The peace process in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) suffered a major blow on Wednesday when renegade soldiers captured a provincial capital in the volatile east of the country.
During the DRC’s 1998 to 2003 civil war the town, Bukavu, was a stronghold of the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD), the Rwandan-backed rebel group in which those who led Wednesday’s assault held key positions.
The renegade soldiers are former rebels in the RCD, which has resisted ceding control of its former fiefdoms in the east to a post-war transition government in Kinshasa.
”The dissident troops of Laurent Nkunda and Jules Mutebusi control the town,” said a top official in Monuc, the United Nations’s military mission in the DRC, asking not to be named.
Clashes in and around Bukavu have claimed about 60 lives over the past week.
Another Monuc source said General Nkunda, who is thought to have between 2 000 and 4 000 men under him, ”was seen in the Sud-Kivu governor’s residence in the Nyawera district”.
Nkunda’s posting in the DRC’s new army is in adjacent Nord-Kivu.
”We have liberated the town,” he said by phone.
”I control the town of Bukavu,” Mutebusi said earlier in the day, before Nkunda’s group advanced from a position about 20km to the north.
Mutebusi was suspended last month from his post as deputy commander of government forces in Sud-Kivu and ordered back to Kinshasa, but refused to leave Bukavu.
”General Felix Budja Mabe is fleeing the town,” he said, referring to the head of regular forces in the area.
Also on Wednesday, former RCD leader Azarias Ruberwa, now a national vice-president, said he ”strongly and very clearly condemns” the Bukavu clashes.
”The democratic process and elections [due in 2005] must not be disrupted,” he said, speaking from Goma, the capital of Nord-Kivu.
Bukavu itself had been calm from Friday until shooting broke out there early on Wednesday morning, although Nkunda’s group clashed with regular troops every day since Sunday near the airport serving the town, about 30km to the north.
Between Wednesday and Friday, 39 people were killed in clashes inside Bukavu, according to Monuc. Another 20 were killed in the fighting near the airport.
Monuc spokesperson Sebastien Lapierre said that on Wednesday morning Mutebusi’s men had left five cantonment sites in Bukavu where they had remained with the weapons on Monuc’s orders since Saturday.
”This morning, one of his officers was apparently killed. The dissidents then left the sites and began shooting in all directions,” he said.
”Mabe’s men attacked us again at 5am, that is why we counter-attacked,” Mutebusi said.
Monuc has brought in hundreds of reinforcements to Bukavu since last week.
Shooting died down mid-morning on Wednesday. The streets were deserted.
Mutebusi and Nkunda claim to be defending the area’s Banyamulenge community, Congolese Tutsis who speak Rwanda’s language and whose relations with the rest of the local population have long been a source of tension and instability.
Many see the Banyamulenge as more Rwandan that Congolese and Rwanda’s effective occupation of the region during the war was bitterly resented.
Also on Wednesday an international committee monitoring the DRC peace process called for an end to the Bukavu fighting.
In a statement issued before the town’s fall became apparent, the committee, comprising representatives of Britain, China, France, Russia, the United States, Belgium, Angola, Canada, Gabon, Mozambique, South Africa, Zambia and Monuc, called for the ”provision of security for the civilian population and the restoration of law and order in Sud-Kivu province”.
The statement also ”strongly condemned all deliveries of arms, equipment and ammunition to the armed dissident forces”. — Sapa-AFP