The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) government said on Thursday it is investigating reports of an ”isolated and regrettable” rocket attack on neighbouring Rwanda from its territory.
”We’ve got this information and we’re checking it,” DRC Foreign Minister Ramazani Bana said in Tanzania’s economic capital, where he was attending a regional summit on Africa’s Great Lakes.
A senior Rwandan army officer said on Wednesday that Rwandan rebels launched rockets across the border from one of their strongholds in the eastern DRC, wounding three women, one seriously.
”A small group of Interahamwe on Monday attacked a Rwandan village near the border from the DRC,” the senior army officer said, asking not to be named.
The Interahamwe are Hutu extremists who carried out much of the killing during Rwanda’s 1994 genocide before fleeing to the eastern DRC.
Baya said that ”if this happened, it’s a passing incident which does not undermine the process of restoring normal ties with Rwanda, it’s an isolated and regrettable incident.”
Monuc, the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the DRC, on Wednesday sent a military observer to investigate the reported attack — which, if confirmed, would be the first of its kind since 2001.
Baya considered that the timing of the incident came ”as our government is sending a strong message to tell all the armed movements that there is no place for them in our country any more. That’s probably why this happened.”
Rwandan Foreign Minister Charles Muriganda said: ”We have no reason to doubt the readiness of the DRC to normalise relations up to now, but it’s probable that this desire is not shared by everybody.
”There could be collective readiness on the part of the Congolese government, but there are always individuals who don’t see eye to eye with it.”
The village that was targeted is in Rwerere district in Gisenyi province.
Disarming the Interahamwe and Rwandan former government soldiers holed up in the eastern DRC is one of the key topics of discussion at the landmark summit on Africa’s Great Lakes region currently under way in Dar es Salaam.
The DRC army and the UN force for the first time mounted a joint operation on November 8 aimed at disarming the extremists. — Sapa-AFP