A United Nations team set off on Tuesday for the town of Kanyabayonga in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to investigate two days of fighting there between the DRC army and dissident troops, a UN official said.
Kanyabayonga was the scene of clashes on Sunday and Monday between government forces and army rebels. Calm was reportedly restored on Tuesday.
”We have sent a team there, mainly soldiers, to assess the situation,” Mamadou Bah, the spokesperson for the United Nations mission in the DRC (Monuc), said by telephone from Kinshasa.
The investigators will stay in Kanyabayonga, which lies 160km north of Goma, the capital of Nord Kivu province, for four days, Bah said, without giving details about the size of the team or the nationalities of its members.
In addition to the investigative team, a company of UN peacekeepers from India began deploying on Tuesday in Rutshuru, which lies about halfway between Goma and Kanyabayonga, Bah said. A company is made up of about 170 men.
”On Tuesday, 105 Indian soldiers arrived in Rutshuru as part of this deployment. The remaining 65 will leave Goma on Wednesday for Rutshuru,” Bah said.
The Monuc spokesperson also specified that Monuc does not intend to deploy troops permanently in Kanyabayonga, where the DRC army has been fighting rebellious soldiers who seized the town at the weekend.
Fierce fighting on Monday pitted dissident soldiers against DRC government troops in Kanyabayonga, with the rebels saying they controlled the centre of the town and had killed a dozen regular soldiers in fighting on the northern outskirts.
An officer with the rebellious army faction said the situation in the town was calm on Tuesday.
”But they say trucks have arrived with government reinforcements who may attack us,” he added.
Local inhabitants of Rutshuru said they saw a UN convoy passing early on Tuesday.
The fighting in Kanyabayonga has been described as a mutiny of troops from the Congolese army’s eighth military region, based in Goma.
Rebels who fought against Kinshasa in the DRC’s five-year war were drafted into the army under a peace pact that ended the conflict in the vast country in 2003.
Despite peace taking root in most of the DRC, the east has remained highly volatile and repeatedly seen outbreaks of fighting, often pitting one ethnic group against another or mutinous army soldiers against the rest of the DRC’s armed forces.
The dissident troops who seized Kanyabayonga were mainly former rebel fighters in the Congolese Rally for Democracy, an ex-rebel group backed by Rwanda that controlled much of the eastern DRC during the war.
The pact that brought the conflict to an end also brought the former rebels into a transitional government, and reorganised the DRC’s military into regions when it brought former rebel fighters into its ranks. — Sapa-AFP