detonate.net - Cannibalism Alive (?) And Well!

UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- Pygmy activists from Congo are demanding that the United Nations set up a tribunal to try government and rebel fighters accused of slaughtering and eating Pygmies during fighting in the northeastern corner of the country.

Army, rebel and tribal fighters -- some believing the Pygmies are less than human or that eating their flesh would give them magic power -- have been pursuing them in forests, killing them and eating their flesh, the activists told a news conference Wednesday.

There have been reports of markets for Pygmy flesh, the representatives alleged.

"In living memory, we have seen cruelty, massacres, genocide, but we have never seen human beings hunted and eaten literally as though they were game animals, as has recently happened," said Sinafasi Makelo, a representative of the Mbuti Pygmies in Congo.

"Pygmies are being pursued in the forests ... people have been eaten," said Makelo, a delegate to the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, which is meeting at U.N. headquarters."

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About 600,000 Pygmies are believed to live in Congo. Africa's third-largest country is emerging from a 4 1/2-year civil war, fueled in large part by the desire of both Congolese and their neighbors to control resources and territory.

Among the original inhabitants of Congo, the Pygmies live deep in northeastern forests, eking out an existence by hunting and gathering food.

Earlier this year, human rights activists and U.N. investigators confirmed that tribal fighters and members of one rebel group killed, cooked and ate at least a dozen Pygmies and an undetermined number of people from other tribes during fighting with rival insurgents. There have been no reports of Congolese Army soldiers engaging in similar activity.

Njuma Ekundanayo, an expert member of the Permanent Forum, said attacks against the Pygmies "are not only coming from the army but also from other groups."

"We don't understand why the military practices cannibalism against the Pygmies," she said.

The fighters also rape and sexually assault Pygmy women, and sexually transmitted diseases are spreading in Pygmy communities, the activists said.

Addressing the forum on Tuesday, Makelo told the body to ask the Security Council, the U.N. Committee on Human Rights and other bodies to recognize cannibalism as a crime against humanity and an act of genocide.

He also asked the United Nations to set up an international tribunal to try those accused of such crimes.

Ekundanayo, the Permanent Forum member, said no figures on the number of such assaults are available.

"The Pygmy people of the Congo have been more marginalized politically, and more so since the war, the situation of the Pygmies has grown more grave," she said.

Separately, U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said it was "taking longer than we had hoped" for the international community to piece together an emergency force to deploy to Ituri province in northeastern Congo, where the death toll from recent tribal fighting is mounting.

The Hema and Lendu tribes have been fighting each other for control of the region's rich mineral deposits, vast forests and fertile land. Rwandan, Ugandan and Congolese governments are accused of using the tribes as proxies in their own rivalries.

The latest clashes erupted May 7 after neighboring Uganda pulled out the last of its more than 6,000 soldiers in and around Bunia, leaving a security vacuum. Hundreds of people have been killed.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan last week asked France to lead an emergency force to Ituri, which would be separate from the U.N. force already in the country to monitor a 1999 cease-fire.

On Thursday, a U.N. official said a grave with more than 32 bodies was discovered by aid workers clearing bodies from a northeastern Congolese town, bringing the number of people killed in tribal fighting to more than 300.

Aid workers were tipped off about the grave by residents of the neighborhood on the outskirts of Bunia where it was located, said Isabel Abric, a spokeswoman for the U.N. mission in Congo.

The bodies appeared to have been dumped into a pre-existing pit and many were in an advanced state of decomposition, Abric said.

It was not immediately clear if the victims were civilians or fighters killed in more than a week of clashes between Hema and Lendu rival tribal factions.