The Hague - Two Congolese militiamen accused of seeking to wipe out a village blocking a strategic route in an ethnic war, enter the dock in The Hague Tuesday for the International Criminal Court's second trial.
Germain Katanga, 31, and Mathieu Ngudjolo Chui, 39, stand accused over an attack by their forces on the village of Bogoro in the Democratic Republic of Congo's northeastern Ituri region that killed 200 people in February 2003.
They deny guilt on ten counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including charges of murder, rape, sexual slavery, using child soldiers, attacking civilians, pillaging and destruction of property.
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The prosecution alleges that more than a thousand fighters of Katanga's Patriotic Resistance Force (FRPI) and Ngudjolo's Nationalist and Integrationist Front (FNI) entered Bogoro on February 24 six years ago "with one communicated and agreed goal: to erase the village of Bogoro".
"The attack was indiscriminate and systematic," said Jean-Louis Gilissen, legal representative to a group of former child soldiers alleged to have taken part in the attack, and given victim status by the court.
He told AFP that fighters entered the town, controlled by rival Thomas Lubanga's Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC), armed with rifles and machetes -- moving from the perimeter to the centre which housed a UPC military camp.
Homes along the way were pillaged and razed, said Gilissen.
Katanga and Ngudjolo are both of the Lendu ethnicity, while Lubanga is a Hema. Lubanga's own war crimes trial, the ICC's first, started in January.
According to prosecutors, Bogoro was considered strategic as it blocked FRPI and FNI fighters and camps from the road leading to the key city of Bunia.
"They (the fighters) encircled, they advanced, there was no mercy," said Gilissen. "Those civilians they encountered were executed; if they were women they were raped before they were killed."
Prisoners were taken by the fighters to swell the ranks of child soldiers, and the women as sex slaves, he added.
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