Rwandan President Paul Kagame has threatened to renew the invasion threat that ignited Central Africa’s deadliest conflict, the 1998-2002 Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) war, saying the continuing presence of Rwandan Hutu rebels in the neighbouring DRC means that ”the war is already on”.
”At the appropriate moment, we certainly will take action,” Kagame told reporters on Thursday, calling a five-month-old United Nations-led campaign to disarm the Rwandan Hutu rebels in the DRC a failure.
Asked about any deadline for Rwandan action, he said: ”It should have been yesterday.”
While the Rwandan leader has always talked tough about the lingering presence in the DRC of militias opposed to his government, a United Nations (UN) announcement on Wednesday added immediacy to the warning: A senior Rwandan official had advised UN special adviser William Swing that Rwanda would attack bases of Rwandan Hutu rebels within DRC ”very soon”, UN mission spokesperson Patricia Tome told reporters.
Rwanda has invaded the DRC twice before in pursuit of the rebels. The second time, in 1998, touched off a five-year war that drew the armies of four other nations into the DRC and killed an estimated 3,2 million people in eastern DRC alone.
Kagame, interviewed during a state visit to Senegal, reacted harshly to the idea of giving the UN-backed disarmament program more time to neutralise the threat from Rwandan Hutu rebels in the DRC, saying the rebels had already relaunched cross-border attacks.
”You’re telling me two months to have more deaths?” he asked. ”I don’t know what you’re talking about. Who is going to take care of this problem? If the international community cannot, no one can except ourselves, because we simply cannot be punching bags for these criminals.”
In 1994, Rwandan Hutu extremists killed more than a half-million minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda. Kagame’s largely Tutsi forces routed the killers, and they and hundreds of thousands of other Rwandan Hutus fled into eastern DRC to escape retribution.
Rwanda invaded in 1996 and again in 1998, saying DRC’s weak, distant capital, Kinshasa, was doing nothing to stem the threat to neighboring countries posed by the militia presence in the east.
The 1998 invasion kicked off a pan-African war. The Ugandan and Rwandan armies and allied Congolese rebel groups took control of much of DRC’s north and east, while the armies of Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia intervened to protect the DRC capital, Kinshasa, from the insurgents.
The UN and others accused all foreign armies of prolonging the conflict to plunder DRC diamonds, gold, cobalt and other natural wealth.
International pressure finally forced the withdrawal of foreign armies, and the DRC’s government and former rebels formed a joint government in 2003, intended to lead the DRC to its first-ever democratic elections next year.
On Wednesday, the DRC called Rwanda’s latest complaints a pretext to resume the plunder.
”Rwanda occupied us for five years, saying they were searching for the Interahamwe, but they weren’t very effective,” DRC spokesperson Henri Mova Sakanyi said, using the term for the Rwanda Hutu militia.
”Rwanda is singing this old tune to hide its real intentions, which are to loot [the DRC’s] riches,” Sakanyi said, calling on the international community to help the DRC.
An estimated 8 000 of the Hutu extremists remain in the DRC. In July, the UN and the DRC launched what they said would be an 11-month program to disarm Rwandan Hutu militias and other combatants in the DRC’s lawless east.
Both the DRC and the UN built up reinforcements for the disarmament campaign this month, with the United Nations beginning deployments that will bring its UN DRC force from about 11 000 to 16 000.
French UN ambassador Jean-Marc de la Sabliere, leading a Security Council mission to central Africa this week to press the peace deals toward realisation, called the UN’s DRC mission its most important in the world at present.
On Thursday, Kagame rejected suggestions that he was asking the UN to do in a few weeks what Rwanda had been unable to in five years: disarm the last Rwandan Hutu militias.
Rwanda was able to eliminate all but 25% to 30% of the Rwandan militias, and block all cross-border attacks as long as its army was in thr DRC, Kagame said.
”Now, the force is being reconstituted by the absence of clear action against these forces,” he said.
Rwandan Hutu rebels have resumed cross-border raids into Rwanda ”under watch of the international community”, hitting as recently as November 15, he said. He did not elaborate.
”The war is already on – otherwise what would the bases be doing in DRC?” he asked. – Sapa-AP