Twenty years ago, late at night, an armed group ambushed a United Nations refugee camp in east Africa. The attackers left 166 dead and more than 100 wounded, destroying the camp in their wake.
Many victims were part of a Congolese Tutsi ethnic group, who were targeted in the attack.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, ethnically-based conflicts have deep historical roots, often linked to questions of nationality. Twenty years ago, this led members of the Banyamulenge community to flee to a UN camp in Burundi.
At 5 years old, Aline Kamaliza lived with her family there.
“At the time we were living in small tents,” she said. “That night, my brother ended up going with my grandma to go sleep in another tent.”
At first, the gunshots sounded far away.
“We didn’t really hear them,” recalled Kamaliza. “But then it started getting closer and closer.”
Kamaliza remembers her mother running out after her brother, who was in another tent, before members of the attacking Hutu group burst in.
“They didn’t really say much to us,” she said, “they just right away started firing gunshots everywhere.”
Kamaliza remembers her father shielding her, being shot, and ultimately escaping the tent the attackers had set on fire.
“It felt like I was watching myself die and I told myself, ‘I gotta get up. I don’t know how, but I gotta get up,’” Kamaliza recounted. “The tents were burning down and I was bleeding everywhere. I pushed his body, my dad’s body, away from me and just dragged myself out of that tent.”
When she woke up in the hospital, she’d lost both parents.
“It’s been 20 years, but I still have memories of them,” Kamaliza said. “The only thing I have of them is, like, 3 photos.”
Her grandmother, who survived, would take on their roles.
“I was in and out of surgery, honestly, until around the age of 13,” said Kamaliza.
The trauma she and other survivors endured that night, she said, was everlasting. But, Kamaliza added: “Our past does not define us. Some of those survivors who survived that night have went on and become mothers, fathers, got married, finished school.”
Kamaliza herself said she has finished school and is now raising a daughter while working a good job.
“I want to say that healing is possible,” she said.
Similarly to Kamaliza’s brother, Desire Rusengo remembers sleeping in a different tent from his mother and siblings. He was already shouldering the grief of losing his father at eight years old.
“After I lost my father, I feel like I lost a piece of my world,” said Rusengo.
That night, as the oldest of four brothers, he only heard about what happened to his mother in the other tent where they slept from other survivors later on.
“They tell me that she was shot earlier, when the killing started, and she was screaming and she was crying, asking for help,” Rusengo said. “And she was asking for someone to come and try to [do something] so they can stop the bleeding.”
Her last words translated to, ‘Oh, God, don’t harm my children.’
Rusengo described the chaos and fear that night as overwhelming.
“The world as I knew it shattered,” said Rusengo. “The sounds of gunfire and explosions are forever etched in my mind.”
In the aftermath, he said, the only way his mother’s body could be recognized was because he remembered where the tent she had gone to sleep in that night was located. Only one of his brothers had escaped, running from the tent that would eventually burn to the ground.
With 20 years between him and that night, Rusengo reflected on what he described as the journey from victim to survivor, calling it transformative and a testament to the strength of the human spirit to see other survivors on their own healing journeys.
“There were some moments of incredible courage and humanity,” he said. “And I heard how the next morning people were being rescued and taken to a small hospital there.”
Now the father of four children, Rusengo said he finds strength in community.
“It’s a very bad-feeling memory to revisit,” he said. “But I believe it’s essential to tell the stories because we honor those we lost, but we also shed light on resilience and strength that have emerged.”
Genocide Watch’s founding president, Gregory Stanton, spoke via video at the memorial gathering to commemorate the tragedy’s 20th anniversary this year.
“Let’s make it an effort to achieve justice for the people who suffered the Gatumba massacre and have survived it,” said Stanton. “Justice that would, in fact, finally convict the people who perpetrated this massacre. Because they’re still free, they still haven’t been punished.”
Stanton also pushed the United Nations to better protect the Banyamulenge and other frequently targeted ethnic groups in the region.
Survivors are still advocating for the massacre to be recognized as an act of genocide.
