OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Thursday 9.00PM.
DEMOCRATIC Republic of Congo President Laurent Kabila has vowed to push the conflict in his country into Rwanda.
In what amounts to a declaration of war, Kabila said on Thursday: “The war will be taken to where it came from [Rwanda]. We will defend ourselves. The Rwandans will not win.” He went on to accuse Tutsis of hatching a “vast plot” in which they planned to “run the government and occupy our country.”
Rwanda has responded by accusing Kabila of training and arming Rwandan Hutu rebels fighting the Kigali government.
“We have information which proves that Kabila reorganised the militias who did the genocide and trained them against us”, Major Wilson Rutahisyre, head of the Rwandan Information Office, told reporters.
Declaring that Rwanda would defend itself, Rutahisyre said that Kabila should “solve his problems in Congo before thinking of a confrontation with Rwanda”.
He said that Kabila had set up a camp at Kamena, in north-eastern DRC, to train Hutus of the extremist Interahamwe militia.
Rwanda has denied involvement in the military conflict which erupted in eastern DRC this week, in which Congolese Tutsis condemned Kabila as “another Mobutu [Sese Seko, the former dicator]” and vowed to depose him.
The South African government is sending a three-man ministerial delegation to DRC to hold talks with Kabila to attempt to mediate the conflict. South Africa has not been invited to the seven-nation summit, to be held in Zimbabwe at the weekend, to discuss the crisis in the Great Lakes region.