The United Nations has named three human rights experts to take charge of an international investigation into the killings and other crimes in the Kasai region of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
This move is however expected to cause a showdown with the DR Congo government.
The three experts are Bacre Waly Ndiaye, a U.N. investigator from Senegal, Luc Cote, a Canadian who worked on a previous U.N. inquiry into Congo atrocities, and Mauritania’s Fatimata M’Baye.
They were named by the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, who has called for perpetrators to be prosecuted, including the pro-government Bana Mura militia that he said had cut off childrens’ limbs and sliced open pregnant women.
The DR Congo has in the past insisted that its own justice system is in charge of the inquiry, with the United Nations providing “technical or logistical support.”
Reuters however reports government spokesman Lambert Mende to have played down any differences over the investigators’ mandate as “semantic” and said the Kinshasa government had instructed its embassies to help the experts procure visas.
More than 3,000 people have been killed and 1.4 million displaced in the violence, part of a wave of unrest that has worsened since President Joseph Kabila refused to step down when his mandate expired in December.
Kabila stayed on as President after failure to hold elections.
The country’s electoral authority said it could not conduct the vote due to logistical challenges.
