BENI: Kavira Mathe was making dinner for her two sons when bullets began flying. Eastern Congo’s M23 rebels had attacked her village, killing scores of civilians. She and others fled for their lives, she said.
“I lost several friends,” said Mathe speaking to The Associated Press by phone from Kanyabayonga where she now shelters. Trekking 50 kilometers (some 30 miles) to safety, she saw roads littered with bodies that appeared to have been bound and shot, she said.
Communities in eastern Congo are struggling to survive in the wake of that massacre and others in which at least 130 people were killed by M23 rebels in what the United Nations called “unspeakable violence” against civilians.
Nearly 26,000 people have been displaced since the attacks at the end of November, according to the U.N. refugee agency, adding to hundreds of thousands who have been uprooted since fighting began between M23 and a coalition of armed civilian protection militia more than a year ago.
