Kigali | Saturday
CLOSE on 730 members of an extremist Hutu militia have been killed since May 1 after infiltrating Rwanda from the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), an army representative claimed here.
Another 250 extremists have been captured, according to representative Colonel Jean-Bosco Kazura.
Those captured — members of Rwanda’s disbanded Hutu-dominated army (FAR) and members of the Interahamwe, the Hutu extremist group blamed for much of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda — were being held in a military camp near the northwestern town of Ruhengeri, Kazura said this week.
Meanwhile, Rwandan Foreign Minister Andre Bumaya decried Kinshasa’s support of the extremists’ movements as a violation of accords designed to end the war in the DRC.
Ten members of the Interahamwe were killed on Wednesday during a firefight with troops from the Rwandan army in the northwestern Nyamutera and Giciye areas, Kazura said.
Rwandan military officials last week said some 2,000 Rwandan Hutu extremists, allied to the government in Kinshasa, had massed near the DRC-Rwanda border with the aim of pushing their rebellion back into Rwanda, following recent peace initiatives in the war in the DRC.
The authorities in Kigali say the rebels, who fled to neighbouring DRC in 1994 after massacring hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and moderate Hutus, have launched a spate of incursions on Rwandan territory.
On June 6, the Rwandan army said it had killed 150 infiltrators as they tried to cross into Rwanda.
Rwanda and Uganda, who accuse Kinshasa of arming the Hutu militias, provide military support to rebel movements in the DRC, where war broke out in 1998.
Troops from Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia have backed the DRC government.
A representative for Kinshasa’s military allies earlier this week accused Kigali of lying about the incursions and said he suspected those Rwandan troops were killing Hutu prisoners, not rebels.
The Rwandan Foreign Minister on Thursday said that Kinshasa’s support of the militias’ movements constituted a “flagrant violation of the Lusaka accords” signed in 1999 and regarded by the international community as the most viable texts for bringing peace to the DRC.
“The mobilisation of the Interahamwe and ex-FAR towards areas occupied by our forces in eastern DRC and on our borders springs from the manoeuvres of the Kinshasa government and its allies,” said Bumaya.
“This strategy is aimed at blocking a particular aspect of the Lusaka peace accords, that dealing with the disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration of the negative forces, that is to say the ex-FAR and the Interahamwe as far as Rwanda is concerned,” the minister added.
This violation could “have serious consequences and might lead to a general resumption of hostilities if the international community fails to discourage it,” he cautioned.
“We remain vigilant, but the movement of the Interahamwe in the east of the DRC augurs new attacks on our borders,” the minister added. – AFP