluge, decrying the two weeks she and the other bereaved had had to wait to identify the victims.
"We couldn't recognise people's faces anymore, relatives only recognised their own by the clothes they were wearing," she said at her simple home in a hardscrabble suburb of Goma, the day after the Sept. 18 burial.
Her husband's brother was also killed on Aug. 30. She and her sister-in-law, Zawadi Balthazar, 22, must now raise six children between them without their fathers. They all wept when they went back to visit the graves on Sept. 19.
