Renegade commanders in the Democratic Republic of Congo pledged on Thursday to withdraw their troops from a strategic city and allow United Nations peacekeepers to take control, potentially defusing a crisis that threatened to plunge the Central African country back into civil war.
General Laurent Nkunda said he has already ordered 300 of his soldiers to leave Bukavu, 1 500km northeast of Kinshasa, and that the remaining troops would begin leaving at 3pm (1pm GMT). He said he was in talks with UN peacekeepers to have them take control of the city.
”We shall withdraw to reorganisation centres to assure the transitional government that we are not opposed to it,” Nkunda said.
”We are just opposed to the persecution of one section of the Congolese community.”
Nkunda and Colonel Jules Mutebutsi, former Congolese rebels who were briefly commanders in the new army, ordered their troops to take Bukavu on Wednesday after complaining that the regional military commander assigned by the government, Brigadier General Mbuza Mabe, was mismanaging security and persecuting members of the Banyamulenge community.
Mutebutsi said that he is pulling his troops out of Bukavu but said that Congolese military police, loyal to him and Nkunda, would patrol the town along with UN peacekeepers.
UN spokesperson Sebastien Lapierre, though, said he could not confirm the plan.
”Apparently he said he would remove some troops. At this stage I’m trying to confirm if this is true, how many troops will be withdrawn, and where they will be [based],” said Lapierre.
UN officials estimate that Nkunda has between 2 000 and 4 000 troops, while Mutebutsi controls several hundred fighters.
In Kinshasa, gunshots sounded outside UN installations and across the capital as security forces struggled with massive mobs blaming the 10 800-strong UN force for failing to stop Wednesday’s capture of Bukavu.
Witnesses reported Congolese police firing into the air to try to hold back tens of thousands of demonstrators, marking the biggest protests in Kinshasa since before the DRC’s 1998-2002 war. Rifle shots blasted at the main city market and across the city, their source not clear.
Crowds targetted UN installations, surrounding UN headquarters in the city centre and a logistics base outside of town. UN troops at the base fired tear gas, UN spokesperson Hamadoun Toure said.
”The state is dead!” mobs chanted at one of numerous protests filling the city after daybreak. ”We will punish [UN forces] ourselves!”
In the northeastern city of Kisangani, students demonstrated in Kisangani and tried to set fire to a UN post and two UN vehicles. Congolese soldiers fired shots into the air to disperse the protestors.
In Bukavu, UN medical workers at a clinic treated three women — including a 15-year-old and a pregnant woman — for severe injuries after being raped early on Thursday. Residents threw stones at UN vehicles and threatened to lynch UN workers in Bukavu’s Kadugu neighbourhood, which was especially hard hit by the renegade soldiers.
Nkunda pledged his allegiance to the transitional government in Kinshasa, led by President Joseph Kabila.
”The withdrawal is intended to pave the way for the governor appointed by [Kabila’s] government to come take up his post,” Nkunda said. ”It is also intended to allow the government to appoint a new military commander in the region.”
On Wednesday night, Kabila declared a state of emergency and a ”general mobilisation” across the DRC on state television.
Kabila also accused neighbour and rival Rwanda in Wednesday’s takeover of Bukavu, the most serious challenge yet to the fragile transitional government set up after five years of war. He also called on the UN Security Council to act against Rwanda.
DRC’s civil war drew in the armies of six nations and killed an estimated 3,5-million people through violence, famine and disease.
Speaking on state-run Radio Rwanda on Thursday, Foreign Minister Charles Muligande said Kabila’s allegations were unfounded and that Kabila was hiding his shame that his troops had been defeated.
Mutebutsi’s troops first clashed with government forces in Bukavu a week ago, sparking three days of fighting in which at least 39 people were killed and 105 were wounded, UN humanitarian coordinator Lucia Alberghini said. At least 10 people were wounded on Wednesday, she said.
Both Nkunda and Mutebutsi were commanders of the Congolese Rally for Democracy, a Rwanda-backed rebel group. Rwanda, DRC’s leading foreign adversary in the 1998-2002 war, strongly denied any involvement in the renegade commanders’ capture of Bukavu, a trading centre on the Rwandan frontier.
UN officials in the region also said they had no evidence of any Rwandan involvement.
In Washington on Wednesday, state department spokesperson Richard Boucher denied claims of Congolese Tutsi being targeted in an ”orchestrated mass killing”.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan condemned the capture of Bukavu and called on the region’s warring parties to abide by an earlier ceasefire.
DRC’s war started in 1998 when Rwanda and Uganda backed Congolese rebels against DRC’s government, accusing it of failing to contain ethnic militias behind the 1994 Rwandan genocide of that country’s minority Tutsi and moderate Hutus. – Sapa-AP