Reaching a Pinnacle after fleeing a ravaged homeland



On the high plateau of South Kivu, cows are suffering from the force meant for their herders.
"Right now, the government of Congo has sent thousands of troops to that area," said Olivier Mandevu. "Their cattle are being stolen, their houses are being burned."

Mandevu is a Banyamulenge Tutsi who was resettled here in April, after a 2004 massacre at a United Nations refugee camp where he was living.

The Banyamulenge are a small group of pastoralists who have lived near the border of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo for generations, raising cattle and small, subsistence crops. For years, they lived quietly in the northeastern hills of the Congo, until the 1994 Rwandan genocide spilled over the border.
"It’s linked to the Rwandan situation, but it’s different," said Mauro De Lorenzo, of The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, who has done fieldwork in the area. "It’s not simple."

Mandevu shed some light in the darker corners of the situation, as he sat in his sparse Albany apartment, next to an empty glass with a milky film still at its edges.
"Our people love milk a lot," he said. "By stealing our cows, it’s one way of killing people."

Although the Banyamulenge had lived amicably in the Congo for years, the government made deals with the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide when they fled to the Congo, Mandevu said. In the early 1990s, Hutu forces killed hundreds of thousands of Tutsis in Rwanda, committing genocide on a scale often compared to the Holocaust.
"When Hutus from Rwanda moved to Congo, they found more Tutsis — we, the Banyamulenge," said Mandevu.
The Hutus began inciting violence against the Banyamulenge, and, by 1998, hatred of the small Tutsi group had become so entrenched that Yerodia Ndomasi, a government official, gave a speech, where he called the group "vermin," and instructed Congolese people, "Use all of your means to kill them," Mandevu said.
His native South Kivu, where the Banyamulenge are concentrated, is very rural, Mandevu said. The houses are made of grass and there are no phones, no electricity, no roads, he said. Of the violence, he added, "This is why the world doesn’t know."

Remembering a massacre

Three years after the massacre at Gatumba, the United Nations refugee camp where Mandevu’s mother and brother were killed, survivors who had come to the United States gathered for a memorial service.
"A Tutsi is now like the first enemy in his own country," Mandevu said, addressing the men in full suits and women in bright, cotton dresses, who listened for hours in thick summer heat as fellow survivors told their stories.

Over the last few months, refugees from the Gatumba massacre have been arriving in cities all over the United States; sixteen have been resettled in Albany. Many of them, from across the country, met at Camp Pinnacle, in the Helderbergs, on Aug. 16 to commemorate the third anniversary of the massacre.

With deep, soulful eyes, they looked upon their comrades, listened to their stories, and laughed with their children.
"We thought it was a safe haven for us," began one woman’s story of the massacre, the cadence of her native language translated into English. At 10 p.m. on that summer night three years before, armed men from the Mayi-Mayi, Interahamwe, and Forces Nationales de Libération, entered the Gatumba refugee camp where she was sitting in her tent; they threw a grenade into her shelter. She lost her husband and six of her seven children. Her only surviving son pulled her from the fire.

Of the camp’s 760 residents, 152 were killed and another 107 were injured.

Janvier Gasita, a young man with an intense gaze, saw his sister die in the attack. He and his parents arrived in Wisconsin two months ago, and a church group raised enough money for him to come to the Helderbergs for the memorial.

The group that has settled in Albany has been attending the Emmaus congregation, which raised money to help fund the memorial.
"They are a deeply spiritual people," said Denise Stringer, pastor of the Emmaus church. "These people have had everything taken from them but their souls."

Some of the money raised helped bring Gatumba survivors from other states, like Gasita of Wisconsin, to the memorial.
It is United States policy to spread refugees who are coming from one area around the country. "We have found that people integrate better when they’re not all grouped in one place," said Regina Wills, a public affairs director at the Department of State.
"The United States requires that they be, basically, placed in communities that, A., can support them, and B., it’s supposed to be done in a fashion that doesn’t support continued interdependence within a population," said Molly Short, director of the Albany branch of the United States Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. (See related story.)
The group of Banyamulenge that just arrived got refugee status because of the 2004 massacre. When asked why it took three years, Short answered, "The same reason why refugees live in camps for generations."

Some Gatumba survivors are still in Burundi and Rwanda, Mandevu said, and it is the mission of his group, the Gatumba Refugees Survivors Foundation, to bring them here.
"Our grandfathers are still there," he said.
"If you go back to Africa, it means you are going to die," said Gasita.

Demanding justice

There has yet to be an official investigation into the Gatumba massacre, but Mandevu and his group are demanding justice.
"We are acting as the voice of these voiceless people," he said of the survivors’ foundation.
"One way of understanding Gatumba is it is a message from the government," De Lorenzo said of the governments’ failure to investigate or help the Banyamulenge. Those who want to eradicate the group will take advantage of the weakness of the Banyamulenge community right now, he said; their survival in the Congo depends on their own actions. "The only people who can stop it are the Banyamulenge themselves," he said.
"The Congolese army has stolen thousands and thousands of cows in the last two weeks," said Mandevu. "Targeting the cows will make them more poor and lose interest in the land and flee. It’s one way of making them leave the land."
The Banyamulenge who are left in South Kivu are largely uneducated farmers, he said. They don’t understand all of the politics behind the violence, he said. "They just undergo the consequences without knowing why."
He warned, "When your neighbor’s house is being burned, don’t feel safe, because the fire may shift."