Mucho began with a brief history of the plight of Tutsis in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), where government authorized killing of Tutsis began in 1965 and still continues. Those resembling Tutsis or who sided with them were also killed, he related. “Even relatives murdered their relatives because they looked like Tutsis,” he said.

    “Some were burned,” he told those assembled at St. Mary’s. “Others were thrown in the lakes and rivers and there they would become the food of the alligators and other wild animals.” Those who survived became refugees, many later coming to the United States.

    A Tutsi rebellion in the Congo in 2004 led to an even more violent backlash by the Hutu government, forcing Tutsi residents to flee for their lives to nearby Burundi or Rwanda. Mucho’s family became one of many displaced Congolese Tutsis finding shelter in Burundi at the Gatumba refugee camp.

    They had been there only two months when, on the night of Aug. 13, Hutu forces attacked the defenseless camp. “We were wakened up in the middle of the night with whistles and drums and the dreadful sound of the killers coming to kill us,” related Mucho. “People died the whole night. They used anything which would kill someone,” he said, “machetes, AK-47s and spears. ... They would go to the gas station and get the gasoline and they would pour it on women and the old people and the kids who could not run away and just burn them alive.”

    That night, when 166 Tutsis were murdered, is indelibly etched on Mucho’s mind. He was 16 years old at the time and remembers stepping outside the tent into the darkened camp after hearing the first sounds of the attackers. Then the shooting began.

    “The attackers were in front of the refugee camp, in front of the tents,” he said, “and they were standing in lines, just like you are sitting here.” Surrounding the camp and its sleeping residents, they were firing into the tents. A bullet pierced Mucho’s hand and he fell to the ground, crawling back towards the tent to help his mother and younger brothers.

    “But I couldn’t get in the tent,” he said, “because when I tried to get back, they were throwing hand grenades and there was fire all over and I couldn’t even see the entrance back to the tent.”

    Blinded by the smoke, he continued to crawl, finally falling into a grass-covered hole behind the tent where he could hear the bullets whistling over his head. Many were killed in the first few minutes of the onslaught. “A lot of people were getting out of the tents, shouting, running, so it was a commotion,” he recalled, “and eventually I found myself with a lot of dead bodies around me and then I just stood up. I just stood up and decided to walk.”

    Busy looting the tents and fighting among themselves for the victims’ belongings, the killers did not notice Mucho stumble out of the camp.

    The attack was made with the support of the Congo government, he said, with the perpetrators being the same as those who participated in the genocide in Rwanda, Burundi and throughout the Congo — and who continue to carry this out in the Congo. After the massacre at Gatumba, some of the attackers were rewarded with government posts in the Congo, he related.

    “There has never been justice for what happened to the Gatumba people or the Gatumba survivors,” he said. Fifty-one members of his family died that night, including his younger brother, who was burned with gasoline and tires.

    Mucho, described himself as one of the lucky survivors given refuge in America, noting that there are many still living in refugee camps in Burundi.

    “Please help me tell the whole wide world what is going on in the Congo and what is happening to the Tutsi people there,” he pleaded. “We need your help, your voice, to bring justice to those who committed those atrocities.”

    Interpreter Moses Rudasunikwa, also a Tutsi, then told of his family members who were living in Rwanda at the time of the genocide there in 1994. His uncle and seven cousins vanished without a trace, he said, with no record of how they were killed or where they were buried.

    He learned the tragic fate of his sister and her family through her surviving children, who told of their being awakened in the middle night and driven from their house, which was set on fire. His brother-in-law (a Hutu who had married a Tutsi) was tied up and dragged along the ground, with his wife and children running after, until the men came to the public out-houses. There they cut off his head in front of his family and threw him into the sewage pit.

    “They stabbed my sister in the stomach,” he said, relating what the children had told him, “but she didn’t cry. She didn’t say anything.” Enraged that she was not begging for mercy, the men threw her also into the pit. They next grabbed the oldest daughter, a young woman of 22. She had been holding her baby, but quickly passed it to her younger sister and fought the attackers so fiercely it allowed the two boys to escape with the baby. The other girls were killed.

    The boys, not knowing where to go, returned with the baby to their burned out home and sat there throughout the night. In the morning they were discovered by a kind-hearted Hutu militiaman who brought them to his mother. She looked after them for several days until help arrived for the city.

    Asked in the question and answer session that followed, what he thought would bring peace to the Congo, Mucho replied, “What would make a huge difference in Congo is teaching the people that they are all human beings, that there is no difference between themselves and to get together for reaching true reconciliation.”     He noted that the politicians who encouraged the killing of the Tutsis in the Congo are still in power and that true reconciliation cannot take place until those in power begin preaching the Gospel message.

    Rudasunikwa, who returned to Rwanda in 1998 to attend the government-sponsored university on a scholarship, noted that Rwanda has begun to heal from the genocide there. He described one unique method of bringing this about.

    Scholarship students at the university were unknowingly assigned dormitory rooms with equal numbers of Tutsis and Hutus as roommates. All of them got along well, he related.

    The only difficult time was the annual memorial week commemorating the 1994 bloodshed. “It was always a rough week,” he said, “but people were encouraged to speak, just like we’re sitting here now, and talk and just share.”
    Mucho added that what is also needed to end the conflict between the Tutsis and the Hutus in the Congo is disarming the wandering militias there. “Those who committed genocide in Rwanda, they’re all living freely in the Congo jungles,” he said.

    Rudasunikwa noted that members of the Hutu militia still roaming the Congo could be granted amnesty if they returned to Rwanda, surrendered their weapons and, depending on the severity of their crimes, submitted to the traditional law of gacaca. This requires that one who has committed a crime return to his neighborhood to ask forgiveness and be judged by the people there. Eligibility for this depends on the nature and number of crimes committed, and Rudasunikwa noted that it is not unusual, given the scope of the genocide that occurred, for someone to confess to killing 50 or even 100 people.

    “It may sound unreal when you are sitting here,” he said to the audience, “but when you consider the genocide in Rwanda ... killing a lot of people was very common.”