United Nations peacekeepers took control of the strategic Congolese city of Bukavu on Friday as renegade soldiers withdrew and President Joseph Kabila attempted to calm the nation after the largest and most violent protests since he took office.
General Laurent Nkunda said most of his forces have completed their pullout and that UN peacekeepers are now in control of Bukavu, a trading centre on the border with Rwanda. All that remain in Bukavu are a few officers and their bodyguards, he said, and they will leave the city on Saturday.
”This operation has ended,” Nkunda said.
A UN commander in Bukavu confirmed the pullout had begun on Thursday night. Brigadier General Jan Isberg pledged to use force to ”disarm and arrest” any armed fighter found in the city by Saturday.
In Kinshasa, the capital 1 500km to the southwest, Kabila was trying to calm the nation after two days of violent protests, the largest since 1997. He spoke on state television on Thursday night and Friday afternoon.
”We ask for calm from all the Congolese people and ask for their confidence in the army and police,” Kabila said on Friday.
Anti-government and anti-UN riots that erupted on Thursday revealed the weakness of Kabila’s government, even on its home turf. Mobs blamed the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) army for giving up Bukavu and the DRC’s 10 800-strong UN force for standing by as it was seized.
”I understand your anger and indignation that you expressed when Bukavu fell,” he said late on Thursday night after protesters attacked UN offices across the country. ”Nevertheless, the solidarity you’re expressing cannot at all justify the excesses that took place.”
He also continued to insist that Rwandan forces were in Bukavu, a charge the Rwandan foreign minister and Nkunda have strongly denied and UN peacekeepers say they have no evidence to support.
”The insurgents must lay down their arms and the Rwandan troops must retreat,” Kabila said. He also asked the UN to ”get involved with more determination”.
Wednesday’s capture of Bukavu by the former rebel commanders posed the most serious challenge yet to the transitional government formed to end the devastating civil war in Africa’s third-largest nation. More than 3,5-million died during the civil war, mostly from disease and famine.
Nkunda and Colonel Jules Mutebutsi — both former rebel commanders who fell out with officers in the new, consolidated army — said they took military action because the local commander was persecuting the Congolese Tutsi minority in Bukavu.
”I’m not a mutineer because I’m not fighting the government,” Nkunda said on Friday. ”I have not set up an administration, I respected the government order to pull out of the city — all this indicates that I’m not here to fight the government.”
When asked what will happen next, Nkunda said ”it depends on the behaviour of the president … I think Kabila is being misled by his advisers”.
On Thursday, UN troops shot and killed at least two protesters who stormed a UN base in a day of massive protests. Violent demonstrations resumed for a few hours on Friday, although on a smaller scale.
Milling crowds heaped piles of tires, scraps of wood and tree branches to block streets on the sprawling capital’s outskirts.
Demonstrators burned tires and hurled stones at passing police cars.
Police had to fire into the air several times on Friday to disperse mobs who tried to reach the heart of Kinshasa.
”We have been demonstrating to ask the government to be responsible and to seek to win the war and not sob every time Rwanda attacks us,” said Antoine Lesikidisu, a 34-year-old lawyer.
Bukavu’s streets once again became busy on Friday with people selling food and other merchandise on the roadside and markets reopened.
The DRC’s latest civil war began when Rwanda and Uganda backed Congolese rebels seeking to overthrow the government of Kabila’s father, Laurent Kabila. Rwanda accused his regime of failing to contain ethnic militias behind the 1994 Rwandan genocide, which targeted minority Tutsi.
Nkunda and Mutebutsi are Congolese Tutsi and wartime members of a rebel group allied to Rwanda, which is now part of Kabila’s transitional government. — Sapa-AP
Associated Press reporters Eddy Isango and Daniel Balint-Kurti in Kinshasa contributed to this report.
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