At least six people have been killed in a conflict over land in northern DR Congo that has already claimed dozens of lives, local officials said Thursday.
Armed men on Monday attacked the village of Babusoko, 35 kilometres (22 miles) from Kisangani, the capital of Tshopo province, they said.
“We buried five people yesterday (Wednesday) in the village. The sixth victim, a child (aged 18 months) died here in Kisangani from injuries to the stomach,” Baudouin Kayombo, the mayor of Lubunga district, told AFP.
Citing a police report, the official said the attack was carried out by a group of people “who came out of the bush.”
The violence was the latest episode in a months-long conflict between members of the Mbole and Lengola ethnic groups, local civil society representative Heritier Isomela said.
He put the toll at seven dead, with four seriously injured and four missing.
Questioned by AFP Wednesday, Norbert Lokula, a provincial interior and security minister, said “a militia comprising Mbole members” was behind the attack.
He condemned “acts of barbarism” carried out during the incursion.
Babusoko is inhabited mostly by members of the Lengola community.
Tensions appear to have started in April after the Lengola people sold land to a company without consulting the Mbole community beforehand.
Intercommunal violence related to land and property in the Lubunga region this year led to at least 55 deaths and displaced around 50,000 people, the UN’s humanitarian coordination office OCHA said last month.
More than 700 houses were also burned down, it added.
Disputes over land can frequently turn deadly in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a vast but impoverished central African country of about 100 million people.
In the west of the country, a conflict between the Teke and Yaka people, triggered by a dispute over customary tithes, has killed 300 people since last year, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW).
Violence also mars much of eastern DR Congo, where roving militias have wreaked havoc for three decades — a legacy of regional wars that flared in the 1990s and early 2000s.
