"[3] A Congolese town near the borders of Uganda and South Sudan, it lies in the eastern part of Ituri, which Human Rights Watch described in 2003 as "the bloodiest corner" of the DRC.

[4] The extermination was carried out by soldiers from the Movement for the Liberation of the Congo (MLC), who became known to locals as les effaceurs ("the erasers"), and troops from the Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD-N).

[5][6] The primary objective of Effacer le tableau was the territorial conquest of the North Kivu province of the DRC and ethnic cleansing of Pygmies from the Congo's eastern region whose population numbered 90,000 by 2002.

[6] In March 2016, the International Criminal Court found Jean-Pierre Bemba guilty of human rights violations in the Central African Republic.

Bemba was the vice president of the DRC, and leader of the MLC during the year-long extermination campaign,[10] but was fully acquitted by the ICC's appeal court in June 2018.