M23 rebels killed at least 171 civilians in a massacre in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo in November, the United Nations said Tuesday, revising the previously reported death toll of 131.
In a document summarizing violations committed in the DRC last year, the United Nations Human Rights Office said M23 had killed at least 171 civilians in the settlements of Kishishe and Bambo, in the eastern province of North Kivu.
M23 rebels
The massacre has sparked outrage in the DRC, where the Tutsi-led M23 has seized territory in North Kivu since late 2021 and displaced hundreds of thousands of people.
A preliminary UN investigation first found that 131 civilians had been killed.
Reported figures on the scale of the massacre vary.
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The DRC government initially said around 300 had been killed, for example, while M23 said eight civilians were killed by stray bullets.
On Monday, Human Rights Watch said in a report that M23 had killed at least 22 people in Kishishe and killed 10 others while searching for enemy militia members.
Elsewhere in a statement on Tuesday, the UN noted that it had recorded nearly 6,000 human rights violations in the DRC last year – marking a 15 percent reduction compared to 2021.
Abuses by state forces also fell, the UN said, with 2,400 cases recorded last year compared to 3,162 in 2021.
Armed groups commit about 60 percent of recorded violations. About 85 percent of the total violations occurred in four provinces in the eastern part of the DRC.
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Despite an overall decline in recorded rights violations, there has been a “significant increase” in the number of summary executions, the UN said.
Although it did not specify numbers, it reported an increase in attacks on civilians in the provinces of Ituri and North Kivu.
DRC ‘failed to keep promises’
The UN pointed to the armed groups M23, Codeco, Nyatura and the Allied Democratic Forces as being responsible for the trend.
M23 resumed fighting in late 2021 after years of inactivity, claiming that the DRC had failed to fulfill its promise to integrate fighters into the army.
The re-emergence has sparked a crisis in the east of the country and fueled tensions with neighboring Rwanda, which Kinshasa accuses of supporting the group.
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UN experts, the United States and other western countries agree with Kinshasa. Rwanda denies the allegations.