The United States has strongly condemned last week's massacre of 160 Congolese Tutsis in a refugee camp in Burundi, calling the killings a "vicious attack" and demanding that the perpetrators be brought to justice. "The United States condemns in the strongest possible terms the attack that took place on Gatumba refugee camp in Burundi on August 13," the State Department said in a statement yesterday. "Armed elements, including the National Liberation Front of the Party for the Liberation of the Hutu People, participated in this vicious attack on an already vulnerable population of refugees, many of them women and children," the State Department wrote. The 160 mostly Tutsi refugees from eastern Democratic Republic of Congo were shot, burned, and hacked to death on Friday night in an attack blamed on a coalition of armed extremists. The State Department said the United States supports a U.N. Security Council condemnation of the massacre and urges all nations in the Great Lakes area of Africa to respect peace accords that ended conflict that broke out in 1993, fuelled by rivalries between Burundi's minority Tutsis and majority Hutus.
