President Joseph Kabila accused Rwanda on Friday of trying to create a confrontation with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in an effort to disrupt Congolese efforts to secure the country and move toward 2005 elections.
It was Kabila’s first public statement since Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame began warning last week that his country would act against 8 000 to 10 000 Rwanda Hutu rebels taking shelter in the eastern DRC.
Kagame said a five-month-old United Nations-led disarmament program has so far failed to neutralise the Rwandan Hutu rebel forces.
Rwanda has twice invaded eastern DRC, in 1996 and 1998, to hunt down Rwandan Hutu combatants responsible for the 1994 genocide of more than a half-million minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
Rwanda’s warnings have raised fears of renewed war in central Africa, reviving a 1998-2002 conflict that drew in the armies of five nations and split Africa’s third-largest nation.
”In reality, if today Rwanda has been constrained to reveal to all its bad faith, it is because we are at the point of completely neutralising the armed groups that have always served as their pretext for attacking our country,” Kabila said.
Rwandan ”authorities are working to promote insecurity and instability in our country, with the aim of disrupting the transition process and preventing the holding of elections set for next year,” the DRC leader charged.
DRC authorities say Rwanda failed during its own five years in control of the eastern DRC to eliminate the Rwandan Hutu rebels, and accused Rwanda of seeking ways to maintain its waning influence in DRC’s resource-rich east.
Kabila said the DRC’s armed forces were on alert.
UN officials said on Thursday that UN air and ground patrols have photographed newly occupied encampments and unidentified, well-equipped troops in the eastern DRC, bolstering suspicions that Rwanda is making good on its threat to send troops.
Rwanda denied it had sent troops across the border, but indications of a Rwandan presence in the eastern DRC included aerial photographs of unidentified camps and of unidentified troops in new vehicles, said Mamadou Bah, spokesman for the UN mission in Kinshasa, the DRC capital.
”We have more and more corroborating signs tending to establish the presence of Rwandan troops in [the DRC],” he said. – Sapa-AP
Thousands flee clashes in the DRC