The vice-president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Azarias Ruberwa, called on Rwanda to withdraw troops from his country on Thursday, after United Nations officials reported possible movements of Rwandan troops crossing the border.
Ruberwa, who held talks with Belgian Defence Minister Andre Flahaut on training Congolese soldiers, said his country had already launched a diplomatic protest against Rwanda.
”The Rwandans don’t have the right to enter the DRC. They should not be concerned with the DRC,” Ruberwa told VRT television. ”By consequence they must leave.”
Ruberwa, who led a Rwandan-backed rebel group before joining the DRC’s postwar transitional government in September, said his country had taken its case to the United Nations Security Council.
”We have put in a demarche and we are awaiting a response from the UN Security Council,” he said. Ruberwa did not say whether Congolese troops would be sent to the eastern border with Rwanda.
The DRC asked for the emergency session at the UN in New York to condemn Rwanda’s threat to hunt down armed rebels in east the DRC.
Rwandan President Paul Kagame advised UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and African leaders on Wednesday that his country would carry out ”surgical strikes” against the Rwandan rebels in the DRC.
Rwandan authorities want to capture Rwandan Hutu rebels who fled Rwanda to escape retribution for the 1994 Hutu extremist massacre of more than a half-million minority Tutsi and moderate Hutus in Rwanda.
Rwanda’s revived threats — coming as the DRC and an 11 000-strong UN peace force step up their own efforts to disarm the rebels and other armed groups in the eastern DRC — have raised fears of a re-ignition of conflict in Africa’s third-largest nation.
Ruberwa also held talks with Louis Michel, the European Union’s development aid commissioner. – Sapa-AP