Check out as Banyamulenge make fresh call for justice over Gatumba massacre
He had played football earlier with his friends, but got really tired and went back home (the family’s tent) earlier than usual so he could sleep early.
Their tent was divided in two; where here refers to as the sitting room that his mother would sleep with his youngest brother who was a baby, and the bedroom where Kalala would sleep with his two other brothers.
He got up to ask his younger brother what was going on, but he was long gone. Kalala briefly hid under the mattress, but then remembered about his mother and the baby.
Shortly after Kalala put his head down- hardly after two hours, he heard bullets in his light sleep, but this was such a common thing in Burundi. People usually shot at each other.
As he walked inside the tent, he saw his mother who was carrying the baby on her back and rushing outside stop at a grenade that was lobbed to her. Kalala doesn’t describe much of what he saw, but he shared that the baby’s head exploded.
Kalala’s family is only part of 166 people mostly women and children who were brutally murdered 18 years ago, who were remembered on Friday, August 13 in Kigali, under the theme “play your part in fighting for the justice of our people killed in Gatumba.”
They also made a fresh call for justice since not one person has been held responsible for the massacre, when people like Agathon Rwasa who was then the leader of Forces for National Liberation- Palipehutu (FNL-Palipehutu), a Burundian Hutu rebel group that took part in the night raid, reportedly confessed publicly.
That was after Burundi’s President Domitien Ndayizeye also told expressed his shock after surveying the scene. “This is unbelievable, I have never seen this before,” he told Reuters before adding that the massacre had been carried out by Congolese who had crossed into his country.