Sitting in a small courtyard in Goma, eastern DR Congo, a 55-year-old Tutsi woman joked darkly that she would be killed if she spoke under her real name, IgbereTV reports
She fled to the city last week after a militia leader known as General Janvier, an opponent of the Tutsi-led M23 rebel group, arrived in her town of Kitschanga.
“We saw children with machetes and guns saying they’d come to kill the Tutsis,” said the woman, in a poor Goma neighbourhood of clapboard houses on the Rwandan border.
The M23 has advanced across North Kivu province in recent weeks, winning victories over the army as well as other militias and forcing hundreds of thousands to flee in its wake.
The Democratic Republic of Congo accuses its smaller neighbour Rwanda of backing the M23, something UN experts and US officials agree with — although Kigali denies it.
Knife-edge tensions have escalated pressure on Congolese Tutsis, whose history is contested in the central African nation.
Many assume that Tutsis support the M23, for example, or perceive them as Rwandan implants rather than native Congolese.
The government in Kinshasa has repeatedly argued against tribalism and stressed that the Rwandan government alone is to blame for the M23 crisis.
But the reality in the east of the country, about a thousand miles (1,600 kilometres) from the capital, is often different
