Empty villages and reports of houses being torched in a score of communities on Sunday indicated a growing conflict in the remote eastern regions of this sprawling country, where Rwandan troops are feared to have invaded.
A spokesperson for the United Nations mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo said armed men suspected of being Rwandan soldiers have been attacking and burning villages for more than a week, although the Rwandan government denies it has sent troops into the neighbouring country.
The spokesperson, Mensah Aluka, said in Kigali that the mysterious troops were reported to have burned houses in 21 villages in a part of the country inhabited by rebel Hutu militias and ex-soldiers who took refuge in DRC after the Rwandan genocide 10 years ago.
But a UN spokesperson in Goma, Jacqueline Chenard, said that a helicopter mission that flew over the localities of Nbwabinga, Busaligwa, Kateku, Bukunburwa, Pinga and Mpeti about 200km north of Goma had found only ”phantom villages emptied
of their inhabitants”.
An AFP photographer with the mission also said there were no indication of houses being torched in the villages.
The UN observers north of Goma landed at a place called Mutogo, where they found a number of displaced people who said they were fleeing because of ”rumors of imminent fighting,” Chenard said.
Rwanda blames the rebels for deadly attacks on its territory and has reserved the right to go after them, although both the United States and the European Union have warned against any action that could set off a fresh regional conflict.
On Saturday, an aid worker with the Medecins sans Frontieres charity said thousands of civilians have fled from fighting in the east of the country.
UN spokesperson Aluka said armed men were driving people out of villages by firing bursts of bullets into the air and burning houses.
He said the UN had been unable to verify the information independently because the region is very difficult to access, even by helicopter.
The rebels ”possibly burned houses in 21 villages,” the UN spokesperson said, in a region occupied by many Rwandan ex-soldiers and members of the extremist Hutu Interahamwe militia.
In another action, UN peacekeepers raided a camp defended by rebel Congolese militias to the north of Bunia in the northeastern part of the country. Two UN soldiers were reported injured during ”serious exchanges of fire” that preceded the assault, according to another UN spokesperson in the region, Christophe Boulierac.
The UN deployed 300 Bangladeshi, Nepalese and Pakistani troops, accompanied by two attack helicopters, against the base defended by members of the Armed Forces of the Congolese People, one of six rebel groups in the region that has refused to disarm, Boulierac said.
He said that at one stage about 100 rebels used women and children as a human shields.
The UN troops were part of a mission to disarm the rebel groups that for years have caused havoc in the remote forests of eastern DRC. – Sapa-AFP
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