Armed groups drawn from opposite sides of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) supposedly resolved war squared off in the east of the country on Monday, ratcheting up tension to the point where a government delegation was forced to seek United Nations protection.
”The regular army fired long-range mortars at our positions,” Lieutenant Colonel Frank Mitima said. ”They attacked us but we haven’t responded.”
Mitima is part of a ”dissident” army unit drawn from the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD), a Rwandan-backed former rebel group whose political leaders are now in the government and whose fighers have donned regular military uniforms in line with peace accords enacted in April 2003.
Diehard remnants of the RCD have been reluctant to allow Kinshasa to re-establish its full influence in the east of the country, most of which was controlled by the then rebel group during the war that began in 1998.
A group of these dissidents was on Monday dug in about 20km north of Bukavu, a town on the border with Rwanda where 27 people were killed in clashes last week.
The same group had also surrounded the town’s UN-controlled airport, which lies a few kilometres further up the road, by midday on Monday but it was not possible to determine who had fired the shells, where they landed or if there had been any casualties.
Most of the former RCD army elements, termed ”dissidents” by the UN mission in the DRC (Monuc), have since the weekend obeyed a Monuc order to return to barracks.
By Monday morning Bukavu residents had dared to venture out on to the streets of the town, patrolled by armed regular troops as Monuc helicopters flew overhead.
Meanwhile, in Goma, about nine hours’ drive north of Bukavu, a team of top government officials — several of whom are drawn from the RCD — on a mission to restore calm to the region asked Monuc to evacuate them from their hotel to the UN compound because of growing tension.
”The members of the delegation [which arrived on Sunday] asked to leave their hotel. They asked Monuc to evacuate them,” said Monuc’s spokesperson in the town, Jacqueline Chenard.
”They have come to the Monuc compound,” she added.
Goma airport was closed for several hours on Monday, but it was not immediately clear why.
”There are a lot of rumours going around. People are very worried. The streets [of Goma] were almost empty this morning,” said the spokesperson.
The commander of the ”dissidents” near Bukavu, General Laurent Nkunda, said he had halted his men following a ceasefire request from Vice-President Azarias Ruberwa, one of the former RCD leaders now holed up in Goma.
”Otherwise I would already be in Bukavu,” he said.
Nkunda said he had no plans to attack the Monuc-held airport but was determined to protect the Bukavu’s Banyamulenge population, Congolese Tutsis who speak the language of Rwanda and whose relations with the rest of the local population have for decades been a source of tension and instability.
Hundreds of Banyamulenge have fled across the border to Rwanda in recent days and Nkunda said several have been killed in and around Bukavu. — Sapa-AFP